Category Archives: India

The (unbutchered) retreat report

I just came back from my first DHAN Foundation retreat (which I plan to write about later) and I also got two books filled with “retreat reports” from other DHANites. The retreat reports range from extremely dull to pretty fun to almost instructional. By design, they are meant to highlight the best and worst parts [...]

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Google Page Creator is gone….

And, they didn’t do such a great job of transferring the Google Page Creator content to Google Sites. So, I’ve decided to delete the content from Google Page Creator and transfer it here instead. This site has so much random content already; four more random articles shouldn’t make too much of a difference. Read on [...]

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Do Indians have a sense of humor?

AKA “Irony over the stinky river….” Sometimes, just when I begin to not have faith that Indians have a sense of humor, I run across something like this: Near our house, there is an extremely foul river…. actually, it’s hard to even call it a river since it really seems to only flow when the [...]

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Marina Beach

AKA “The sweet smelling ocean spray on Chennai’s shores….” Aah. Marina Beach. Great to go people watching. Good place to buy little silly plastic touristy stuff. Smell the fresh ocean breeze. Take a dip in the water to cool off. Or should you?

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Wetwo Brand

AKA “Population Control, Indian Style….” Most of the autos and a lot of the yellow-painted vehicles in Chennai have this saying on the back “We two ours one” or sometimes simply “Ours one.” Along with the P. James tagging covering everything in Chennai, this was another prevelant sight that Amy and I were not certain [...]

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Submission

AKA “Quick, shhh! The Big-boss has just entered….” I was on the Tata-Dhan Academy vehicle the other day (or, as they like to call it, the “vee-kul”) and one of the passengers was the head of our organization. There was a notable hush over everyone in the van as we sat there waiting for the [...]

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An interview with Ananda Mahto

Every year, pretty much everyone available from DHAN Foundation and its family of “themes” gets a chance to attend the “DHAN Retreat.” The retreat takes place in different places each year. There are also different themes each year. Because of my surgery, I wasn’t able to attend this last retreat, which was somewhat unfortunate since [...]

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Mr Grumpy’s 2009 “How-to-write” calendar

Over the past few weeks, everyone has been going calendar crazy. I mean EVERYONE. I was sitting in meetings with colleagues trying to write “messages” and then find the right pictures to go with the calendar they were making. Amy was asking me how to edit some of her photos so that they would look [...]

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The Gita in Pictures

Here’s something that some random portion of my readers might be interested in. And don’t worry. I haven’t turned all religious. I have just always liked the pictures—they’re part of my childhood days… That… and I wanted to try out the gallery feature in WordPress to see what it is all about… The quality here [...]

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DAMN It!

I was just having some fun at work a couple of weeks ago, trying to put some positive and creative pressure on a co-worker, so I created this fake center to compete with the center she is heading (the Advanced Centre for Enabling Disaster Risk Reduction [at the Tata-Dhan Academy where I work]). The result? [...]

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