Category Archives: Stories

Effective Communication?

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When people begin the study of communication, their attitudes vary anywhere from “I think this would be a very important class: it is important to understand the communication process if I want to improve the effectiveness of my communication,” to “What a waste of time. I’ve been communicating all my life. Do I really need to take a course to understand communication?”

Whether or not we take a course in communication, there is considerable value in trying to refine our understanding of communication. To demonstrate, I will present two class exercises. In describing the exercises, hopefully some of the jargon common in the communications discipline (for example, encoding, decoding, channel, and congruence) will become clearer, and you will be at least a little more sensitive to trying to verify the effectiveness of your everyday communication approaches.

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The (unbutchered) retreat report

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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 of your year, share what’s on your mind about work, introduce yourself to other DHANites, and be something personal. At least that was my understanding.

Some of you may have remembered my retreat report from last year in which I interviewed myself. This year, I decided to (predictably) do something different. And here’s what it was:

Here’s a PDF too….

So, why the title of this post? Well, the people in charge of compiling the retreat report books decided to take away all the pretty pictures, retype the text, and delete at least one important line from my report. I understand that it is not “standard format” but I did keep that in mind when I consciously decided to make it fit nicely onto a single sheet of A4 paper–I figured they could just print it out and insert it at the end of the rest of the reports or something, but I guess that would be asking too much.

Grrrr….

Google Page Creator is gone….

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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 to find:

An interview with Ananda Mahto

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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 I really like the place that the retreat was being held. (You can see some pictures of the location here; I visited some students back in 2007. It was pretty great.)

Although I wasn’t able to attend, I was asked to write a “retreat report” which gets published along with reports from some 350 or more colleagues of mine. I think I’ll have to bring the reports along with me for my long flights that I’m trying to book for the end of this month.

Anyway, I enjoyed writing my “report,” and figured some of you might be interested in reading it, so here it is:
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A flashback to 15 years ago….

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I’m getting old. I must be. I was just sorting some of my random files on my computer, and I remembered that I had downloaded Ryan Gratzer’s post of the Jeberrekenelle/Rugburn split LP. While the Jeberrekenelle songs were already available, Ryan went ahead and also included the Rugburn songs (so you hear the songs in the same order that you would hear them from the record—alternating between each band), the silly start-up samples, and the nice big booklet that we stuffed in the packaging. I downloaded his booklet, straightened it up a bit, and re-posted it at Issuu so that you can all check it out without having to download the whole zip file (unless you want the Rugburn stuff too, which is also worth hearing).


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Six new old stories….

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I was ego-surfing the internet archives the other day, and I realized that some of the posts that I had made before my old server went down had actually been archived there and not simply lost to the digital graveyard. I’ve decided to pre-date them to match the dates they were originally posted, so you can either jump to the end of the archives and poke around or you can cheat and pick from the list below:

Compassion and Empathy and Sticks and Stones

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For people in a country that is supposed to be based on Gandhian principles of tolerance and pacifism and where people won’t eat meat because all animals are God’s creatures or whatever, most Indians I’ve observed sure seem to have a strange way of showing compassion for animals.

It looks like a special kind of hatred found only in people who may actually be too stupid to know better.

Maybe that’s cruel and exaggerated. After all, they decorate their godly cows so beautifully, right? And worship them at Pongal and paint them in fantastic colors. So how can I say that they’re hateful?
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