In the Age of Aquarius,
A droplet's waves spew holons,
Yet users wave back at applets,
And the future looks like chrome.

--for Google Wave...

senza parole: meno male che silvio c'e'...
http://www.forzaitalia.it/notizie/arc_12919.htm

generation gap, the elderly get geeky? or, geeks are more open?
http://liftlab.com/think/laurent/2007/07/06/eat-at-my-grandmas-place-almost/

it's raining... man,
alleluia! ...
so goes the song... but but but...

After 3 months of scorching sunshine and over 40C, I want more! Canada gavem me a serious sunshine deficiency? Or sunshine is just sooo me :)
So while the monsoon rains are fabulously refreshing... I want them in the afternoon and evening... and I want sunshining sunshiness in the morning! Got it?
ahem.

Of the many legacies colonialism has left, not may are as lively as the art of uniforms. Military ones of course: though soldiers the world over look all the same now: these are mostly boring uniforms.
No no let's talk about British school and nurse uniforms! :D
See, having spent time in several uniformed lands: communist Romania, Bahamas and Toronto too, I got to develop a certain sensibility, seeded for sure by having grown up as a People's Pioneer: dark blue suit and cap, white shirt (with epaulettes) and tomato red scarf.
"The Britisher's Art of the Uniform", sounds like an after lunch hobby project for a lascivious repressed gentleman. And am I gonna become one? :)

Well India keeps pulling me in all directions; including to bed... I've been sleeping rather unsoundly lately: too much noise in the guest houses and in the night, too many stimuli during the day, and too many mosquitoes, so-called-indian-mattresses too thin, too many thoughts coming from past present and future, too many emotions from all the motions around me in the last months. But that's sort of what I expected and wanted; so s'all good. Except it would do me some even more good to really rest; but that seems just too hard when facing attention overload from a continentful of novelty.

So India is lively and in your face; i.e. loud for all senses: colourful, noisy, spicy, hot. Ok no big revelation here; but I'm starting to see its way to be lively. We'll see if I can describe it at some point.

I've been to Tiruvannamalai, inland from Pondicherry. An important temple complex to Shiva's agra lingam(?)--his fire phallus that appeared on a hill. It's an important place and apparently merely thinking of it can bring enlightenment, so give it a thought :)

more after a nap :)

hi everyone, from Auroville (http://auroville.org).

Been here for a few days after overnight trains and buses. Trains are quite enjoyable. Buses much less; but sometimes faster.

Auroville is close to Pondicherry, south of Chennai/Madras. It's a newly created city, with a kind of supranational status, but in india, maybe 40 yrs old, meant to be open to all creeds and interests, and to be an experiment with alternative living. It's a success in some ways: for existing and growing to 2000ppl or so, and for being very green and integrating with the villages that used to live in a kind of dire desert before that. It's a question mark yet as for being an ideal place, and supporting ideal people or politics or ... it's a very human place, that looks at times like a vacation town but dealing with quite difficult conditions (clime and environment, growth issues, support and relation with various levels of institutions in india, etc).
Definitely interesting though not a place that opens up immediately; if only because it's formed of many communities with various tendencies and approaches to living (from most experimental vegan/fully sustainable to luxury villas).

I'm looking for some volunteer opportunities, I hope it will help meet more locals. It's a place that's at the same time out of the "mainstream" like Toronto life, and also very cosmopolitan because of the many highly educated people from all over the world that live here. But mostly it's still human, all too human, not quite an arcology populated by levitating sages. And perhaps that's the most promising aspect today: that it goes on attracting and holding together people of all persuasions.
More will come as I go beyond first impressions.

Everyplace has its prosaic aspects. Such topics have their legitimate uses, for example to start a conversation when one wants to but has no other traction; which also implies that the prosaic is what one can use to mindlessly kill a conversation when one is not interested at all.
Ambiguity, and the commonplace, might well be keys to politeness and civility (if not indispensable to bear the discontententment of civilizations).
Canada has the topic of weather well exercised (except maybe for Vancouver where the weather changes so much less); no less than 2 24h weather channels besides the regular announcements, that people actually watch! (this should be good news for those interested in making conversation; though other challenges await the canadian chatter). It does make some sense as Canadian weather can change quickly.

In Hyderabad, a much chattier place than Toronto, one of several topics is traffic. This it shares with most large cities and more so with non-western ones. Yes torontonians! you are entitled to complain too, but only as a whim; yes romans! you are more justified, but really it's your style that saves you. In Hyderabad traffic actually must kill routinely: by physical impact, by air poisoning, by cardiac arrest, by casual dismemberment...
To the newcomer it really looks like life is very cheap here. And it may well be in India; but that's another topic I'm definitely forced to look at.
Lanes, road directions (they go routinely against traffic), lights, hand signs and prayer, are often disregarded. I can't really describe it succintly, it's really chaos.
The real surprise is that no one seems angry or even discombobulated. Rome has beautiful exchanges of possibly complex insults. Here people barely blink.
Perhaps they can't afford to blink!
Many times I just don't know how come big trucks and my autorickshaw avoided each other: I mean this entirely literally: one must train one's eye like for sports to start catching the moments of lifechanging decisions. Like say for soccer or hockey when the ball/puck moves you've already missed the moment. When you see the charging motorbike it's too late to make decisions. Yet drivers are Musashis with large metal hulks. Most of my fatal errors, oops I mean all of them--have been gracefully tolerated.
I'm a trained Montreal and Paris jaywalker, but this traffic management approach implies there is a traffic! Here there are only flows: like coloured paints or rivers mixing up with no definite borders ... and such natural processes are mathematically chaotic: just as you can't go back and separate colours or rivers once they are mixed, you can never go back in Hyderabadi traffic: only forward in a new direction.
In fact I'd revise jaywalking theory, by saying you can't jaywalk in Hyderabad: you have only two questions to ask yourself: are you part of the flow or part of the pavement? and are you alive? There is no grey area.
And there is no driving in such traffic either: you must develop your presence as an actor uses a mask or costume; your klaxon, wheels, movements, lights, hands and shouts all must all be extensions of your body via the metal costume you travel in. Either you capture the attention of the "spectactors" or you're a liability to all.
Of course driving here can become a habit. Or you hire a driver which is very common. Here one does not pass silly tests, one is naturally selected or not.
Oh but way before one dreams of entering this circus, one realizes it can be fun: traffic as a spectator sport.
Just to wrap this thought, yes traffic is terrible, mostly because it's customary for a trip to take as long in a car as by foot: hours. Spent in terrible pollution of course. I really feel midday trips shave off hours of my life. People only a few kilometers away behave as if they live in different cities. That aspect of the city can become a totally serious reason to hesitate living here. I mean the traffic hours add up to the noise, city complexity, pollution, danger, really bad road conditions, and so on.
And yet... people don't get angry! Again maybe you can't aford that second of loss of control. However that "gentleness", and the quotes should be in quotes too, is definitely one aspect of the communicative toolset that's particular to some of India at least. Like the head bobbing that initially seems to mean yeas, no, maybe, sure, please, go to hell, all in one graceful gesture. In romania we had the "turkish yes" (well it's greek too) which I think is part of the indian bob. But really the head circles are what facial expressions are to italians: here the face is "gently" smiling but the head (and eyes of course) is litterally writing in the air. Or not smiling, there is actuall I think no compulsion to smile; just a mask. Perhaps the forced smile is much more western than the civilized non-quite-smile-but-really-looking-so that's commonly perceived by westerners in "asia". And some don't do smiling at all. Which is quite striking and I think reveal that what westerners call the "fake smile" is indeed not fake nor a smile, but more a canvas: full of potential but not fake.

Maybe because non-western cites can be so tough to navigate asian expats have started the "hash runs"; groups of people running together in nice settings towards a party after: "drinkers with a running problem" as their saying goes, certainly seems so in the 40C heat. It's a global "open source" post-colonial kind of event; intro: http://half-mind.com/Hashing/who.htm#2