alan little’s weblog

mahatma gandhi road

9th May 2008 permanent link

People who were cremated and had their ashes scattered on the waters of a holy river clearly don’t “turn in their graves”, so: in an irony that doubtless has Mahatma Gandhi swirling in the Ganges, the main upmarket shopping street in many Indian cities is called “M G Road”.

M G Road in Pune, I only noticed last week on my third visit there, has modern glitzy shopfronts; but if you look above street level, many of those shopfronts are tacked on to ramshackle and charming Pune old town buildings.

M G Road, Pune

related entries: Photography

mango season

9th May 2008 permanent link

I’ve spent a total of about six months in India, spread over eight calendar months, October to May. That’s winter (October to February, approximately) and summer (March to June) accounted for; the monsoon is still on my to-do list (especially “landscape photography during”).

Summer is the mango season. I love mangos. When I was in Mysore in February and March 2002, the guy at my local fruit & vegetable store kept telling me they would be coming “next week, sir”, but they weren’t. At the beginning of April in Pune this year, I read in the paper that the early season mango harvest was bad, and saw – and ate – only one mango the whole week. Last week they had finally arrived in large numbers.

mangos

In the early days of the Mughal court – originally and predominantly Persian / Afghan / Central Asian – developing a liking for mangos was apparently regarded as “going native” to a dangerous degree. This (iirc) from Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, Lizzie Collingham’s history of Indian cooking as experienced, and influenced, by foreigners. The Portuguese in Goa appear to have had no such inhibitions, judging by the fact that the most prized early season mango variety in India is called the Alphonso.

Indian mangoes are small, and one normally buys them in boxes of a dozen. I took one carefully packed one box in the centre of my suitcase to bring home. In departures at Mumbai airport I saw an elderly Indian gentlemen whose entire luggage appeared to consist of a stack of mango boxes taped together. Perhaps they were emergency supplies for a nephew working in Europe – my Indian colleagues in Germany are amazed what garbage the mangos in supermarkets here are.

airborne random trivia

27th April 2008 permanent link

Blogging in a SwissAir Airbus 330(*) somewhere over the Arabian Sea. In about an hour, for the third time I shall land at Mumbai airport and immediately(**) leave the city. I really ought to actually visit the place some time, it being supposedly one of the world’s great vibrant cities ’n’ all. I told a colleague who comes from Mumbai that I am afraid to go there having read Shantaram(***) and Sacred Games. Oh don’t worry he said, the gangsters only shoot each other. Mostly.

What do the local papers lead me to expect? A good week for reading Indian newspapers: they are full of the great national controversy about lewd, scantily clad cheerleaders in the new national cricket league Brian Micklethwait and Michael Jennings are so excited about(****). For purely cricket-related reasons in their cases I’m sure. I couldn’t care less about cricket. In other hotness-related news, Pune – which had pleasantly mild weather three weeks ago – is apparently now in the grip of its second highest ever recorded temperatures. Sounds like an excellent time to stay indoors and watch cricket.

(*) Note To Self: think twice before flying business class with SwissAir or in a small Airbus ever again. Food, comfort and entertainment in Lufthansa big planes are vastly superior. On the other hand, Lufthansa arrives in Mumbai at two in the morning, whereas I picked this flight because Swiss gets in at ten in the evening. Maybe reconsider tomorrow morning when I’ve had the chance to appreciate the extra four hours sleep.

(**) There’s actually nothing “immediate” about leaving Mumbai. Even at the dead of night, you have to drive for nearly an hour from the airport to get clear of the outermost new housing developments.

(***) Update 1st May: liking Shantaram doesn’t come under the heading of “only recommending books about India written by Brits” because (a) Gregory David Roberts isn’t a Brit, and (b) it’s a bestseller in India too, as I discovered today in Landmark Books in Pune. Not only that: in the paper yesterday I read about a real-life character on the colourful fringes of Mumbai’s criminal world. There is a new journalistic cliché for people like this. They aren’t “Dickensian” any more, they’re “like something out of Shantaram”.

(****) Update 3rd May: Brian is still excited, but as it turns out Michael disapproves.

two by two

20th April 2008 permanent link

monkeys elephants

Family trip to Munich zoo.

I suppose I could have claimed to have taken these in a park on the outskirts of Pune three weeks ago. Only people from Pune, and people who know that only South American monkeys have long prehensile tails, could have called my bluff. General knowledge from information placards at zoos is a wonderful thing – did you know polar bears are so well insulated that they are invisible to infrared sensors?

related entries: Photography

seven million gorillas?

20th April 2008 permanent link

Michael Jennings photographs me in a beer tent at Munich’s Frühlingsfest last weekend; I photograph Michael Jennings (and mess up my white balance. Don’t use flash if you can possibly avoid it, except outdoors in bright sunlight).

me michael jennings

I like to maintain regular social contact with my fellow bloggers. I had dinner with Michael Jennings in London in (I think) 2003, and lunch with Michael Blowhard in New York in 2005. (I said “regular”, not “frequent”). If any Indian bloggers would like to recommend a good South Indian restaurant in Pune the week after next, I’m up for suggestions.

moving beyond stretching

16th April 2008 permanent link

… if you aren't on your edge, the chances are good that your mind is wandering.
Steven Barnes on yoga asana practice

for some people – me, for example – being at some kind of personal physical limit seems to help with the focus.
me on yoga asana practice

related entries: Yoga

in spite of the gods

9th April 2008 permanent link

in spite of the gods

Currently reading …

One aspect of India’s economic growth and transformation in recent years is rising prices. English language books, which a few years ago were much cheaper than they were in the west, are now about half the price or more. Nevertheless I spent a happy half hour in Landmark Books in Pune last week.

Part of the loot was Edward Luce’s In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India (the cover photo is of the English edition; the American one looks boring). Edward Luce knows far more about India than I do, having lived there for years rather than months and being married to an Indian lady. He is impatient with dewy-eyed hippies who imagine India is some kind of mystical-metaphysical paradise, and rightly so. I personally think yoga is a huge contribution to world culture – I hope this won’t surprise anybody – but India isn’t only yoga, any more than Europe is only Beethoven. If you want an affectionate but clear-eyed outsider’s look at what’s really going on there these days, this looks like it’s probably the book to read.

I’m not far into the book yet; I hope I don’t end up agreeing with the amazon reviewer who thinks it starts well but is ultimately disappointing.

“Without question the best book yet written on the New India”, says William Dalrymple, and Mark Tully rates it highly too, so why should you care what I think? Go ahead and read it, if you’re at all interested in the subject.

So, do I only recommend books about India written by Brits? Nope. I talked about Vikram Chandra’s hugely enjoyable Mumbai gangster novel Sacred Games last year. I also read Edward Luce’s friend Ramanchandra Guha’s India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy last year. I found it dry and overly political (one can’t complain that this isn’t clear from the subtitle), but nevertheless, it's informative and makes it clear just what a fragile miracle India’s democracy is.

related entries: Music

india, india

6th April 2008 permanent link

Just back from a week long business trip in India. Mostly in Pune, with a day in Delhi. Very productive from a professional point of view and I had a great time, but the days were filled with doing business and in the evenings our Indian business partners took their duty of hospitality to guests very seriously. I had no time at all to get out and just wander about with a camera. (I did take lots of pictures of confidential business meetings; since I have no interest in losing my job they won’t be going anywhere near the internet)

I don’t think I got more than five hours sleep any night for the whole week, and now I have a touch of jetlag on top of that, so any kind of coherent joined-up writing is out of the question. Here instead are a few random jottings about impressions of India now versus India six years ago.

I’m aware that this is not a scientific like-for-like comparison – I’m sure six years ago it was already possible to spend a week going from air-conditioned upmarket hotels to air-conditioned tech company offices in air-conditioned company cars in big cities, just as I’m sure it’s still possible now to spend weeks attending yoga schools in charming small towns where most of your local acquaintances are very traditional brahmins.

There is a huge construction boom. Driving out of Mumbai on the Pune highway you go through miles and miles of new upmarket apartment developments. Lots of heavy goods traffic on the road in the dead of night, much of it construction steel. The price of construction steel has doubled in the past twelve months. There’s such a shortage of experienced building labour that employers are starting to have to treat and pay building workers decently. This last of course is a Good Thing.

building workers

The vehicles on the road are far more modern than they were. Mostly locally built modern Japanese small cars and motor bikes, where six years ago ancient Fiats, Morrises and Enfields dominated. There are still motor rickshaws still everywhere, though – even bicycle rickshaws in the outer suburbs of Delhi – and their drivers still live in slums in between the upmarket apartment developments and state of the art business parks.

Traffic in Pune is pretty heavy, but not as bad as Bangalore was six years ago. I’m told Bangalore is worse now. Traffic in Delhi is downright efficient, even though we were there during according to local papers the heaviest April rain in years.

I manage to fit in minimal yoga practices in my hotel room in the mornings, but have to time to get out and see interesting yoga-related sites in Pune. I subsequently figure out on google maps that the Iyengar Yoga Institute is in a part of town we drove through every day to get to the office, but I didn’t see it. My acquaintance with the Osho Ashram is limited to a drive by the front gate at the dead of night.

Compared to Mysore, Pune has no monkeys and astonishingly few cows and temples. This is probably more of a climate / culture / small town versus big industrial city difference than a 2002/2008 difference. I’m told there are dates on which devout Hindus have to make devotional offerings of food to cows. In Pune on these days people drive around for ages looking for cows to feed. In Mysore you would just open your front door and there would be one right there in the street.

Considering this was North India at the start of the Indian summer and supposed to be hot, the weather everywhere was mild and pleasant. Supposed to be low thirties (celsius) in Pune, but there’s a pleasant breeze all the time and it doesn’t feel hot. Hardly any mosquitos. Thirty six in Delhi the week before we arrive, apparently, but the day we are there it’s twenty and raining heavily, which is not supposed to happen in Delhi in April. No mosquitos there either.

North Indian food is very good, but in its rich restaurant version twice a day it gets heavy pretty quickly. I still prefer South Indian.

I’m not a fan of upmarket luxury hotels, but the Imperial in New Delhi is pretty amazing.

easterwinter

23rd March 2008 permanent link

You could choose to spend the day before your 47th birthday thinking “shit, I’m nearly fifty. How did that happen?”. Or you could choose to spend it on a mountain, most of the day going down a blue slope with your family: your son grinning from ear to ear the whole time(*) and shouting “Daddy, again!” every time you arrive back at the lift; your wife after a while deciding short blue runs are boring and she’s going off up the mountain to do a three thousand foot red run, arriving back at the easy slope a surprisingly short time later, sweaty but smiling. While wife & son are having breaks you head off up the mountain yourself into still-falling fresh snow for a couple of hours of the best on-piste snowboarding you’ve ever done.(**)

After spring skiing in February, the week before Easter the temperature in Germany and the Alps dropped fifteen degrees with big dumps of fresh snow. We headed out at short notice, this time to Zauchensee and Wagrain. These are part of the biggest connected ski area in Austria and definitely don’t come under the heading of small/funky ski resorts, unlike the other places I’ve been this winter. Big and commercial doesn’t have to mean impersonal, though, as we learned when we told our bed & breakfast landlord that we needed to hire skis for our son. “Oh” he said “then you need to go to Sepp”, and hailed a passing friend to hop in our car and take us to Sepp’s shop.

In Altenmarkt where we were staying there are three big ski shops on the high street. Sepp’s isn’t one of them. In a town that is a major centre of Alpine skiing, Sepp’s is Nordic Sports, a cross country specialist operating out of what appears to be a converted living room and garage on the edge of town. You have to respect a man who goes against the grain. He has decent Alpine kit to rent too, at decent rates, and is clearly a professional. After one look in his workshop I decide it’s time for a new wax job on my snowboard. Cross country guys live and die by wax.

Sure enough, next morning my board is better than new. Three years of scratches and dents, some of them deep and embarrassingly diagonal, have disappeared under a coat of wax so deep and lustrous I can hardly see where they were. Sepp charges me ten euros. I’ve paid two or three time as much for inferior jobs at bigger places.

I don’t do commercial plugs very often, but here’s one: if you’re ever in the area, you should rent your kit or get it serviced at Nordic Sports in Altenmarkt.

(*) Especially the bit where you call to him “ok, now let’s go a bit faster” then promptly fall over.

(**) There are those who would say “good on-piste snowboarding” is an oxymoron. They are more proficient snowboarders than I am.

gemütlichkeit

19th March 2008 permanent link

In my previous snowboarding career, my friends and I tended to look down on German ski resorts and preferred to drive the extra hour or two to Austria. German resorts, we thought, were small, had unreliable snow conditions and antiquated lifts. In particular they have lots of drag lifts, which we as beginner snowboarders were afraid of. All these things were and are true; last week at Spitzingsee I was well and truly frightened by the sight of the Rosskopf (Stallion’s Head) lift, the steepest and fastest t-bar I have ever seen.

Nevertheless. This year I have been to:

These quiet little places have their charm, I am discovering. I used to like the big glacier and high mountain resorts in Austria, but so do thousands of other people. These days I don’t need thousands of feet of black runs and off piste to keep me challenged and amused. And my family certainly don’t(*).

Alan’s Snowboarding Blog? We’ll see. Probably not. The winter, what little we have had of it this year, must surely be nearly over by now. In any case, if I want to blog more about boarding then I can see I’m going to need to get good enough at it to feel safe carrying a camera. Posts like this need pictures.

(*) although my son probably will all too soon if we keep this up. At Spitzingsee we saw what appeared to be an extreme off-piste skiing class for seven year olds: a little ski-school style crocodile of them, happily following their teacher off into the woods underneath the steepest part of the chairlift. Locals, presumably.

rediscovery

18th March 2008 permanent link

Twelve years ago, in the midst of and in reaction to some major turmoil in my life, I gave up rock climbing. Climbing had been one of the major loves of my life for a decade and a half before that, but I felt it had contributed to the hole I thought I was in, so out it went. I don’t miss it; it’s a wonderful activity, but so are lots of other things. Yoga for example, which I took up directly afterwards.

Three years later I moved to Munich; most of my friends there went out snowboarding at weekends, so I did too. Driving down the autobahn on the way to my first outing, before I even knew anything about how snowboarding was going to be, I realised a large part of what I had been missing terribly from climbing wasn’t climbing; it was the just cameraderie of being in the car with a bunch of friends, heading out to the mountains on Friday night.

So for two winters I was a snowboarder. We were almost entirely self-taught and doubtless nowhere near as good as we thought we were, but we could go more or less where we wanted to do on the mountain. I wasn’t fanatically in love with it – it seemed to be bad for my yoga, which was more important to me – but a couple of times I experienced the flying in powder snow sensation, and that really is ecstatic.

Then I spent a winter in India, then I became a father. I got out boarding once or twice a year, most years, but if you do something as little as that you can’t do it well enough to really enjoy it, and I didn’t miss it much.

Now my son is nearly five, the age at which kids normally start skiing around here. A week’s family holiday with friends in Austria was fun. The week after we got back there was even new snow in the Bavarian Alps, for the first time in months, so we thought we would venture out again for a Saturday afternoon to a little local resort called Spitzingsee.

This was purely a family day out, and that is a different thing again from heading out to the mountains with a bunch of friends. Particularly when my wife and son are very much beginner skiers and I am a barely intermediate snowboarder. Previously we’ve always been out with friends who are experienced and capable skiers, well capable of helping beginners who get into difficulties. A good adult skier can just put a kid between their skis and ski down more or less anywhere; once I even saw a guy skiing with his daughter tucked under his arm. Whereas even good snowboarders, which I’m not, are severely limited in their options for helping skiers. Imagine, then, our dismay when the baby lift at Spitzingsee turned out to be closed and, after we’d walked back up the baby slope a few times, my wife didn’t feel confident enough to make it down a blue slope to the nearest t-bar lift. Nor did I have any idea how either an adult beginner or a snowboarder was going to make it up a t-bar lift with a small child.

Our options at this point appeared to be: walk up and down the baby slope half a dozen times until we were all sick of it then go home, or take the chairlift to the top of the mountain where according to the map the only ways down were red (intermediate) runs. My wife wanted a bit more time on the baby slope; my son and I were bored and ready for adventure. Into the chairlift. What’s the worst that can possibly happen? At best a long and humiliating walk down the mountain at the first hint of anything steep or tricky; at worst an appearance in the paper as an example of irresponsible parenting.

But no. Spitzingsee turns out to possess quite possibly the easiest “red” run in the Alps. With good snow conditions (and the snow that day was lovely) it’s no problem at all for sufficiently brave beginners – of which it turns out I have two in my family. I am immensely proud of them and we had a great time. I even grabbed a couple of chances to play on slightly more challenging runs while they were resting.

(So I have still only had to walk down a ski piste once, during a total white-out in a snowstorm on the glacier at Hintertux in February of my second snowboarding winter. It was worth it. The next day my friend John and I were the first down the valley run off the end of the glacier, putting first tracks through a metre of fresh powder courtesy of that storm. Just like in the movies.)

photography quotes

17th March 2008 permanent link

Cartier-Bresson got by with one lens … and Sebastiao Salgado uses three. You need more?
Mike Johnston

related entries: Photography

yah anauvaad nahim hao payaa

17th March 2008 permanent link

I’m off to India in a couple of weeks, on a business trip to check out my new supplier’s development team. My employer has switched the outsourcer for my project from a local one in Germany to a non-local one in Pune.

A business trip to a major industrial city to visit a (we hope!) state of the art tech company should be interestingly different from studying yoga in sleepy traditional Mysore. My Indian colleagues tell me things have changed quite a bit anyway in six years. Some bloggage and pictures might appear here in due course, although I’m only going for a week and time will be tight – so relentlessly employee-unfriendly is my company’s travel policy that I can’t even fit in a weekend side trip to Mysore to see my friend’s new baby. I’m told the office I’ll be visiting is near BKS Iyengar’s yoga school, but I assume both my schedule and the three year waiting list mean I won’t be dropping in on a class or two there either.

The title? Allegedly “India here I come” in Hindi, or so claims the Government of India’s Hindi translation website. I’m sceptical though: I was expecting terms like “Hind” or “Bharat” to turn up somewhere. (No disrespect intended to the Government of India – especially not today, because tomorrow I’m off to my local consulate to see about my business visa, but …) on principle I don’t trust online translations unless I can cross check them. My attempts to cross check hit stumbling blocks. cfilt.iitb.ac.in, wherever that might be, throws a php error. Let’s hope their skills improve before they graduate and go and work for my new supplier. And google and babelfish apparently don’t regard being one of the top five most-spoken languages in the world as a relevant ranking criterion for deciding what languages to support in their translation services.

customer service

17th March 2008 permanent link

Thanks and praise to Ellie on the support desk at The Pragmatic Programmer.

I needed to get hold of an up to date edition of Agile Web Development with Rails for some prototyping I want to do for a project at work, the beta download copy of the first edition that I purchased two years ago being hopelessly out of date. My first attempt using my main email address failed, so I fired off an email to customer support, fearing that my purchase of a beta copy of the first edition might no longer be valid for an update to the second edition. This being Sunday morning in Europe, I didn't expect a reply for quite some time.

Then I looked more closely at the original emails and noticed that I used a mail alias two years ago that I had since deleted. So I set the same mail alias up again, logged on to the Pragmatic site using that email address and voilà, my updated download works. A little while later – round about Sunday morning in America – comes a mail from Ellie saying that she has merged my two accounts for my and everything should now be ok. So thanks, Ellie, for spending your SUnday morning tidying up problems for me that were entirely due to my own carelessness. The Pragmatic Programmers take customer service seriously.

gone boarding

4th March 2008 permanent link

Just back from a week’s family holiday in the Alps. Wife and son at beginner’s ski school. I had a snowboard lesson on the second day, having previously boarded for a couple of winters at weekends before my son was born, but then hardly at all for the last five years; after the lesson and by the end of the week I was boarding better, and having more fun with it, than ever before. I can get down black runs, in a manner that is perhaps lacking in elegance and speed on the steep bits, but enjoying myself and without too much embarrassing falling over. This despite snow conditions that, while ok, were more like April than February. For most of the week.

(No snowboarding pictures, since I’m still not good enough at it to feel safe carrying my camera on the mountain, and the numerous pictures I took of my son’s ski school graduation “race” are really only going to be of interest to his grandmothers – for whom I spent last night printing a large batch.)

Where I really should have taken pictures – but at the time was too busy being frightened – was on the journey home. In order to avoid huge end of ski week traffic jams on the autobahn, I decided to take a short cut on a back road over the Wendelstein Alps. This, as I discovered only later, was about an hour after the Wendelstein summit weather station recorded Hurricane Emma at 140 mph. Thankfully we missed the crazy winds, but the several inches of wet, heavy fresh snow defeated us and everybody else on the road except those who stopped to put chains on (locals) or wait for the snowplough. We turned back – after proudly achieving the highest point reached without chains by anybody in our little line of cars – and found a different, longer but lower way round the autobahn traffic jam.

It was a little tense. Realistically and with hindsight, drifting to the side of the road and hitting a barrier or a tree at the speed we were sliding around at, just before we lost traction completely and gave up, would have been more embarrassing and inconvenient than seriously dangerous – but just try telling that to your hindbrain at the time. I remember being very happy that we had lots of warm mountain clothes in the car. Cameras did cross my mind too, but only briefly and I suspect my wife would have taken a dim view of me hopping out of the car and doing anything that didn’t directly contribute to getting our son (who slept through the whole thing) back to safety. So you’ll just have to take my word for it that the Wendelstein Alps under a heavy fall of new snow are very beautiful. We will definitely be going back there some time when there isn’t a hurricane blowing.

copyright

6th February 2008 permanent link

People who leave their copyright-but-unwatermarked pictures lying around on the internet should expect to have them “borrowed” from time to time – especially if they’re any good – and mostly that's ok. Most people in my experience are polite enough to ask permission and/or link to the photographer.

I feel honoured, given that the person’s own pictures are pretty damn good, that this Indian photography blog liked my one of my pictures of the beautiful temple at Somnathpur (from my technically out of date but still philosophically valid film-era essay on photography in Southern India).

On the other hand, it raises my hackles when I see a big name, A-list tech blogger using a picture of and belonging to a friend of mine without so much as a hint of linkage or attribution.

currently listening to ...

1st February 2008 permanent link

My son is taking his own musical education in hand by picking CDs from the shelves at random and insisting that they be played. (Brian Micklethwait approves) He’s old enough now that I can let him do that without having to worry too much about the fate of the CDs, and in any case I have backups. (Although I suppose admitting to those backups in public might not be such a great idea these days. Fair Use, people, Fair Use)

Today’s choice was Public Image Limited’s Greatest Hits, So Far. “Er”, I ventured to suggest, “you might not like this”. Turns out I was wrong. I underestimated the boy.

Perhaps I should try him on some Joy Division next. Or perhaps not – his mother could come home from her yoga class at any moment.

related entries: Music

cody on patanjali

1st February 2008 permanent link

I’ve been quiet lately I know. Sadly it isn’t because I’ve been working on my masterpiece.

Unlike Cody. Part Two of quite possibly the most helpful English-language version of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras is published. Rejoice, and read.

related entries: Yoga

one percent theory

24th January 2008 permanent link

“99% practice, 1% theory” is one of Pattabhi Jois’s famous bits of gnomic guidance on how to approach ashtanga vinyasa yoga.

I was sure this was just what I needed when I first started practicing yoga seriously. My life was down a pretty deep hole at the time, and I was convinced one of the reasons for that was too much reading and thinking and not enough doing. So for my first few years of ashtanga yoga, I deliberately concentrated entirely on practice and left the theory to be taken care of later. It was a series of philosophy lectures by B.N.S. Iyengar at a workshop in the summer of 2001 that finally convinced me it was time to start catching up on the one percent. So I bought Desikachar’s The Heart of Yoga, including his translation of and commentary on the Yoga Sutras, and read it. Pattabhi Jois says the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and the Bhagavad Gita are all the 1% theory you need.

Sooner or later one’s karmic burdens reassert themselves, though. My practice-to-theory ratio is sill reasonably healthy, but Amazon has figured out that the former academic historian in me is irresistibly drawn towards books by western academics attempting to make sense of yoga’s history, and relentlessly recommends them to me. Fortunately so far they are few & far between. Ian Whicher’s The Integrity of the Yoga Darsana seems like it will be interesting one day, but I haven’t really managed to get to grips with it yet. I ground my way painfully through much of Joseph Alter’s Yoga in Modern India. One of the reasons I never made it as an academic was my belief that the ability to write is a vital skill for a historian. This belief is deeply unfashionable or even heretical in contemporary academia, and Professor Alter clearly does not subscribe to it. Just arrived is Elizabeth de Michelis’ A History of Modern Yoga. Let’s see how that goes.

related entries: Yoga

congratulations

16th January 2008 permanent link

A few years ago I wrote that I thought my friend Lakshmish in India would make a good father one day.

That day has come, and I am delighted to be able to congratulate baby Goutama, born on the 10th of January, on his excellent choice of a dad for this incarnation.

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