Africa. Work. Technoserve.

Technoserve is a non-profit organization running social impact initiatives across four continents of the world. With about half a century of experience behind them, they are a driving force in the agriculture and agribusiness transformation domain in Africa.

Having recently launched a new program, Connected Farmer Alliance (CFA), to create mobile-based solutions for lowering transaction costs of conducting business with small farmers, Technoserve is looking to help every tiny farmer in East Africa access markets and information. This is great significance in the region given that 80% of the population is involved in agriculture, and of those a vast majority are small farmers. The program aims to reach 500k small farmers by the end of two years.

I am part of this initiative through their 'Volunteer Consultant' program, which allows me to help in identifying the potential elements of this solution. It also gives the opportunity to live in Nairobi (Kenya), and later Maputo (Mozambique) and/or Dar-E-Salaam (Tanzania) and get my first taste of East African culture.

On first impressions, and looking forward to a few days in the much famed Masai Mara, I highly endorse.

Ghosts

Remembering past lovers is a symptom. They're always lurking in the corners of our heads, waiting to appear when we least need them. Waiting to pull us down.
I woke up a few hours earlier than I would on a Sunday morning. My heart had sensed the loneliness it was destined to face due to the misgivings of my mind. And it was nervous and scared and it was pinching my head, which was fast asleep of course. And I woke up with a start, and a huge sinking feeling.

From the Valley of Strangers - I

Eyes
A Million eyes
Wandering. Sparkling. Smiling. Dreaming.
Rolling. Frowning. Narrowing?
Narrowing?
They notice a pen;
In the valley of strangers
And they wander back to their own world,
Wondering.

My Relationship with the Newspaper

The only thing I detest reading is a newspaper. A great feeling of deja-vu overcomes me whenever I try to read a newspaper, and it makes me feel that the world is cycling through the same issues over and over again. It makes me feel that we are neither growing nor progressing. And it makes me thing less seriously of issues that are in fact rather grave and depressing. As you can see, instead of making me more sensitive to things happening to fellow sufferers around the world, it ends up making me numb-er, and hence serves exactly the opposite of its intended purpose. 

Good? Bye

If only I had been awake when she was leaving. I should never have let her go.

I bet she left that glass of wine, on her side of the bed, on purpose. She knew that I would come looking for her in there. I would sip her wine. Somewhere far away, fresh blood will flood her pale face. Ease the pain, as I draw my last few drops of her, with not-so-secret desperation and mounting regret.

She will go make mistakes of her own, to feel less troubled by mine. This is not what her shrink would recommend. But her shrink doesn't know her like I do.

Life of (p)I

I recently saw Life of Pi, the fact that this coincides with the release of the movie in India, is of course irrelevant. It merely talks about my efficiency in tracking down movies which are guaranteed to be well made and talk about things I don't understand. Things I would like to believe I have the ability to understand but choose to ignore. Except in movies. Watch a movie with the intention of exacting only entertainment and you may take nothing more. Watch it with some higher hope and you may take back the gift of disappointment, in most cases at least. I just don't get why acquiring something as common as faith requires one to be lost at sea with a tiger in tow. If God is as omnipresent as all the religions of the world claim, stories that inspire faith have to be less far-fetched. If someone is already a believer, this story won't change him, if one is not though, an impossible-sounding, unverifiable story by a french-canadian-indian who claims to follow three religions isn't the perfect recipe for change. I am surprised that the dude listening to Pi's story took it seriously. The world is full of convincing story-tellers, with the ability to pay attention to detail. If this dude would have sat his gullible ass on Rowling's couch, he might have spent the rest of his life in search of Hogwarts?
The movie was well made.
And the idea of going on this larger than life journey full of joy, pain, misery, fear, turmoil, change sounds exceedingly appealing. So does the idea of flying fish. But we can't all wait to be on a pre-modern ship floating on stormy sea, can we? We need to find our boat and our CGI tiger and our lifetime supply of food and water cans and get started. If we fail to embark on a journey that tests our knowledge and our faith, how can we ever be at peace? I'm unclear about where I am. I don't know if I'm sleeping, waiting on the overnight storm or searching for my floating island of hope, running short of resilience.
I just know that there's darkness.

New Beginnings

When you take the decision of letting go of your false existence, you expect instant happiness. Everything is more real. The reactions of people around you tell you who they really are, for you. But the one thing that you forget to figure out is how to fill the void.

If you have always lived a certain way, real or fake, right or wrong, your life and you are built around that. How can you replace your life with another?

Your cognitive self still perceives the world and behaves in exactly the same way as before. You are free of everything fake in your world, except your own self.

Hello Stranger

Sometimes people force you to do things that you don’t want to do. I’m not one to give up my free will that easily but there is just no way to constantly fight for everything you believe in against everyone you spend your life with. It’s tiring and consuming. Tradition is the backbone of the false security that my dear society lives with. If you do everything exactly as your ancestors did, or as they claim they did, then it’ll be alright. If you as much as sneeze in the wrong direction, you are in unknown territory. Dark, dirty waters ready to whirlpool you down their swirling gut just because you were foolish enough to jump in them. There is the known and the unknown. The ideal life is the perfect execution of the known I was taught. “It’s not easy and no one has done it before in our family. You are a special child. You, I believe, will be able to perfectly do everything we ask you to do”. The last time I concentrated when someone was giving me a speech trying to tell me how limited I am was a year ago. If I remember correctly, I responded with incoherent shouting. The last time I pretended to listen was a few months ago. And then I decided that I’m done pretending. There is no way to actually tell if and when you’re happy, but I guess I try to gauge from the way I talk to people, the kind of music I choose to listen. Music is tricky – I still love listening to Damien Rice when I’m cheerful. I’m definitely happier not pretending. Problem is I fit nowhere when I’m not. Because everyone else is.  But then I’m forced to pretend every once in a while, and there is the usual bout of grouch. That’s the beauty of being among strangers. There is no need to pretend. Any of your faces is new to them, so they don’t give a shit. And they don’t give a shit. Strangers are good, well-meaning people. 

Like Spinning Plates

Sometimes you travel to a city for the first time ever. Backpack packed with great expectations. You expect to be disappointed simply because everyone say you won't be. Maybe the walls of the city are all painted with graffiti. Images that change everyday, erasing the past with the paint. Nothing is permanent and everyone is at home. Sometimes you like a band so much that you mention it to every stranger you meet. Maybe you see them live.

Sometimes things don't disappoint.

There might be scores of versions of this song online. This is my favorite. It reminds me of a beautiful day, in a fascinating part of the world. 
Like Spinning Plates - Radiohead - Live in Berlin

Idiot Box

I don’t think I’m going to live beyond 40. I’m 24. Once I managed to rationalize my current discontent, I realized that there is no way to eliminate this, and hence the only possibility involves struggle, strife, despair and death. I am no fortune-teller. I don’t wear bright patchy robes and I don’t have a crystal ball tucked inside. I just got distracted by an intense game of ping pong and stopped writing. I was distracted enough to stop writing this, this most important of passages, this text which is supposed to describe the infallible logic behind my precise prediction of my own downfall. I think I have ADD. I think that’s Attention Deficit Disorder. I've never heard it in full, it makes perfect sense. The electricity just went off for a 5 second period, but it kick-started a process which re-drew my attention to this most pressing passage. Its not that I missed the match in 5 seconds, but the way it works in my neck of the woods is that any power interruption forces all systems to reboot, whenever its restored. And my television takes about 10 seconds to reboot. That’s still just 15 seconds. So there’s more to it. You see, the channel in question is ESPN. ESPN is big here, it gets all the massive gigs, sports gigs, I like the word gigs, it sounds smooth, doesn't it? ESPN is a paid channel and according a recent (annoying) regulation, can only be viewed through this thing called a set-top box. I have reached a point where I am forced to define a set-top box. Excuse my impatience, but my immediate instinct was to question its relevance to the passage, but a few seconds and a bit of over-thinking made me realize that its most crucial, no detail must be spared, or I risk sounding unstable, or worse, irrational. I’m not irrational. I have been called a lot of things in my life, all contradictory, lots complimentary (lies) but I have never been called irrational. Not by the dumbest of strangers, not by the most malicious of friends. I couldn't bear that. I can see myself raging with anger at the sound of this crass insinuation and coming down upon the accuser with ungodly force, ending once and for all the pointless existence he has bothered the world with. I am not a murderer. A set-top box takes channels from some central broadcaster and brings them to my television, in a highly tracked and legal fashion. Helps track users. I’m in a land full of cheats.  The set-top box takes 20 seconds to reboot. An innocuous power interruption, worth the blink of an eyelid has cost me 35 seconds. I think the German guy won. I hope he did. The Chinese have dominated ping pong for too long now, rendering the sport boring and the matches a mere formality. The only interesting matches are when a Chinese guy plays another Chinese guy, but then that’s no longer international sport. I only watch international sport. One would expect, after 35 seconds of excruciating delay, at a crucial point of a fairly critical encounter, between the German and the Chinese, to finally be able to watch what remains of the match. Both the Chinese and the German guy were 2 points away from victory. Maybe I could've caught the last rally. But life isn’t fair. Its fucking disgusting.  The set-box company is incidentally, also a major telecom company around here. Their marketing guy is this fat, bald bastard in his mid-40s and over sized pants, who trots to work and spits ideas all over a plush, wooden boardroom. In one of his recent meetings, he announced, “We've found a way to make money off the dumb boxes”. All the other fat slobs, weary from sitting in their seats all day, perched their neck up in attention. “Every time the dumb box, our little box of gold, reboots, we’ll reset to a channel flashing ads of our sponsors”. And his face grew wider as he spoke the last words, into a smile but even wider, stretched so much that the smile also found it hard to survive, and was replaced by an open-mouthed search for reaction. The fat slobs burst out in applause. They all agreed, and didn't really care. So much for the fucking customer. It took me an additional 5 seconds to switch to ESPN, and by the time my little 40 second afternoon siesta ended, the players had walked off the table. I smashed the remote on the table, and decided to get back to writing this passage. The Chinese guy won. What a surprise.

Just another Friday night

It was just another Friday, night. I had the same old plans to meet the same old folks at the same old joints. There comes a time in your life when you've visited one too many Friday nights. It’s not that they’re predictable, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that I gaze through my crystal ball of wisdom and experience and foresee the proceedings of the night to be. It’s just that its tiring. Its tiring to think about it. Its tiring to do the analysis. Famous Friday last September, my favorite Friday of the year, I went out to the same old with this bunch. There were four other dudes. Now, I’m no dude lover, so I don’t really care if there is a copious overflow of dudes on my Friday night, but if you were to ask my opinion, I’d say five is one too many. That’s a lot of action seeking, game faced energy and I don’t know if one silly little bar table could handle it. There were 6 ladies coming too. Its not as if there was a shortage of game. This city, my life, is no desert. It’s a pretty dense jungle of things exotic and unnecessary. But I don’t think it matters how dense the jungle is. If there are too many hunters out there, they’ll end up shooting each other. There’s only limited space you know, limited ways to bait. But fuck that, life isn't perfect the rest of the fucking week so why crib over the state of Jurassic park on a Friday night. At least there’s no shit that needs typing. The thing as you grow wiser is that people have different things they want from this zoo committee meeting they most gladly attend. Take Urvi, she just wants to down some drinks, because she must, before she goes back to her wretched husband and actually has to spend time with him on the weekend. She loves him too much to fuck her head up though. She will come out and make polite, flirtatious conversation and just when you think the alcohol is setting in and you might just find her tolerable, she gets up to leave. Sia has a boyfriend she hates, and he’s a little bit like me, that makes the perfect fucked up combination of facts for her to be temporarily attracted to me and help make a fun night. Jai wants her too though. I can tell, and he mentioned it rather crudely and directly over a drink the other day. Hina is married but she’s great pals with Sia and Rahul, so she will honor us with her entertaining conversation about her troubles as a young mother and a working wife. I bet she thinks of us as a support group of some sort, pouring all her troubles in her glass and throwing the filthy cocktail right into our faces. Sia makes better conversation, but she gets stupider with every drink. People react in wildly different ways to alcohol. One would imagine that is amusing to observe, it is. But I know these people and their future drunk state will be no surprise to me. Varun and Hari are bringing their girlfriends and will try their best to sound like bad-ass risk loving game-players  and not overdo it. Fucktards. Rina is the only one who is truly single. There are reasons. She’s blind as a bat, in the head. She’s the one who laughs at every joke that everyone makes, that very giggly, I will not laugh too much but not too less either laugh. She’s the one who does that and finds herself giggling at some dark witty completely inappropriate statement that draws the quiet glances from the rest, and then looks around only to realize she fucked up. And she tries to cover that up with a smile. A cute one. She looks okay. I don’t want to come home drunk and alone. Makes for the worst hangovers. See this is the problem. There’s too much to think about. I wonder how it would be to just walk out on a Friday night and see what happens. Maybe meet the same people, maybe some new ones. No pressure, just go with the flow. How about that?