Archive for the ‘Misc’ Category
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November 14th, 2007
My maternal ancestry, beginning in the mid-late 1800s
November 3rd, 2007
This my great-great-grandfather, Simon Podwal. The Catholics of Mangalore, a coastal town north of Goa, voluntarily converted to Christianity in the 1600s under the influence of the Portuguese. Many of these early settlers had fled the horrific, forced conversions going on in Goa, that were a part of the Inquisition.
Below is Simon’s son, Andrew D’sa, my great-grandfather and his first wife and daughter.
Now we have Appolinaris D’sa, my grandfather, whom I lived with as a child and loved very much. This picture was taken in 1938 in Mangalore. He is a young lawyer 2 years before he is to meet and marry my grandmother, Eunice Pinto.
Switching sides, below is a picture of Rose Pinto, my great-grandmother. She was born in 1896 and died at the young age of 24, in 1920, of Typhoid, a terrible disease at the time that claimed the lives of young mothers and children every year. She left behind 3 children, the oldest of which was my grandmother, who was 7 years old when her mother died.
And here is my grandmother, Eunice D’sa, the year she married my grandfather, in 1940. The picture is a cropped image from a group photo of the Ladies Club of Mangalore taken in honor of a visit by the British Governor’s wife. This is 7 years before India’s independence.
And finally my parents, Marina D’sa and Paul Subaiya in 1972. Marina was Eunice’s 4th child.
Karl Rove’s Republicanism or why the Democrats are more closely aligned with internet culture
October 25th, 2007
I wrote this post earlier in the year, before Karl Rove left the White House, and forgot about it. I decided to bring it back since I’ve been thinking a lot about how the web is changing our lives.
The thing about comparing Republicans and Democrats is that it’s not an apples to apples comparison. I’d argue that they are two different constructs that as a function of necessity and history have been described as two political parties, but really it would be like comparing a noun and a car, or a fruit and philosophy – things that might share some common elements but really should not be the basis for meaningful comparisons. Listening to Karl Rove talk about his party’s “mission” and Tom Delay talk about global warming, I get the sense that each party is running a separate race, not against each other with a common definition of success, but separate battles altogether.
Enter bias. Democrats seem to pursue change based on humanitarian ideals, whereas Republicans seem to pursue control in the name of more abstract ideals. It is interesting that Karl Rove’s Republican rhetoric involves use of the word “natural” so often. A “natural majority” for example. Because he knows that to further his party’s agenda requires skillful and heavyhanded masterminding, precisely because the agenda is…unnatural. It is unnatural to protect extreme wealth in the face of huge economic disparities, to believe so strongly in individualism that we ignore compassion. It is unnatural to deny our responsibility in damaging the earth.
Karl Rove observes two important trends: that people want individual responsibility/market forces and that they crave spirituality. I actually agree, but I think he is dead wrong about how we will get there. I believe people will seek a new level of wholeness and fulfillment in their lives but not by flocking to evangelical churches, but rather by tuning into their environments, joining communities for social change, paying more attention to their health, examining their role in social inequity and demanding greater transparency from their institutions. And yes people want market forces; Karl Rove cites Ebay. But he draws a totally weird conclusion about free markets. What people are really doing on Ebay is building a new economy of trust, by proving that the individual empowered by information and access to resources will be a creative, productive force of “good” in the world. Communities will form that will self-regulate. Groups will learn. Ethics will not have to be sleazily forced by political machinery; a point totally lost on Karl Rove. A sense of collective morality can grow if you believe in people. And this is really what the internet ethic is about; what we are seeing evolve in the socially networked world some of us are lucky enough to live in.
Rove’s brand of Republicanism isn’t about this at all. According to him, unless the party is hypervigilant and controlling of the message it will lose its grip. It’s the essence of old school, top-down, unidirectional media; web 0.0. And probably, his fear is justified, because his version of the party line is inherently unnatural and precarious to begin with. It requires a politics of fear and insecurity. Not unlike what would be spouted by dictators who live with the constant threat of a coup because deep down inside they know they’ve wrested power, not earned it; that the principles for which they stand would not be the logical outcome of truly democratic debate. Instead the message needs to be constantly repositioned and framed so that it’s never seen for the Emperor’s new clothes that it is.
India’s community identities
October 25th, 2007
It is the way one wears her sari, the fabric her sari is made of, the way one greets a friend, the way one cooks chicken, or whether one eats chicken at all. “We are this way” is a common expression pronounced with the Indian equivalent of a Talmudic shrug. “We” refers to the mirco-identity of a small group, categorized and defined by a complex intersection of race, religion, geography, occupation, social standing, family ties. It’s like looking under a microscope at what would be a monolith to the naked eye. At my Aunt’s home the other day, four guests were saying goodbye. I just nodded and smiled at the Manglorian Hindu couple, but kissed the Manglorian Christian woman on both cheeks and shook the hand of the Manglorian Christian man – everyone participated in the goodbye rituals intuitively and seamlessly and to have done anything differently would have crossed a subtle line in social conduct.
Algebra class in the apartment
October 23rd, 2007
Aunt Rhoda is awesome. Once a week she takes 5 girls from underprivileged backgrounds through their math homework – today I listened in on a lesson about the quadratic equation. These girls were taken in by nuns because they either don’t have families who can provide for them or they don’t have families at all. They gathered around my Mac to see pictures of themselves, full of giggles. Over the years, four of Aunt Rhoda’s students from this lot have gone on to college, something she is justifiably proud of.
Guests
October 23rd, 2007
We had a slew of guests today: a woman doctor who is instituting AIDS awareness programs in middle schools in Mumbai despite the wild protests of the Hindu fundamentalist party (they aren’t allowed to call it sex education), her husband, an international bridge champion to whom I lent the New Yorker issue with the article about Garry Kasparov, the Russian chess phenom whom I learned he admired and their daughter a homeopath who works out of her home. Conversation went from how out of control autorickshaw drivers were in Bangalore, refusing to take customers if the distance is too short and extorting people for high fares (the situation was pronounced “beyond redemption” because even if you took it to the highest level, the police commissioner turns out to be our own cousin and he just laughs and says, why not just pay the extra 20 rupees), to the stock market and how much higher it could go without collapsing, to the latest Hindi movie about an Indian coach who leads a girls hockey team to success. The actor, Shahrukh Khan is now getting requests to teach leadership in management programs across India. It’s just the “glamour quotient” said the woman doctor. We served foie gras I’d bought at the airport in Brussels, on crackers topped with cucumber in the shape of bows.
After they left, my cousins Shona and Sam came by bringing biryani for lunch from a local restaurant. They said they’d deliberately picked a less spicy kind for me which was totally unnecessary since I relish the real Southern Indian version. We then combed the pages of a society magazine as my cousin picked out all the people she knew. “This guy is only 26 and married this woman in her 40s, but she doesn’t look her age,” we observed as we leafed through.
Today’s news
October 21st, 2007
October 19th
Bush said to Iran today, “we will isolate you” referring to his zero tolerance policy for their efforts to build nuclear capabilities. It’s ironic since now, more than ever, it’s America who is isolated. With our weak dollar and lack of moral credibility, we are forcing a realignment of affinities even among our once friends. The joke about Bush bonding with Putin on his visit to W’s ranch is more than not funny, now that Putin is befriending Iran. China is cutting deals with Iraq, and so is Iran. Turkey is ready to take matters into its own hands with Baghdad, having given up on the US helping with the issue of the Kurds on their border. There is some serious huddling and whispering going on in them Eastern regions and Bush is not invited, and therefore we are not invited. There are new affinities forming, drawing into stark relief the real catalyst for the frightening but not so unreasonable threat of a WWIII, that Bush naively attributes to Iran getting nuclear.
Why do we put up with software for Windows only?
October 11th, 2007
Developers PLEASE stop creating beta versions of things that only run on Windows. Mac users by definition are early adopters and tastemakers – thinking about us after the fact is not just super irritating but it would seem to me that it’s bad business. Stop thinking about sheer market size and think about the type of customer you want, your ultimate adoption curve and the potential to create a lasting brand. Yahoo’s news videos used to be PC only, I think now they’ve changed, but they lost me as a user. I just tried to download Times Reader. Bad, bad, only for Windows. And not to mention MS’s Healthvault, but that’s at least just plain predictable.
Oh and yes, I just bought a mac that can run windows. But it’s just so distasteful to have to make the switch and not all macs are configured for this anyway.
To the Health 2.0 community, we made history on 9/20!
September 22nd, 2007
This incredible short film was born out of a collaboration that truly reflects the spirit of web 2.0. I had seen Michael Wesch’s The Machine is Us/ing Us at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco in early 2007 and was very moved. I wanted something similar to start the Health 2.0 conference with, so I sat down with my business partner Matthew Holt and we came up with a story concept and some examples of how Health 2.0 developed on the heels of innovation in web technology in general and how as a patient movement it arose as a natural chapter following the health activism of the 70s and 80s. We hired Scribe Media to go from there and Alexandra Lerman and Michael Cervieri did a brilliant job further developing the story board, coming up with the structure and text and producing a visually and intellectually compelling journey through the history of medicine. Even the soundtrack reflects collaboration in the age of the internet. The song is a remix of “Drunk” by Luxxury produced by London’s Jamie De Winter under his Janus alias (see myspace.com/luxxuryremixes for more info).
Billboard across from Magic Castle