Sherman, fire up the Wayback Machine.

Actually it's not that far back, only back to February, but you get extra points for spotting the reference.

After spending some time on one of my earlier trips in Bangalore meeting with one of our Indian partner companies, a member of their engineering team offered to show me some bits of Bangalore. And we started with an ISKCON temple:



ISKCON devotees are better known in Australia as Hare Krishnas, since they believe that Krishna is the 'Supreme Personality of Godhead', whatever that means. Anyone who knows me knows that I'm not at all a religious person, but since all religions have their art and I do like art, I can be persuaded to consider a tour of a temple or two.

What I didn't realise when Suresh asked me to come inside was that this wasn't just a 'wander in' kind of temple. First there is the 'bit with the stones':



A close look at the this photos reveals...not a great deal, actually. For reasons of decorum, you can't take a camera inside the temple, so the only two shots I have are from outside. But the tall brass thing that looks like a flag pole, and is in fact a flag pole, is the entrance point for the temple. This is the start of the mantapa, the pillared hill which sit in front of the temple hall proper. To begin the climb, you pass through an entrance gate of sorts, a series of 108 granite stones slabs, set above the floor in a contorted path from the edge towards the centre, where the stairs lead up to the next level. At each step, you are supposed to repeat the mantra:

Hare Krishna Hare Krishna
Krishna Krishna Hare Hare
Hare Rama Hare Rama
Rama Rama Hare Hare

At each stone. All 108 of them. Anyone who has ever been in a major Australian city when a delirious group of orange-clad, shaven-headed Hare Krishnas manders by with drums and tamborines a-pounding, knows how mind numbing that chant can be. Which, it turns out, is exactly the point. The mantra is supposed to free you from thoughts of your earthly existance and help you reach pure God-consciousness. And as someone who hasn't had any practice with mantras, especially Sanscrit ones, I spent so much mental effort making sure my Hares and Ramas were in the right spot, I did kinda forget that it was taking me twenty minutes to get through the door and how hot these stones are in the sun (no shoes in the temple). The constant blaring recording of the mantra was more distracting than helpful, but the speed with which you were supposed to say the mantra (or else make it impossible for more than a few dozen of the faithful to get to the temple in a day) was the biggest hurdle. No rythmic chanting, no dancing, just breakneck mantra recital to the finish line. It was, then, some small comfort to me that some of the other Indian visitors didn't bother with the chanting, I didn't feeling so bad when I got it wrong.

So after the trial-by-mantra, you ascend the stairs to the first shrine. The hillside climb to the main hall is broken into terraces with a shrine to various other gods of the Hindu pantheon represented. I particularly remember the shrine to Hanuman, the monkey faced god, who is probably the inspiration for the Monkey King character from 'Journey to the West' which eventually became 'Monkey', one of the greatest TV shows of all time.

So once we had worked our way up the hill through the minor shrines, we reached the main hall. It was an amazing piece of work. As you can probably tell from the photos, the temple is very modern, less than ten years old, but it's no less impressive for that. A large overhead dome, painted with images of Krishna and other gods, seemed much larger than expected from the outside view and gave a grand presence to the space, in a similar way to a Christian cathedral. The back wall of the hall had a number of different shrines to gods I couldn't indentify, and Suresh invited me to pray with him in the central seating area on the floor. I declined, instead wandered around the shrines wishing I had my camera.

The outside rooms, downstairs, were full of stalls selling all manner of religious stuff; tapes, icons, books, calendars and other things of uncertain purpose (Krishna has an avatar as a child, which resulted in some very unusual items that would be unsettling in another context). No real shock, all religions need to have ways of financing their work and fleecing the flock seems to be the most sucessful in other faiths, why not here.

Later in the day we visited some other temples, the state legislature building (very impressive as well, I might post some shots of that soon) and, since I was curious, we tried the Bangalore KFC at Brigade Road. Not quite the same as at home, but close enough that they won't lose their frachise.

The same day we visited the shrines to Ganesh and Shiva. The Shiva shrine in particular was bloody enormous (check the guy in front), apparently it's a homage to a large stone Shiva statue in the Himalayas, hence the fake stone backdrop. The red string adorning the railings and the roots and branches of the tree near the statue of Ganesh is left there by people praying to Ganesh, presumably for luck, his specialty, but the particular significance of string which is red was beyond the either Suresh's theological knowledge or perhaps my ability to clearly express my question. In any case, I don't know why.





The slightly odder thing about these two shrines was not that they were together (only about 20m apart), but that they were situated behind a very large department store. The only way to access the shrines was to go throught the store. The store claimed to be the largest toy store in the world, but the toy section was smaller than just about any Toy World I've ever been to and the store overall about the size of a usual Australian department store. But no Myers in Australia has its own Baptist church out the back, now does it?

It was a good day.

It's a new....girl!

Good friends of mine, Tash and Shane, have just had another child, a baby girl called Jacqueline Elise:



She's all healthy and has all the right bits in all the right places, mum is doing fine, so everything is right with the world. I look forward to meeting her before she's old enough to vote.

Indian Democracy 1, Knee Jerk Politics 0

Never let it be said that Indians take an assault on their liberties lying down. After requests from various groups asking the Department of Telecommunications here to explain why they had instructed ISPs to block all of these sites, their response was that they had instructed ISPs to block only certain blogs and that the ISPs had misinterpreted that instruction and blocked the entire domains where these blogs were hosted. If that is true, then I'm going to have to eat some crow and back down from my denunciation of the Indian government in yesterday's post, because, hey, mistakes happen, right?

But this statement doesn't really jibe with what was written in the Indian Express yesterday, where they claim that the order to block the blogs was issued a month ago, or on July 13, and that it had nothing to do with the recent Mumbai attack, and that the order included a list of 20 sites (presumably individual blogs rather than 20 domains) and that it came from the National Informatics Centre, which might be part of the Department of Telecommunications, I don't know. It's all a bit confused. I'm going to assume that it was a mistake, not something sinister, in an effort to balance the cynicism of my last post. In any case I can see my blog (and others that I visit) again, so all's well that ends well, or something. And thumbs up to the Indian public.

India is a democra..(censored)

Or apparently it's not. Remember the Australian government was recently considering a nationwide firewall to prevent Australians from seeing things the government thought they shouldn't see and maybe start thinking for themselves? Perhaps you don't, most Australians made it pretty clear that they thought this was a bone-headed idea and it was quickly shelved.

Well the Indian government has clearly decided that buying uranium is not the only thing they'll be importing from Oz and they've implemented a blanket ban on all blogs hosted by the most popular online sites. Including Blogspot. It's apparently to "curb he propagation of religious extremism on the Net". Because terrorists who are smart enough to build bombs and use computers are too stupid to get around the ban by using other methods for communcation. Its a foolproof plan by the Indian government, and you know what they say about foolproof plans. Morons.

Now the sharp ones in the audience will have figured out the vital and ironic flaw in this plan. You are reading this, which means I can still post to my blog, even though (in theory) I can't read it. Which means if I was a nasty terror-monkey, I could still get my evil, hate-filled epistle out to the unsuspecting public.

In reality, anyone who really wants to - it took me all of five minutes - can download Tor, or one of half-a-dozen other anony-making software gizmos and waltz right by the Indian Internet Intervention Instrument(tm) with your metaphorical middle finger aloft in the direction of short-sighted, dim-witted authority figures everywhere. In the words of some smart guy: 'The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.'

In a related bit of 'make the lives of non-terrorists harder while having no effect on terrorism', the mobile phone system in Mumbai was disabled straight after the horrific bomb blast the other day. It's supposed to prevent terrorists from remotely activating bombs using mobile phones, what it actually did was prevent the people in the middle of the mess from communicating with loved ones and emergency services, and thus undoubtedly made the situation worse for everyone involved, if that's possible. There's not much you can say in the face of such pointless brutality, except to hope that Mumbaikers don't let the cowards win; rememberance of the lost and defiance through continuation of life seems to me to be the best response to terror.

Haiku

Brine scents drift inland
Crows aloft on sea fog wings
Stench of rot dissolves

So I spent the last week on night shift and I emerged from the front gate this morning to be greeted by the strong smell of the sea and mist blown ashore as dawn was breaking. It was one of those small moments of joy at the beauty of nature, haiku seemed warranted. All emails about being a pretentious git will be ignored.

A cabin for what?

Your guess is as good as mine. Actually that's no longer true, because I asked someone WTF this little cabin was for, since no meaning I could conjure from the sign made any more sense than the previous one.

Genuine Certified No-Prize© for the person who figures it out.

Spin you partner round and round...

Well, its been an interesting week in football and a unimpressive week in the life of the project. Football first.

Brazil, gone. Argentina (my pick), gone. Germany, gone. Never let it be said that the World Cup doesn't provide some surprises. A final between Italy, who could barely muster enough aid from the referee to overcome relative minnows like Australia, and a superannuated France. At least I get to see Henry play in an other WC final. It hasn't been the most spectacular of tournaments, there have been some good games and some very good goals - Maxi Rodrigez etched himself a corner in World Cup history with his strike - but there have been just as many slow, uneventful games. Looking at the number of knock out matches that went to penalties tells you a lot.

That said, I've still enjoyed it a great deal. My sleep has suffered a bit, but then thats to be expected and I certainly would have had more difficulty if I had been trying to watch the matches from Oz. And I hope that with the A-Leagure season approaching, the shine of the Cup can rub off, the ground attendances around the country will grow and build a strong enough competition that we'll have a chance to go to South Africa for the next roll of the dice.

Now the job. I know, you're sick of hearing me complain about it. Which is fair enough. Lets just say that nothing has changed, it's a dancing instructor who is teaching the tango: "Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow". Except the quick part is more like "less slow". And the the instructor lies to you about your progress. Despite the fact that you're on your arse in the middle of the dance floor.

So instead, some new photos:











More photos on the Flickr site. Enjoy!