Responding to a call from Kiruba Shankar, a bunch of us got together and embarked on a project of interviewing all the TED India fellows. Working by ourselves, we researched the fellows, prepared our questions for them, hunted out their coordinates, chased them with calls, hounded them with reminders, poked them on Facebook, and then used some more tricks from our armories.

Geetha at Simply Speaking aggregates various interviews of TED India fellows.

Update: Having attended as a TED Fellow, Amit Varma shares his experiences on the conference and of the Infosys campus

Today at school, we had the Alumni reunion, and outside the Siegle Café I met this alumnus from the 1958 batch. We talked for an hour about the housing bubble, the Ford Museum, the Korean War, the GI Bill, and as always what I lack in depth I compensated with breadth. And then the Alumnus asked –

“You are Brahma, right?”

I was surprised. How did he know my name? I am quite famous with my parents, but not so beyond that.

Brahma shares his essay that won the Discover India Essay prize at University of Michigan.

Nithin in a four part series,writes about planning a bike trip, from getting people to route planning , from preparing your bike to taking off.

Chapter 1: Riding Buddies
The most important part of your trip preparation, the weightage to this factor keeps growing as the length of the trip increases. For a weekend trip, you could probably hit the road with people you have no clue about, but on a lifetime trip like, say Leh, or an all india trip, you cant afford to go wrong on the people you pick.

Feanor writes that the excitement of having a copy of Unsettled was short lived,thanks to WestLand, a publishing company owned by the Tatas.

A few months ago I asked my in-laws to bring along Kamini Karlekar’s Unsettled when they visited us in London. They purchased the book at one of Bangalore’s bookstores, a spanking new copy, and I pounced on it like an elderly tiger. Imagine my toothless bafflement and fury when I saw that the first twenty or so pages of the book were blank. There were faint traces of print, but nothing was legible.

Clearly, quality control is sorely lacking at WestLand. (You can see how lackadaisical they are – even now, almost a year since the book was released, the website says it is ‘forthcoming’.)

DON’T TREAT THE READER LIKE A FOOL
Too many bloggers, drunk on the power they feel while blogging, talk down to their readers. Do not do this. Treat your readers as if they are as smart as you, if not smarter. If you have comments, don’t behave like a king granting an audience to minions. Be respectful of others’ opinions and points of view. As a friend of mine once told me, ‘Speak as if you are right; but listen as if you are wrong.’

I am sure you have already read this one.Worth it.

Sheila was stashing the bottles, Amba said, because the more she sold at one time, the better the price she’d get for each one. Obviously Sheila had recognized our consumption patterns and was holding out for us to fulfill them; or maybe she knew Christmas was coming and that our holiday party would be a party for her as well.

Dave and Jenny write about the empty bottles of Delhi.

Jai caricatures an autorickshaw ride in Bengaluru.

Slightly off from the usual track,here is a new crossword blog that can really pick your brains.The I-do-it box by Diogenes and Cryptonyte.The latest of the puzzles is here

#8

Ravi was way ahead of his peers and most conservationists in India, advocating what might be tantamount to domesticating a wild, endangered species in order to conserve its populations! All based on a good understanding of the species’ life history, as well as the socioeconomic compulsions of the people who depend upon the crystallized saliva of these little birds, and the irrational but rich market for the nests.

Madhu at Reconciliation Ecology mourns the death of Ravi Sankaran, a prominent ornithologist and field biologist.

Former Brand Equity Quiz champion Naveen Giles has decided to contribute his 5 paisa to the quizzing world.Along with Sujith C, he has started a quiz blog aggregator that aggregates from over 80 quiz blogs. A great place if you are the quizzing types.