The Always-Outsider

The Euro GBC are the ISKCON governing body commission for the Eurozone. They are responsible for ISKCON policy in this area and are based in Radhadesh, Belgium. I’ve written this letter to them to find out ISKCON’s position with regard to the destruction of tribal land, especially considering that Anil Agarwal is a very influential member of the London ISKCON community. I am waiting for a response, which will be published here.

http://www.eurogbc.com

Dear Dina Dayal,

What is the official ISKCON position in regards to Vedanta Resources’ exploitation and displacement of the Dongria Kondh tribe in Orissa, and the mining of their sacred mountain for Bauxite (aluminium ore)?

Anil Agarwal, the owner of Vedanta Resources, is an influential and rich member of the ISKCON community in London, and has his name on the logo of the Krishna Avanti school.

Does the GBC find it acceptable that ISKCON schools are being built using money that comes from the exploitation and displacement of Indian tribal people?

As a concerned devotee, and a member of the ISKCON community, I look forward to hearing ISKCON and the GBC’s official statement in this regard. Please find attached several websites with reference material.

Thanks,
Jambavan

Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

Here in the UK, we’ve had our share of motorway bypasses built over beautiful little 12th century churches or ancient saxon burial grounds or even just a little old lady’s back garden. Due to the outcry because of this it’s now practically impossible to build a new road or train line. The practice of destroying towns to build a road through them goes all the way back to Roman times and beyond.

Unfortunately, India’s rapid economic growth means that many more projects like this will be built. It’s so sad that Yamunaji is being treated like a sewer, but don’t forget that this is Kali Yuga, and as it progresses the holy places will get more covered by the material energy. “The material energy” does not just mean hogs in open sewers, it also means these soviet style poured concrete monstrosities.

It’s a sad fact of life, that as Vrindavan becomes more built-up and developed, that infrastructure will be built to cater for the new population. Perhaps rather than complaining about this bridge being built, one might campaign against the overall development of the area. How many of us enjoy the nice new upgraded NH-2 from Delhi to Vrindavan?

Many of the people who are up in arms are from western countries, and have bought or built houses in the Vrindavan ‘metro area’. Many of us have stayed in the luxurious new ‘guesthouses’ built recently in Chaitanya Vihar. Do those same people not stop to think that the concrete for those buildings must arrive in those dirty smelly lorries we hate so much. Those lorries need roads to drive on.

Much as we hate to admit it, we, the foreigners who come to live in Vrindavan, are the root cause of this bridge. We are the ones who made Vrindavan so popular among the suburban Delhiites and their new-found wealth. This means that we’ve got a bit of a responsibility to look after this place. We need to show the people who want to develop at any cost the massive cost that this will have on *their* lives, and how it will be them that suffers in the long run, as they no longer have any cute authentic little villages to go on their weekend trips to.

I don’t think we want Vrindavan to become another Chowki Dhani

RRDtool is insanely useful. If you’re looking after lots of servers like I have to, it helps to be able to graph various system stats both to placate management, and to plan for upgrades, failures, etc.

I got the following plate of multicoloured spaghetti by graphing the User CPU of a whole bunch of servers using SNMP, then averaging use across the cluster. It’s interesting to note that although individual servers will often spike up to almost 100% usage, once their process dies and drops back down to zero the others take up the load immediately, quite nicely illustrating how well the load balancer is working! This pattern is repeated across network interfaces and memory utilisation as well.

CPU Utilisation, Averaged across a cluster

Some things make me feel like this.

Specifically, when people say things that don’t make sense, and when they keep insisting that they be done “in case it works”. Here’s a cheerful example:

him: can we try tracerouting their office IP: 172.26.123.45?, and see if that takes the same route they have given

me: that’s inside their private network(172.26) which is not routeable over the internet, so tracerouting it would not make sense. Also, his desktop is on a completely different network from the server.

him: Can you answer my question in the email you replied to?!

me: I just did, and explained why doing it would not make sense

him: Why can’t you just do what i asked?

me: because it wouldn’t work, is illogical, and doesn’t even make sense.

him: but why didn’t you at least try? Fine. if you can’t do it, I’ll ask someone who can.

me: *head explodes*

This is basically what I gleaned from my time trying to work remotely from Vrindavan. I think the Indian mobile Internet services at the time are just starting to take off, so the phone guys mostly know how to set it up, but a lot of western visitors are still in the dark. A lot of the information here is either shamelessly cribbed from xda-developers or is my own work. I had a hard time getting pppd on OS X to play nicely with Idea and ended up having to write my own dial script for pppd.options. I’ll add this shortly.

Airtel (Delhi)

APN: airtelmms.com
Username/Password blank

Send sms with body:
MMS ACTV
to
222

Idea (U.P.)
APN: internet
Username: internet
Password: internet

Vodafone U.P. (formerly Hutch)

SMS with Body:

ACT VMC699
to
56789

You can also activate Vodafone Live by sending

ACT VL

to 52586

…though why you’d want to, i can’t imagine

APN: portalnmms

IP Address: 10.10.1.100