Thursday, November 29, 2007

Is there anybody alive out there?

Very catchy, very anthemic, consequently very concert-friendly and ultimately *very* Boss is his new song _Radio Nowhere_, a song that I heard on Radio Indigo yesterday and again today, riding home after a really fun session with Sky, Dinesh and Rene at Janaastu.

I met the abovementioned trio and Kavitha, at BarCamp Bangalore. Well, actually I'd met Sky a day earlier at RangaShankara, where I acted in a play by David Horsborough called 'The Ungrateful Man'. More on David and the play sometime later.

Sky is doing her Ph.D while not espousing Ubuntu, traveling on grants and in general, learning and teaching lots of things. She taught me to play capoeira at BarCamp and we play everytime conversation flags, which is often the case with me at one end :). She is interesting and vital, this Aussie, with a strong Padmanabha chakra. She doesn't believe in characteristics of blood groups, so I asked her to read this, though there was a better site on the topic earlier.

Kavitha is a professor at UCI. Very enthu about many things and very knowledgeable, K. is a one of the best orator/presenters I have heard. She gave a talk at NIAS that I understood very little of - I was concentrating on the performance more than the content. She also gave me a couple of Sci/Fi books. I will read one of them before she returns :).

Rene is a programmer from Germany - he has set up Community Wireless networks and gave a talk at BarCamp on the same topic and got folks in Bangalore very interested. Also got to know a little about German politics and squatting from him.

TB Dinesh is probably the wackiest of the lot - he had us protesting against the Nandigram violence after BarCamp. We stopped people at Church Street, gave flyers and asked them protest visually, which meant people did some crazy stuff like kick imaginary balls, stare at the moon and dance. All this while the jazz band at JavaCity was playing great 60s/70s music for us. At other times, he runs a software company, an NGO and lectures on Principles of Programming. Whew!

So I guess I can safely answer Springsteen - "Yes, Boss!"