FN: Frederick Noronha’s blog

“All flights are delayed by two hours,” the director of the VIIT
announced to volunteers, and the mood sunk. Even the Baramati skies
appear overcast. Earlier, while I sat through a sandlewood-paste
flavoured beard-trim (Rs 15) at the local roadside makeshift
haircutting saloon, the TV spoke of rainy weather warnings.

That means a delay in getting started.

But the hosts here are hospitable to a fault. I don’t know what it is,
but have often encountered the hospitality of our neighbouring states,
though often, like “good neighbours” huge Maharashtra and tiny Goa
also have our tiffs over political and other issues.

A few of the early arrivals, mainly the organisers from YES _/ Bank
and the college, and ICRISAT’s international faculty Dr SP Wani,
joined in for an interesting, vegetarian Maharashtrian meal. Their
food is interesting, and given the diversity of India, food changes
every few hundred kilometres that you travel. Like it. In any case, am
(impure) veg myself.

After that, a brief chat saw one land up at the CC — or the community
centre. On the top of the building, a newish board announces this
year-old station “Vasundhara Vahini, 90.4 FM”. Vasundhara is one of
the names of the earth. There are many names in South Asia with an
earthy feel to them: “Achala, Avani, Bhoopesh, Bhupendra, Bhupati,
Bhoodevi, Bhuvana, Bhuvaneswari, Dharani, Dharavi, Ela, Ela Devi,
Ibrahim, Ila, Ila Devi, Mahipal, Pruthvi, Pruthviraj, Urvi.”

After all, as the announcer who worked at Satara, a neighbouring
state-run All India Radio station as a casual announcer said, it was
because of the earth that man sustains himself. And this point is felt
strongly in this part of agrarian India.

VIIT director Dr Amol Goje thinks it would help to hand over the radio
to the students to run. Others rued the fact that the number of
restrictions placed by the Indian government on what it calls
“community radio” (actually a form of ‘campus radio’) make it tough to
sustain.

One can broadcast just four minutes of advertising in a day, or that’s
what one was told! There are restrictions on rebroadcasts of
entertainment-oriented music, others complained. But the announcer at
the station, who demoed how he read out the announcements (broadcast
is four hours in the morning, with a repeat session in the evenings)
termed this the first agriculture-oriented radio station in Asia.

It’s located in three rooms, and is run with the minimal staff to keep
it viable. Waiting to tune in to this network, when I have the time
and an FM radio on hand, at the right moment.

Waiting for the action to start. –FN in Baramati 7:49 pm March 9, 2006.

I’ve lost all sense of time, but my mobile phone (which fortunately
works 800 kms away from home) tells me it’s 10:29 am on March 9, 2006.
Have reached Baramati… after many years.

Later today, the 6th Annual Baramati Initiative on ICT and Development
(focussing on The Potential of e-Agriculture) gets underway at this
rural, but education-oriented island two hours away from Pune in Central
India.

On reaching, I couldn’t recognise the place. It has been a return to
Baramati after five (or is it six?) years. The place has greened in the
meanwhile… while this diarist has greyed Another change: bandwidth
has improved considerably here. I could have been in some part of
metropolitan India at these speeds. And so has the Baramati knowledge of
GNU/Linux and free software. When I was struggling to get onto the
wireless network (I’m no techie, as you know) a staff member from the
institute helped me in a few minutes to get online. Despite the fact
that they’re more into Red Hat and this is Mandrake. (I prefer the
volunteer-crafted Debian, but the student supporting me has installed
Mandrake on my laptop, and there’s no arguing with him!)

Instead of spending the day at Pune, I thought of bussing it down to
Baramati, in the rugged, rough but fairly efficient and functional bus
service that connects this state of 96 million (Indian sizes tend to be
huge, except perhaps that of my home state, Goa, 1.4 million!). And as I
look at the Wikipedia for the background figure on Baramati, I find that
Kerala, another Indian state not far from Goa to the south, is featured
on the home-page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page today.

The actual event opens tomorrow, Friday, March 10. Among other things,
there’s a report launch on ‘e-Agriculture: Empowering India’, talks, a
field trip to a sugar-cooperative (this is the heart of Indian
sugarland), and more. Given bandwidth, I hope to keep you updated with
inputs. Let’s see how it goes.

As the students talk about organising (mainly) the event and technology
(a bit, amidst all the bustle today) in Marathi (the local language) and
Hindi (India’s national language, but not uniformly understood across
the country), it’s nice that we had to learn a bit of either in school
– so one can understand what’s going on… and even converse. What’s
also interesting is the high rate of women participation among students
here. But will they be able to break the glass ceiling over time?
–
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Frederick ‘FN’ Noronha | Yahoomessenger: fredericknoronha
http://fn.goa-india.org | fred@bytesforall.org
Independent Journalist | +91(832)2409490 Cell 9822122436
Currently blogging from Baramati on the 6th Annual Baramati
Initiative ICT&Development “The Potential of e-Agriculture”
See http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bytesforall_readers
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