Sunday: from riots to unity?

Meetings all day from 11am to 9pm… Lakshmi on IRN – covered ground and had a really good rice-flour chappatti with dry (south Indian) chutney… it rocked (thank you!). Then met Arvind and talked about the seminar he wants to host – nice idea but not my area of interest or capability… I agreed to [...]

Read Full Post »

such a big difference?

As I slowly prepare myself for the work I will be doing upon my return to Seva Mandir, I have been doing my best to get whatever I can out of google books. As elaborated in my Analtical Paper and also alluded to in an earlier post, I am finding myself deeply interested in the [...]

Read Full Post »

Complexity World Cafe

On a radically different note from the previous post…
I co-hosted the first of what may be many sessions on complexity at IDS today! After extensive brain-scratching and chatting with colleagues and co-learners a World Cafe format was developed and we got a good mix of students – including some new faces from outside IDS – [...]

Read Full Post »

Fragmentation and Healing

N.B. This piece has been taken from my reflective writing journal and should be understood as tentative and incomplete
It seems that we are all here in order to make sense of things. We look into books, we look into each other, searching for what is out there, what is right – and maybe [...]

Read Full Post »

Back to school!

After 5 years of living in the ‘wilderness’, of gathering experience and of learning from the immediate reality, I am finally back to ’school’. School, in this case, is the Institute of Development Studies located at Sussex University. My course, for those who don’t yet know, is the MA in Participation Power and Social Change. [...]

Read Full Post »

conversations, presencing, change and more

A while back I had been talking about social objects – the things that give us a reason to be in a relationship with others – and how they are critical elements in the process of social transformation. Now there’s a kind of magic that takes place in that fuzzy area where we interact around [...]

Read Full Post »

the guru illusion (yeh guruwuru kya hai yaar?)

I am increasingly feeling myself anti-guru – at least in the traditional sense. Some great posts from Mushin who deconstructed his own guru role helped strengthen this feeling in me – although it has been there for quite some time (this is one example). More recently, I was chatting to someone about Baba Asharam Dev [...]

Read Full Post »

Women, unity, gifts and spirituality: the foundation for women led community development in Delwara

In the small multi-caste town of Delwara, a women’s group has been formed. This group is a platform for women to come together on a common platform across all kinds of traditional divides – caste, religion, class, etc. – to become agents of their own destiny. This morning, I spent a few hours with the [...]

Read Full Post »

A new line of inquiry: social objects as medium for change

I have been thinking about social objects (a la Hugh of gaping void) for a while now – particularly in the context of the kind of work that Seva Mandir is involved in – i.e. ‘community development’.
“The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to [...]

Read Full Post »

Some positive feedback on the 6th CP process

Another pleasing outcome of today’s ‘last’ meeting for the 6th CP process has been the positive feedback on the overall process received by the team (which includes me). It was good to hear people voicing many of the points that I had mentioned in an earlier post based on my own observations. I guess it [...]

Read Full Post »