Manipal Invitation

“No gifts/bouquets. Any gifts received will be channelled towards supporting education of financially underprivileged children”

Mumbai Invitation

Please do not bring bouquets of gifts. All monetary endowments will be channeled to support the education of financially underprivileged children. Details are given on our website.

First off, we thank you all for the gifts and contributions and are very moved by your support. There were several of you who specifically told us that you were making a gift only because of how we plan to spend it. On the wedding website, we committed to presenting a report of fund utilization by May 31st. Although we did manage to fully allocated all the contributions by mid-March, for various reasons including awaiting documentation, photos and some busy times, we finally have gotten down to putting together this post. So here we go:

We received a total of Rs. 51000 ($1160 )  from the ceremonies at Manipal and Mumbai. The amount was directed towards 3 different projects mentioned below. For project 1 and 2, we are thankful to Mr. Karunakar Shetty. We know Mr. Shetty through his son Sandeep who is a good friend of Sharath’s from high school years. The Project 3 effort was possible thanks to Krishna Ramkumar, CEO and founder of Avanti Fellows, who also happens to be a Little Rock alumnus.

1) Rs. 21600 to a high school in Panchanbettu, a village about 20 kms from Udupi, Karnataka. This is a Kannada medium government funded high school that had somehow been deprived of funds for about 7 years. During this period it survived mostly on donations from Bunt hoteliers based in Mumbai. Mr. Shetty has been teaching at this school in honorary capacity since he retired from work in 2001. We contacted the school principal asked him to list their most pressing needs. It turned out that they had been spending several thousand rupees every year renting sound system during ceremonies and stage events. We therefore sponsored the purchase of a sound system for Rs. 21600. The money thus saved may be otherwise better used. Sharath’s parents visited the school and delivered the check. Here are photographs from the visit.

2) Rs. 15000 to a high school in Rajivnagar, about 5 kms from Udupi, Karnataka. This school particularly serves children of daily wage laborers and poor farmers. The school management had been seeking to build a library but had not been able to do so. Our contribution of Rs. 15000 was split into 2 efforts:

• Rs. 6500 for a bookshelf
• Rs. 8500 for an initial set of books

A few photographs from the school visit are here.

3) A donation of Rs. 14400 was made to Avanti Fellows, a program run by a highly motivated and enthused group of IIT alumni that is dedicated towards helping children from the underprivileged community. In their own words:

The Avanti Fellows Program aims to be the largest mentoring program for underprivileged students in India. The organization is currently focused on helping students from poor homes gain admission to prestigious engineering colleges across India and ensuring that they are able to perform well academically and assimilate socially during their time at engineering school. In due course, the organization will expand operations to other disciplines including medicine, law and commerce.

Krishna, the CEO/Founder of Avanti has prepared a report of the expenditure. Indeed this report is testimony to the professional execution of this project. We are happy to recommend Avanti to any of you looking to make a philanthropic contribution.

Once again, thanks to Mr. Shetty and Krishna for helping us channel the money into productive and effective philanthropic efforts. It might have easier to just have sent a check to one of the scores of global charity/NGOs, but we chose to go down this route so we (and now you all) know exactly what happened to the money.

As a parting read, here is something to think about – The Ovarian Lottery.

(If you would like to do something similar and if we don’t already know each other, please leave us a comment here  and we will reach you via email)

I am going off on a blog-sabbatical (is there such a thing ?)– one that will last at least a year. I will be a different person a year from now (nothing portentous, we all will ) and not unlikely different enough to not return to blogging in its current form. In what will therefore be my last post for another year to come and maybe last ever on Epistles, I will briefly (we’ll see how brief it will end up) outline why.

Epistles was my fourth attempt at blogging. Or was it the fifth. I started this blog as somewhat of a countervailing/compensatory force against other developments in my life. This may have been what kept it going in its initial days when there were hardly any readers. Over the next months as activity picked up (which meant waking up on an occasional morning to see more comments on the blog than emails in my inbox and an average of 3200 page views per month), I spent more and more time posting material and generally thinking about what the blog should look like.

And then when I say blogging, I am also including the time devoted to regularly following the handful of blogs which I quite frequently also linked to. Following these blogs also meant I had, through their writing, access to some of the most brilliant, articulate and opinionated people in the blogosphere (and at large) – Tyler Cowen, Greg Mankiw, Megan Mccardle, Gary Becker, Richard Posner, Daniel Denette, Richard Dawkins, Bryan Kaplan, Arnold Kling and Robin Hanson to name only a few. And even if it would be hard to recall specific instances of inspiring prose (because there were many), it would be equally hard to deny that contemplating their writings motivated fundamental changes in my outlook on the world. Several years down the road if I have to pick two characteristic themes of my 2006-2007, my experience as a blogger would rank in there.

Of course, all this begs the question that if it was all this great then why stop ?

Well, all this also means that for over 22 months now, I have spent most of my leisure reading. And did so with little sense of direction. Much chaos and much clutter. I had a good idea of what subjects interested me and there were many and diverse. Given a choice between walking far and digging deep, I always chose the former. My sources were relatively few – a handful of blogs and news sites – but many of them were themselves producing heterogeneous content and in copious amounts. And so, month and month I followed commentary from famous blogs and bloggers and while I was at it, produced some of my own.

This kind of reading and this kind of blogging had become a way of life. I liked this model – it came naturally to me and went well with my intellectual restlessness and a general lack of time to pick up details with some exceptions. And I want to try and change this. It might appear to be (and it is) change for change’s sake but then its also true that there is only that much intellectual enrichment to be sought from reading yet another article on rise of this phenomena or that, influence of this person or that, or ponder over possibility of this event or that. This change is mostly about experiencing something different and new. And its also about a feeling that although it could have always been better, I am happy with this experience and its time to move on.

I don’t exactly know to what end how all the time spent blogging will be put to, but the bigger picture is that I am now looking at activities that are more focused in nature – learning some music, catching up on some photography and maybe, just maybe trying my hand at reading some fiction.

I thank my readers who gave me a chance to put down my many thoughts, and for having put up with my (pride and) prejudices . Through Epistles, I also met and came to know many individuals who I would otherwise have never known (and have not yet met) and then those that I may still not know. I am touched that many of you have been a part of this blog even in the absence of that vital connection that knowing the blogger personally brings.