This title is reminiscent of the Harrison Ford movie, but is very applicable to how my country (India) goes about its foreign policy. As a rather naive spectator to the global policy game, here are some conclusions that I have based my current statement on.

• Being rather country-locked, and especially nations that are in a constant state of political flux. We are in a tremendous disadvantage, unable to appease them or take control of them.
• Our “friendly” neighbors are currently in the cashing in phase, due to the games between China and us. We have been unable to use our cultural proximity as an advantage, rather we are playing the finance and buy-out stratagem which on its own we have already lost.
• Our utter neglect of the North east, (or the east as a whole) is paying rich dividends to the Chinese. As a country of smart people, we are really slow at learning things which Mao embedded into the communist psyche a long time back rather publicly. They will eventually take what they believe is rightly theirs, even if it means war.
• UN and common currency - Its a farce, with Nehru helping the Chinese to get the security council and they consistently refusing us entry into that club(with our huge standing army). It is a rather on the face statement about what they think of us at this point of time. The common currency move is good, but with the move from uni-polar to a multi-polar configuration it will be interesting to see how it plays out.
• US in my opinion is on the back foot – Consistent rise of nationalists in Japan, the economic crisis, the dollar, Iraq, Afganistan, and so on … Yes, their bulk has kept them alive, they are pros at keeping themselves in the game. It would be interesting to see what is the next move they make. Fingers crossed.
• So there is the need of a bigger war, one where the significant people advantage of the asians gets reduced. (from the developed nation perspective). Pakistan seems to be the point from where all it will possibly emanate.

Enough of brain dumping, back to work.

What
The threat of drought is looming large over Northern India, Delhi has received less rainfall than normal and the city if facing acute water crisis, to highlight the impact of climate change on the City on July 17, Friday around 30 volunteers will queue up outside RBI with buckets filled with water to deposit in the Bank.
The message on all the buckets and a banner will be “Climate change = Water crisis”
Time : 10 AM onwards

Online Element – Thousands of Cyber Activists will be asked to sign up for Green Idol and then for every sign up, we’ll deposit a bucket of water.

Proto has been taking place for sometime, but Jan 2009 is my first proto.in attendance and it was worth the trip to Bangalore. I went in with some expectations and yes, they were fulfilled. The highlights of the event is given below.

• Awesome talks – There was one talk by Bob Young(founder of redhat) which was simply awesome. There were others as well which were informative and fun sessions.
• Great audience – People from all walks of professional life, met a lawyer, a HR guy, a finance guy and so on … with so much variety one can only choose to get bored of such company.
• Neat theme / tshirt - The paper plane theme was awesome and in one session where Kiruba got everyone to throw airplanes onto the podium was especially lots of fun.
• Techies – Special mention to Sheryas , Aswin , Moyeen , Vijay who made it clear to me that B’lore + Chennai is still very much ahead on the super nerd density index. Clever engineers to hang out with is the least i can say about these guys.
• Startups – Last but not the least, a great bunch of startups were there promoting their stuff. It was cool to see some interesting revenue models and different ideas. Shotgun startup was one fun event to take part in (this deserves a complete post by itself).

All in all, I had a lot of fun. Thanks to Vijay and the proto team for making me a part of something awesome. Looking forward to making proto a bigger and better event going ahead.