What I'm doing

Bikram and I are going to be hanging in Sydney on August 23rd.

Today's the last day for the early bird pricing if you want to come.

If you're in Melbourne, Australia tomorrow morning listen out for me on 3AW talking with Neil Mitchell about the protest against the recent Mike Myer's film "The Love Guru".

I'll be on some time between 9am and 11am.

OK, so for the time being I'm calling my band "The Sitapati Project". After all, it's all about me,right? ;-)

Check it out on Reverb Nation or Facebook.

Here are a couple of demo tracks for you. These are the scratch tracks I give to the other members of my band (which still doesn't have a name - suggestions welcome). They then use the track to learn the tracks before we get together to rehearse them.

The vocal track is just a guide and is done in one take, after I've recorded everything else. I will eventually get around to doing proper recordings. In the meantime, you'll have to be satisfied with these scratch tracks.

• Mantra funk - (.mp3, 9.5MB, 10 min) I show some love to Jamiroquai and James Brown. I've been getting into playing bass lately. This one has a guide drum track from my workstation. Luke, our drummer, cut his arm in an accident and is out of action for another two months.
• O My Mind (.mp3, 6 MB, 6 mins) - An english rendition of Govinda das Kaviraja's "Bhaja hure mana". I do this is practically every program where I get to sing, so the peeps are quite familiar with it. It's nice to hear people singing along with this live. In this recording, made last night, Prahlad sings backing vocals.

This Sunday, 29th July 2008, is the second annual Yoga fest in Brisbane.

Jonathan Murphy from Radiant Light Yoga has worked really hard to pull off this event, which brings together Brisbane's entire yoga community once a year.

We'll be there representing with a stall, we are doing catering for the event, so you can get yummy healthy food between classes, and we're also doing the kirtan in the evening, half and half with Radiant Light Yoga.

There are two yoga halls with classes going on all day. Prem Yogi is teaching an advanced asana class at 4 pm in Studio One. The kirtan is from 6.30 - 7.30 pm.

We'll have copies of our Sacred Chant Volume One CD and our new Introduction to Atma DVD available at the stall at a special Yoga fest price. The new DVD includes a class, a guided meditation, and a documentary on Atma Yoga.

The Yoga fest is being held at the Old Museum near the RNA showgrounds. The first class is at 9 am.

See you there!

Brisbane Hindus are preparing to protest outside local theaters screening Mike Myer's new film "The Love Guru" when it opens in Brisbane on July 10.

Brisbane Hindu leader Sita Pati said that the protest is part of a worldwide Hindu backlash against the movie's disrespectful portrayal of sacred Hindu traditions.

Spearheaded by the Universal Society of Hinduism, a global umbrella group for Hindus, the reaction to the movie has mobilised many different Hindu groups. Hinduism is a culture as well as a religion, and many different groups fall under the broad banner of "Hinduism". The response to the movie has united many of these groups in opposition to the movie.

Paramount initially agreed to prescreen the movie for Hindu leaders, but later recanted.

"Paramount would never dare to release a movie that treated Islam in this way." says Sita Pati. "As we saw with the Danish cartoons, disrespect for religious tradition can lead to violence."

More than 100 people were killed in 2005 during worldwide protests following the publication of a series of cartoons mocking sacred Islamic icons in a Danish newspaper.

Local Hindu protestors, however, are more likely to protest by handing out flowers than throwing rocks, evoking images of the famous Hindu advocate of non-violent resistance, Mahatma Gandhi.

The aim of the protest, according to Sita Pati, is to raise awareness of the effects of religious intolerance and insensitivity. "In our increasingly multicultural Australia Hindus are not people living in some foreign country - they are people living next door. It's important to treat each other with respect and understanding. We're not going to knock anyone down, but we're not going to take it lying down either. Hindus are Aussies too!"

Sita Pati hasn't seen the movie "The Love Guru" but says: "Mike Myers has his hilarious moments. I was into heavy metal as a teenager, before joining Hinduism, and I laughed at Wayne's World. Now that Myers has gone on to lampoon Hindus, I'm starting to wonder if he's following me."

Sita Pati, born Joshua Wulf in Auckland, New Zealand, was ordained as a Hindu priest in the Gaudiya Vaisnava sect in 2002.

The Gaudiya Vaisnava branch of Hinduism, popularly known as the Hare Krishnas, is the most well-known and fastest growing branch of Hinduism among western converts. It is a monotheistic faith, similar to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam in its belief in a single supreme God.

The Hare Krishnas are well known throughout Australia for their vegetarian food and for brightening cities streets with their singing and dancing.

The Love Guru, a Paramount Pictures comedy starring Mike Myers (of "Austin Powers" fame), Jessica Alba, Justin Timberlake, Ben Kingsley; and directed by Marco Schnabel opens in Australia on July 10.

Our son, Prahlad Narasingha Wulf Felix, turned 6 on June 17th, while we were in Cairns. Here he is with his new t-shirt and a statue of Hanuman that Acyuta Bhava gave him.

We flew back to Brisbane that day so he had two celebrations, breakfast in Cairns, and dinner at Atma Yoga. Adina-lila took some photos in the evening. Here's the morning's breakfast - all sweet...

From the age of 0-5 is called kaumaram, or childhood, in Sanskrit. From 6 onwards is called yauvanam or youth. Prahlad has gone from being a child to being a young boy.

The change in him happened overnight. Just like his first birthday, which was in the ISKCON temple in Lima, Peru, where we lived at the time. At the birthday party itself he got up and started walking, right in front of all the guests.

Similarly, he went from one day where he couldn't sleep without snuggling up to me to becoming more independent and self determining.

This is an interesting period of transition now. Up to this point he has not been responsible for what he does. From this point on he takes more responsibility for his actions and the outcomes.

I miss him as a child, but I am excited about the opportunity to help him to grow as a youth. It is helping me to become more conscious and responsible for my actions and the outcomes.

All things in this world must pass, but while they are here before us we have the duty to steward them responsibly. This world is temporary, and it is real.

In our strategic planning for Atma over the next three years I noticed that we will have spent half a million dollars in rent over six years. That's a huge outlay. The money that is generated and spent is a side effect of our main activity, which is sharing our spirituality and lifestyle knowledge with others. Atma is a state audited incorporated not-for-profit association. However, we need to be responsible stewards of even the side effects. That's Krishna's energy that we are leaking there.

Also, it makes no sense to continually start from scratch with each new place that we get. Here are some preliminary thoughts on how we are going to approach this:

After the recent JAOO developer conference I had a chance to write two lines of code, something that I haven't done in a few years.

We're going away next week for six days for a holiday. We have one every three or four years. The last one was when we came back from Peru in 2004. Anyways, I may not have internet access, so I can't be molly coddling the Planet ISKCON server and code.

I spent some time tuning the Apache instance so that the server doesn't run out of memory and go into swap death (you've noticed that it sometimes disappears?).

I also modified the Planet code to make it more robust. You've noticed that Planet ISKCON will sometimes not update for a few hours, up to a day? It's because a cache file somehow becomes corrupted. Each feed has a cache, so that Planet doesn't have to download the content every hour, just the new stuff. When a feed's cache file becomes corrupted, it chokes the whole job. When that happens, at to this point, I manually run the cron job, identify the culprit from the stack trace, and delete the cache file by hand.

Now what I did was identify the call that opens the cache file, and put it in a try...except block that will delete the cache file on a failure, and retry:

__init__.py:

        cache_filename = cache.filename(planet.cache_directory, url)
        try:        
	    cache_file = dbhash.open(cache_filename, "c", 0666)
        except:
            os.remove(cache_filename)
            cache_file = dbhash.open(cache_filename, "c", 0666)   

If the second call fails, it will still bomb out - but this will make it more robust.

I spent three days last week at JAOO, an IT developer conference.

On Wednesday I attended a tutorial on "The Art of Telling Your Design Story", given by Rebecca Wirf-Brocks [bio and summary].

There was a lot of good information on communication. Here are some of the points:

Five things to consider when preparing:

• Goal: What's the goal of your communication?
• Scope: How much material are you going to cover?
• Depth: How much detail are you going to go to?
• Tone: Formal, informal, diagrams, examples?
• Results: What's your concrete outcome?

Ways to Screw Up

• Inconsistency: example - a recent presentation on Krishna consciousness I attended contrasted material existence with "eternal life". The audience was left confused as the first part of the presentation was about reincarnation - isn't material life "eternal life" as well?
• Explaining too much: In answering questions on this point the presenter additionally introduced new concepts and points, further complicating understanding.
• Over precision: Too much detail about a minor issue

Remember that the audience comes from a "one life" understanding and to introduce reincarnation and then contrast it with spiritual life calling that "eternal life" is confusing. Let me just add that apart from that one small point the presentation was excellent. It used several media - video and whiteboard, and was very engaging.

Story Telling Basics

• Start from most fundamental and go to more detailed
• Things are more fundamental than relationships
• Large structures and shapes are more fundamental than details
• Order the elements of your story from the most to least fundamental
• Use multiple descriptions
• Is there a "natural order" to your story?
• Are there side stories that you are willing to take?
• What questions do you expect?

Speaking to a Diverse Crowd

• Cater to the majority
• Choose what to emphasize
• Defuse quacky ducks
• For impatient audiences: Park questions that will derail your story-telling
• For impatient audiences: Don't present fundamentals first
• For impatient audiences: Stick to the point

Communicating Complex Ideas

• Use progressive realization
• Give an overview
• Create views that move someone to where you want in gradual, interesting steps

Holding Attention

• Summarize important stuff
• Note important details
• Skip lightly over certain things
• Shift and illustrate different perspectives