Yeah, OK, I guess I have to re-set my counter. (Today is Saturday.) I was counting on AirJaldi beginning on Monday, but officially it looks like it starts Sunday. That’s tomorrow. So let’s re-set my counter and I am at AirJaldi-minus-one right now.
What a great day. The rain storms have fizzled out, and although it’s pretty cloudy, every once in a while there’s a tiny attempt by the clouds to drop some water on us, but it is not really succeeding. I went over to Green Hotel this morning after breakfast, to set up connections with friends who are arriving later today, and ran into some of the AirJaldi organizers and then honored guests. What a trip!
Obviously, as we go along I will have more background on all of this (boom! today is Diwali and since it’s kinda like a combination of the US Fourth of July and Christmas, with fireworks and gift-giving both, every once in a while there are firecrackers going off!) Airjaldi crew. Arun Mehta (photo at right) is an Indian computer science engineer and professor, and his welcome to Dharamsala was so kind! He was the one having the more traditional Indian breakfast, which was a bit greasy for me to go after, so I continued with chai tea since I had a large breakfast with supporters of The Dalai Lama Foundation who I’ve been traveling with since Tuesday night.
The breakfast conversation was interesting – largely things that I am aware of, but just for the record I will note that Malcolm Matson was quite lucid about the fact that “free access to Internet connectivity” is, of course, running into uphill struggles against the existing communications infrastructures who would rather control the process (using political and legal approaches) so they can profit from it. And that these struggles will continue in the future, and be quite difficult. (Sorry, I don’t have Malcolm’s photo here at the moment, but we will catch up with him later.)
I continued down to the registration booth (remember that I registered on Thursday morning, and actually I was “guest registrant number one” at least on my badge. Such luck! And these guys know how to take a good photo, don’t they? The registration booth is on Temple Road at the Tibetan Children’s Village craft shop, out on the front porch. And such a racket because this is one of the major intersections in theMcLeod Ganj (upper Dharamsala) district and since Indian drivers use their horn A LOT, one sometimes is faced with having to plug ears while waiting a moment in order to continue the conversation with the staff who are registering new attendees. I have been helping pull together a spreadshset containing a list of registrants, fees paid, tours to be attended on Sunday, and workshop sessions, day-by-day which begin on Thursday this week. The workshops are part of WSFII, which follows the three-day AirJaldi, and is also going to be conducted at Tibetan Children’s Village (TCV).
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