Output of the India Years (MPI 50)

Project manager profile in 2007.

As I've worked further towards a synthesis of my experiences and accumulated skills from over the years in Hindu and Buddhist circles, it's clear that with sufficient abstraction all scenarios and their dynamics can be pooled into a symmetric set of multi-field expediency, also in diverse business and technology contexts.

Engaged in diverse projects in diverse groups, the unifying environment across the board has been one of intense focus and dedication to improving and perfecting one's accomplishments, while acting a carefully tailored frame of mind. When you do things for a holy purpose and it reflects on your entire existential status, motivation for getting the job done properly and thoroughly is naturally available. Moreover, when you are meticulous with every emerging detail, things tend to get done very efficiently.

Here's how the net total reads when distilled into additions to my professional CV, and you are allowed to tell me to shove it because I'm so full of it. In my world, everything is in perpetual beta regardless. [People interested in networking can look me up with the full CV at LinkedIn.]

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Form = Emptiness and the
Meaning of Three Fingers

Summary and Specialties

I have a long and solid background in Hindu, Buddhist and Oriental studies and associated meditative and cultivation disciplines, along with parallel research into psychology and general-purpose applications of their diverse methodologies, also in business and technological environments.

On the creative and alternative side, I have a definite personal and professional interest in deep aesthetics, expressive photography and innovative media, ayurveda and natural medicine, activism for good causes, and a general love for symmetry fueled by all these years.

Language skills: Native fluency in Finnish and English, major French and English with minor Swedish at school, good modern/classical Bengali, practical Hindi, philosophical Sanskrit and Pali interpretation, working  knowledge of several other Indic, Nordic and Romance languages and related writing systems.

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My early years with the Hare Krishnas, all the ding-ding notwithstanding, did provide me with a very useful and versatile environment for developing diverse skills and accumulating valuable experience on several fields. "Service is good for you", they say for karma-yoga. Even while the basic intention of the said service is of course to advance development of inner virtue, it's hard to escape the practical market realities in sales and missionary work.

ISKCON: Sales / Marketing / Communication / Technology
Religious Institutions industry, Marketing and Advertising industry
June 1995 – January 2000 (4 years 8 months)

Bhaktivedanta Book Trust International: Book and CD sales, direct marketing. Sales team leader, trainer, manager and cashier (1999), sales accounting, . Personal rapid marketing to diverse age and industry target groups. implementation of innovative direct consumer cold lead sales strategies for fast sales results for groups and other high-yield audience connectivity scenarios.

Library and store bulk sales, event sales booth presentations, sales material arrangements and stock control. Customer follow-up and ethical sales development for customer post-sale satisfaction and returning business, internal law and organizational structures. Projections for on-road stocks with overhead for unexpected sales on the basis of past sales volume by season, location, team members, and revenue requirements.

Dramatic highlight from diverse
more and less strange projects

Department and project leadership, talks and lectures, congregation expansion models, cell group organization, education and consultation,  audio archive organization and source material networking, community management and conflict resolution, event organization and promotion, periodic internal upskilling in management and sales seminars, scalable on-road and large catering cooking and organization skills, dramas and scripts.

Poster/brochure design, prepress and promo material printing, e-communication, Internet, Telnet and BBS systems, textual research and language studies, personal web projects and other computer work. Communication and coordination across heavily hierarchical and often archaic multi-level managerial and advisory structures in national and global scope; success in a highly demanding environment.

Modeling and implementation of philosophical and operative formulas in practical contexts; mental training and discipline to sustain functionally desirable perspectives across environments. Deep philosophical research on practical and metaphysical causation, causal chains and causal combinatorics, and derived practical projections and mental projection models.

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The second related entry is a combination of web freelance work and involvement in the diverse aspects of Swami B.V. Narayana's international movement and related websites, publishing, propaganda, and congregational work.

Freelance / GVS: Developer / Designer / Promoter / Organizer
Information Technology and Services industry, Publishing industry
June 1999 – January 2002 (2 years 8 months)

International Ali Baba
of Propaganda Work

Freelance: Small/medium business websites, basic eCommerce solutions, CMS customization and simple custom CMS prototyping and deployment, brochure sites and home pages, graphics and content production, web software modification, CMS and publishing systems testing and deployment, miscellaneous scripts and utilities, personal and volunteer NGO website projects. Self-directed learning through tutorials, manuals and professional collaboration.

GVS: Desktop publishing, translation and editing, brochures and promotion, general prepress work and on-demand click-print mass publishing, community management, event organization, lectures and seminars, tutorials and study materials preparation and production, audio archival and associated online resources, e-book library compilation, organization and material production, promotional writing, miscellaneous research, resource sites and general propaganda strategy.

Collaboration and pioneer work with Gaudiya Vedanta Publications in editing, layout, custom fonts and general prepress, parallel with independent startup publishing, distribution and sales models and trials. International Gaudiya Vedanta Society congregational organization, engagement continuity cultivation, market expansion strategy and public representation. International networking and strategic think-tanking for exchange of ideas and effective outreach across mixed target groups.

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Here are the years I spent divided between Finland and India while digging deeper into the ancient traditions, producing associated services and resources, and providing diverse consultation, research papers, and community organizational support for a small global audience. Total 50 individual and indexed projects.

Sri Krishna Chaitanya Shastra Mandir: Editor / Translator / Research / Archival / Prepress / Project Manager
Publishing industry
February 2002 – August 2007 (5 years 7 months)

Radhakund CPP (Chief
Production Professor)

Manager for Sri Krishna Chaitanya Shastra Mandir global and local publications in English, four produced and mass-printed books with matching e-book versions, general production management.

Author and producer for general digest e-books and websites [Gaudiya.com], translation [Sanskrit and Bengali to English and Finnish] and integrity verification, direct clarifications with original author, general proofreading, manuscript organization and archival work, historical and doctrinal research and exegesis, research papers and general queries, abstracted information storage and applications, synthesis and systematization of scattered source texts.

Desktop publishing, printing press contacts and production supervision, website design, copywriting and development, wiki logging and encyclopedic collaboration, cross-referenced multilingual databases and reference tools development, shared authoring models and workflow conceptualization, small-scale website networking and centralized search engine infrastructure.

Lots of this in sorting the
head into good order.

Communications and consultation, local and virtual community management, miscellaneous research and writing, source material hunt and digitization, fund raising strategies, education and seminars, audio/video recording and media archival projects, video editing and advanced DVD authoring, environmental projects.

Founder of associated Lake of Flowers Productions providing 100+ GB of free multimedia online. Former president and executive project manager for Gaudiya Kutir, a budding non-profit organization with audience and contributions from people in the Americas, Europe, and India, working towards syndicating and organizing dozens of related projects and agendas.

Freelance / SKCSM: Madhavananda Project Index
Published URL: http://md.gaudiya.com/

The MPI is an exhaustive personal project index covering a total of six years of research and 50 individual projects undertaken

Collecting and archiving
audio/video at events.

and brought to various stages of completion, managed from both Finland and India. Further published works and productions are included in the combined portfolio and task tracker portal. A good deal of the related resources were acquired in collaboration with Sri Krishna Chaitanya Shastra Mandir and associated helpful people. Much of the production cycle and related adventures were also documented and archived online in substantial detail with photos [Vraja Journal].

Among others: Archival work, book publishing and prepress, printing and e-books, multi-project environment management, construction and rural property development, dozens of networked website projects, classes and seminars, language tools and localization, local and virtual community management, community think-tanks and study groups, promotion and study materials, tutorials and manuals, standards research and establishment, resource networking and project support, lecture podcasting and media production, 10000+ organized photos, server administration, software development, etc.

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The following initiatives grew out of this abundant pool of projects and enthusiasm. While the limited amount of available project participants and material resources limited the expansion of operations to an unfortunate degree, two out of the following three major initiatives are still alive and well, continuing to serve a global audience with diverse informative, cultural, religious and academic resources.

Lake of Flowers Productions: Director / A/V Recorder and Producer / Systems and Infrastructure
Publishing industry
March 2002 – Present (8 years 8 months)

Lake of Flowers Productions was in its prime between 2005 and 2007, producing and publishing online a total of 100.8 GB of audio recordings and edited video footage, and photographed and archived thousands of high-quality photos. Presently in archival mode, the site is supported by ads and donations, and continues to serve out free media indefinitely. As of October 2010, 27 TB of tracked media have been downloaded.

The storage and online file serving solution was provided with support from the Internet Archive (Archive.org) and their petabyte project, as free availability of high-quality media and cultural history was a shared agenda. In-house developed tools for connecting with the Internet Archive server networks made the operation silk smooth. Footage from the archives has been featured on Comedy Central's The Daily Show and in numerous independent productions.

Areas of work: A/V recording, equipment screening, testing and purchase, A/V editing and post-processing, codec, compression and storage solutions, scripted processing, online infrastructure, networked resources, peer-to-peer media distribution models, scripted image and metadata archiving, A/V versioning and archiving, web development, online archive scripts and tools, DVD authoring and production, general design, prepress and print, newsfeeds and podcasting, open-source audio/video tools

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Gaudiya Grantha Mandira: Developer / Digitizer / Systems Provider
Libraries industry
February 2002 – Present (8 years 9 months)

Software and technical solutions provider, text digitization and transliteration with Gaudiya Grantha Mandira, a non-profit initiative founded by professors Jan Brzezinski and Neal Delmonico for digitizing, transliterating, and eventually translating ancient and medieval Sanskrit and Bengali texts as a free public service.

The current library hosts almost 600 previously unavailable texts in diverse formats for both academic research and seekers of wisdom, provides an additional platform for collaboration, and a well-rounded set of free tools for converting text between all common transliteration schemes and associated Indic scripts.

Some initiatives, like a semantic markup language for automated text processing, cross-referencing and miscellaneous notation, an abstracted data storage system for bibliographies and metadata cross-referencing of categorized shorter texts, and an advanced full-text library search engine, are still in the air pending more resources and volunteer participation.

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Gaudiya Kutir: President / Project Director / PR / Networking / Systems and Infrastructure
Non-Profit Organization Management industry
June 2005 – June 2007 (2 years 1 month)

The Gaudiya Kutir was a syncretic networking initiative to advance availability of information and resources on cultural, meditative and religious traditions from medieval Bengal. With agendas for I. Education, II. Preservation, III. Celebration, IV. Facilitation, and V. Outreach, it aimed for a broad field of activities and global expansion. I contributed as founding member and VP (later President), community leader, project manager, systems developer, and resources producer.

The organization sought to pool volunteer resources and ongoing projects under one roof, providing synergy, contacts and additional resources to efforts with parallel interests and potential. With over a dozen major internal projects and assistance for numerous independent initiatives, it successfully disseminated information and provided resources to a small but growing global audience. In absence of sufficient supporting interest and funding, the project was gradually frozen, and contingencies were shaped for the initiatives to continue independently.

Activities: project organization, human and material resource management, volunteer management, local and virtual community development, lectures and seminars, educational initiatives, copywriting and press releases, promotional materials, server infrastructure, material and resource development, event organization, social media and networking, networked websites, software development, project consultation, audience activation initiatives, translation and interpretation

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Finally, below is the conclusion of the diverse business work I somehow managed to somehow accomplish in between the cracks to keep bread and butter on the table, parallel to all the religious, cultural, internal and mystical ventures oriented for broadening my overall perspectives.

CodeWallah: Developer / Designer / Project Organizer
Internet industry
October 2004 – February 2009 (4 years 5 months)

Fixing things up for
people in need..

The two final years of the CodeWallah phase went largely off the grid across India and Nepal in search of the ultimate code and the patterns of a grand paradoxical abstraction, with periodic meditation retreats and seclusion, general free wandering on foot, entertaining villagers, publishing blogs, photos, doodles, poems, serious news and editorials, and hacking in a random client update at times of electricity and "available" business time in a cyber-café somewhere down the lane.

Wandering with native and foreign
holy men of many denominations

In Nepal, I worked with two environmental/educational NGOs and an orphanage, providing marketing and networking help, volunteer organization, manual labor, technical solutions, food, and organization structuring help on a volunteer basis.

Somewhere down the line I first grasped that strange unifying light atop the yonder mountain peaks after muttering too many mantras, studying too many books, casting too many spells, hoping too many hopes, dreaming too many dreams, and walking way too many miles both physically as well as far far down the rabbit hole and back again.

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kaccin nobhaya-vibhraṣṭaś chinnābhram iva naśyati |
apratiṣṭho mahā-bāho vimūḍho brahmaṇaḥ pathi || BG 6.38

Arjuna: "O Mighty-Armed One, would one not fall from both spiritual and material, as a torn cloud perishes without any foundation, if he is bewildered on the path to transcendence?"

pārtha naiveha nāmutra vināśas tasya vidyate |
na hi kalyāṇa-kṛt kaścid  durgatiṁ tāta gacchati || BG 6.40

Krishna: "O son of Pritha, whether in this or the yonder worlds, he is not destroyed; for one who is a doer of good will never attain a foul destination."

The Spacious Quality of Emptiness

People may wonder what drives a man to engage in diverse charitable, environmental and humanitarian activities, in hands on activism to help heal the world, after a decade of meditation and commitment to other-worldly attainments.

Some would see that as a falling of grace of sorts, believe it or not! Let me quote an old favorite author, Swami A.C. Bhaktivedanta, founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, biting into one of his favorite themes. That is, bashing the Mayavadis (Advaita-vadis, monists, the Shankara tradition):

"The Mayavadi philosophers, therefore, adhering to the slogan brahma satyam jagan mithya ("spirit is true, world is false"), want to refrain from false, materialistic activities. They want to stop all activities and merge in the Supreme Brahman. According to the Vaisnava philosophy, however, if one simply ceases from materialistic activity one cannot remain inactive for very long, and therefore everyone should engage himself in spiritual activities, which will solve the problem of suffering in this material world.

"It is said, therefore, that although the Mayavadi philosophers strive to refrain from materialistic activities and merge in Brahman, and although they may actually merge in the Brahman existence, for want of activity they fall down again into materialistic activity. Thus the so-called renouncer, unable to remain in meditation upon Brahman, returns to materialistic activities by opening hospitals and schools and so on." — Srimad Bhagavatam 7.13.27, commentary

There is, however, an alternative interpretation to this pattern of action. Perhaps some of the meditators weren't pulled back towards the world merely owing to an insufficient capacity for prolonged contemplative life, or over a profound and insuppressable ontological pull for action. Perhaps they in fact emerged from their cocoon of solitude after attaining profound realization on the nature of existence, on the substance present and discoverable in the world, just as a worm emerges from its cocoon to glide across the skies as a beautiful butterfly.

The fact is that emptiness is spacious. Where the stuffy ego-complex has resolved and no longer imposes itself, when the flow of nature is perceived without attachments and aversions, a sense of emptiness finds its natural self-expression. In that emptiness, there is infinite room for giving and sharing. In that emptiness, in absence of a possessive ego, unconditional giving and self-sacrifice are a natural consequence.

Where there is ego, there is competition. Where there is competition, there is no compassion. Competition, by its very definition, is all about a particular ego-entity emerging victorious in meeting his objectives and gaining fame appropriate to the achievement, whether as a benevolent or a heinous character. It is, in other words, ultimately self-serving.

"But if everything is empty of permanence", one might ask — and it's a very valid reservation! — "what difference does compassion make?". It wouldn't really make that much difference to you, given that you are into a life of desirelessness and natural liberation. There are, however, countless conflicted ego-formations, the populace of the world, who could use some ego dissolution to make the world just a tad bit more harmonious and beautiful.

The Vedanta-sutra cuts to the heart of the assimilated individual's modus operandi: lokavat tu lila-kaivalyam: "The apparent world is indeed but sole play.". With liberation, all necessities have ceased and all duties have been fulfilled. And when the work is done, one is free to act in any given manner without enmeshment in the infinite net of action and reaction.

Look at Krishna. A mukta-purusha of first water, a controversial character for many, and difficult to reconcile even for profound philosophers. Combined in a single being, we find the polar opposites of a playboy engaging in extensive amorous dalliances with other men's wives at the heart of the night in the forest groves of Vrindavan, and at the other end the sober philosopher, famous for his Bhagavad-gita.

When asked by king Parikshit, Sukadeva explained that Krishna's amorous adventures are exactly as those of a child playing with its reflections in the mirror. A classical Vaishnava interpretation following Sri Chaitanya's line of thought employs the tantric theory of shaktis in explaining the relationship between Krishna and the girls. This is, however, an explanation very much tied with specific theological formulations.

Let's assume Krishna was not an all-powerful primeval deity, or the Supreme Personality of Godhead to use a term coined by Bhaktivedanta. Suppose he was once upon a time just like one of us, but made his way across the eons, transforming into something extraordinary. Would we not have the same prospects, each one of us, then? If you looked at the matter from a Tantric Buddhist perspective, in fact this is exactly the case. Padmasambhava, for one, the great grandfather of Tibetan Buddhism, was an ardent tantric practitioner with numerous consorts, yet considered by many to be practically a second Buddha.

Tantric sadhana, the union of the polarity of the cosmos, is however aptly acted out only at levels of consciousness where an understanding of shunyata has evolved to a very substantial degree. Many long-time monks and practitioners consciously choose to leave consort practice to the later years of their lives, knowing the immense challenges it presents in containing one's mindfulness and retaining a sound platform of aloofness.

Then, having reached the grand stage of emptiness, it is quite natural for a person of profound spiritual background to engage in benevolent activities, in acts of goodwill that unfold on the egoless platform. It naturally follows. We need to be doing good things, us worldlings. And for the holy, doing good things no longer rises out of obligation — it rises spontaneously.

Ultimately nothing makes any difference. In the meantime, there is some time separating us from the maturation and resolution of our karmic track. Riding the waves into wherever the universe leads us, we engage in acts that are wholesome and beautiful, we learn the sublime art of life. In that there is supreme peace, supreme happiness, and supreme enjoyment as well.