Tom Downey describes how an Indian city balloons from a few million residents to tens of millions with ease.

It was January, and I was headed 80 miles west to the Maha Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, a Hindu religious festival in which tens of millions of pilgrims come together at the convergence of two real rivers, the Ganges and the Yamuna, and one mythical stream, the Saraswati. They stay for all or part of a celebration—this year’s would last 55 days—that is the largest single-purpose human gathering on earth.

I arrived by taxi at the Kumbh at sunset, expecting throngs of cars, cows and human beings blocking all access points. Instead I glided comfortably into my camp, which sat on a hilltop. I looked out over the fleeting city before me: makeshift shelters constructed on the floodplain of a river that was sure to overflow again in a few months. The soundtrack consisted of dissonant chords of shrill songs, snippets of amped-up holy recitations, a distorted line from a dramatic performance of an Indian epic and the constant rumble of millions of people cooking, chatting, snoring and singing. The horizon was dark and smoky red, with colorful flickers of light piercing the haze in orderly, geometric rows that stretched as far as I could see in three directions.
I’d come to witness the spectacle for myself, but also to meet a group of Harvard researchers from the university’s Graduate School of Design. Led by Rahul Mehrotra, an architect from Mumbai before he went stateside to teach, they would closely analyze this unparalleled feat of spontaneous urban organization. “We call this a pop-up megacity,” said Mehrotra, a bearded 54-year-old. “It’s a real city, but it’s built in just a few weeks to instantly accommodate tens of millions of residents and visitors. It’s fascinating in its own right, of course. But our main interest is in what can we learn from this city that we can then apply to designing and building all kinds of other pop-up megacities like it. Can what we see here teach us something that will help the next time the world has to build refugee camps or emergency settlements?”

What struck me as soon as I descended into the byways of the Kumbh was something I had not anticipated: It was the cleanest and most orderly Indian city I’d ever seen. Wide boulevards built from metal plates bisected long lines of tents. White splashes dotted the sand where sanitation workers had disposed of waste and then scattered lye. The grounds stretched so far and wide, nearly eight square miles, that there was, at that time, none of the crowding and claustrophobia I’d feared. Clean and orderly streets were inhabited by citizens apparently enjoying an evening of enlightenment from lecturing gurus or entertainment from costumed Ramayana actors. There was little commerce of any kind, save for the occasional street-side snack stand that sold fried potatoes or popcorn, and there was little or no traffic, as vehicles were restricted. Pedestrians seemed to move with purpose, proceeding from mess hall to music performance, from the feet of their gurus to the tiny warming fires they’d lit in front of their tents.

Read more — Here.

Daniel Sidell, an art curator, connects art to the spiritual world.

It’s safe to say that everyone reading this has seen an accurate reflection in a mirror. Everyone you know has seen their face in a mirror as well.

A thousand years ago (a nanosecond in evolutionary time) virtually no one had.

Mirrors are a big deal. Elephants and primates have been shown to be able to recognize themselves in a mirror, and the idea of self-image is one of the cornerstones of our culture. Hard to imagine walking through the world without knowing what you look like.

Fascinating aside: When we see a famous person in the mirror, our perception changes.

I hope we can agree that in 2013, anyone who gets uncomfortable around mirrors, who says mirrors aren’t their thing, who tries to avoid a job where they might see a mirror–that person is a bit outside the mainstream.

Cameras are mirrors, but unlike the momentary glimpse of the traditional mirror, they are permanent, and now the web amplifies them. Do you see how many people pose for snapshots? The unnatural posture, the fake smile… there’s anxiety here, and it’s because unlike seeing ourselves in the mirror, we’re being captured, forever. Multiply this fear by the million people who might see this photo on Instagram…

No one gets tense in front of mirrors any longer. Experienced professionals don’t get tense in front of cameras, either.

It probably used to be okay to say, “mirrors freak me out,” or to assert that they contained demons. No longer. It certainly wasn’t uncommon for cultures to resist cameras at first, and to take the phrase, “take a picture,” quite literally. This resistance is also dying out and almost gone.

And yet… And yet we still freeze up when someone takes a picture, we hold our breath before we go on stage, we give away our deepest insecurities when someone puts us on video…

Mirrors and cameras each took a generation or more to catch on as widespread foundations of our culture. It’s not surprising, then, that so many people fear social media. It’s about us, and when we’re on the hook, in front of people we can’t know or trust, we hold back.

For a while.

And then we don’t.

Originally Posted on Seth Godin’s Blog – Seth’s Blog

A small victory on the second day of school this year still has me smiling.  It was something very simple, a small bit of knowledge that I had just learned and thought my students already knew.  However, when I told my high school students that typing the letter d before someone’s Twitter handle would send them a direct message, it was like the heavens opened up and my students saw me as someone who actually knew what I was talking about.  I have come to expect that students will appreciate my knowledge on some sophisticated software program, but enter the world of social media and they think I’m too old to understand.

I try to remind my students that I was hanging out on online bulletin boards before they were even born.  They laugh when I tell them I skipped out early on my sophomore homecoming dance to install my 14k modem and got online while my girlfriend slept on the couch, annoyed by my need to connect.  Yet, when it comes to their world, one that is always on, always connected, they see me as a foreigner.

As tech leaders, we must understand that a connected life is all our students know.  They have learned to share and over share online.  They want instant access to knowledge and are not afraid to tackle a task well beyond them because they know that there is probably a video on Youtube already describing how to do it.  They want to be a part of a culture that is always sharing, always creating, always connecting.

Our schools must reflect their culture.  Gone are the days where we exist solely to teach them.  We must be ok with learning with them.  We must not be afraid when learning goes beyond our own knowledge base.  We must be confident enough to not fear the students who know more than us.  We must allow our students to go much further in their learning than we ever imagined.  We must not hold them back.

The global world they are entering is moving at breakneck speeds.  There is so much to learn and understand.  However, if we chose a path of learning with our students, they (and we) will be just fine.

Origonally Posted at www.toddnorton.me

Image via Big Think

Via Wandering Earl

Earl shares with us some great ways to prosper and be able to support a life of travel.

A few examples:

It Starts With The Blog

This blog is actually my main online project and as a result, the main source of my income these days. I work on my blog almost every day and I could easily spend 50+ hours per week on this one website alone, writing posts, promoting posts, being active on all social media channels, answering emails and comments, updating my eBooks, adding new pages of information and on and on. Blogging is a ton of work, far more work than most aspiring bloggers ever imagine, especially if you want your blog to earn you some money.

Through the blog, I earn my income in a few ways…

Wandering Earl Tours

While Wandering Earl Tours is a relatively new project of mine, something I started only towards the end of last year, I’m quite blown away by the success so far. I have already led three tours and I have three more planned for this year, all of which are sold out at this point. I absolutely love organizing and running these tours and I can’t wait to start choosing destinations for next year’s trips as well.

Of course, at the same time, organizing these tours involves a great deal of work, not only during the actual tour as I travel around with the group, but in the months leading up to the tours when I am extremely busy with the preparations, bookings and overall organization. Tack this work on top of my normal blogging workload, as well as trying to travel to new places in between, and I barely have a free moment these days.

Am I earning a fortune from these tours? No way. That’s not my goal. Besides, I told myself that for the first year of Wandering Earl Tours, I just wanted to break even and maybe enjoy a tiny bit extra for my efforts if possible. And as the tours hopefully continue to grow, which will involve another increase in workload, I do plan to try and compensate myself fairly for all of the effort that I do put into each and every trip. Again, the plan is not to become rich from this project, but to offer affordable trips to various countries in exchange for a modest income.

Check out more ways — here. 

We have talked before about unCagedBaby’s beats. In the past he has dropped a weekly mixtape called “Elevators to Heaven.”

We haven’t had an elevator ride in a while. He was cut off by Soundcloud — they probably thought the music he was making was too smooth and fresh to be promoted on Soundcloud.

Well today I received an email from unCagedBaby: