Marut

 
From the Times of India website:

"......Eastern Madhya Pradesh's Panna tiger reserve has become devoid of the big cat, except the two tigresses translocated there to revive its population....."

I really really want to know how this works?

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/news/environment/flora-fauna/-Nine-tiger-cubs-sighted-in-Satpura-Reserve-/articleshow/4885736.cms

Kali's been playing a willing model.

Got back to photography after a pretty long break of 4 months. And did I miss the shutter or what (!!) ?

Dude this is funny...

A mock emergency drill was conducted in my office where they send text messages to all employees if they are safe or not.

All the employees are required to reply back with one of three standardized responses based on their condition. So when I got the mock drill message, I started texting back "I am Safe - Onsite". Ironically, with the T9 dictionary turned on, keying in "Onsite" turns up the word "Morgue". I almost sent back the message "I am Safe - Morgue".

 

With about 110 Million homes in India with Television and about 60 Million of those with cable, what basically is required is a box which is essentially an ultra cheap computing device that you can hook up to your TV so that the cost of the monitor is saved. The device should be able to offer basic computing (spreadsheet, document editor, media player) on a free OS with a card slot and about 3-4 GB of flash memory pre loaded with educational software. And on top of that, a software that makes this box a DVR for on demand schooling videos. Would it be possible to manufacture one for fifty dollars? My guess is probably yes. And the government should probably give a subsidy of 90% of the cost, and provide this box to as many children below the age of 15 as possible. What about homes that dont have a TV, well if there was a box like this, I am suddenly a fan of TV gifting politicians, just let the TVs be bundled with this box.



And in other news, this cracked me up. Reminded me of passages from social studies text back in middle school explaining the reason for India's bloated population.

And I am increasingly irritated with Livejournal. I mean, these guys who run this website, are they so oblivious to the shitty web based editor that passes muster and has done for 10 years now! (Yes they are celebrating their 10th birthday.) I mean, wtf! Ten years in business and they still dont have a decent web based editor?? I am probably moving to another blogging site soon.
 

OR why Pearls Before Swine is a truly fantastic comic.

Desperately seeking jargonized order?

“We will leverage on our late mover advantage. Our aim is to get part of the 250 million GSM consumers who are frustrated with their existing networks to come and try a new, better service at the lowest cost, forcing the incumbents to defend their position,” says Shukla. He says the plan is also to get a part of the 8-9 million new subscribers that come on board the GSM ship every month, a market that was so far largely out of Reliance’s reach...."


From here.

"The gold standard was objective. Modern monetary management is subjective (under Alan Greenspan, it was intuitive)"

-The Wall Street Journal, 21st December 2008

The thing about photography is that its one of those art - forms that requires one to be significantly involved in the core basic science that goes behind photography (optics, chemistry). And it has always been about gadget hotness, right through the beginning of the whole art and science of photography. People have always taken to photography because they fell in love with these boxes, that captured reflected light and froze the moment for posterity.

Right then, thats what got me attracted to photography. And the more I got involved, the more I have been attracted towards film as a medium. Yes, I posses a hot digital SLR, but there is something fantastic about how emulsion on a sheet of plastic has the ability to capture emotions. Not emotions of people being shot, but of the photographer. Its almost personal, how one gets involved in the process of photography and what shooting on film does to you.

Which leads me to the topic of this post. A few weeks back I acquired my first film camera, not an SLR but a 35 year old rangefinder. A Yashica 35 GSN - that poor man's Leica. It has this really fantastic F1.7 45 MM yashinon lens - absolutely godly for shooting faces. Picked it up on e-bay, in near mint condition, and its HOT!
 Have been shooting Film Noir since then, only to be stumped by the lack of studios that develop B&W film in mumbai. Its frustating really and has led me to start thinking of creating my own darkroom. So vrikodhara dont be surprised if you turn up at the apartment one day to find one of the bathrooms boarded out.  Just the little task of figuring out where to buy the necessary chemicals from.

So yes, this is an eyewitness account. I spent the night, holed up an apartment behind the Taj hotel, to the sound of gunshots and grenades. Intermittently watching parts of the magnificent Taj go up and flames and smoke. Blood boiling up in my arteries, the moment Shivraj Patil came up on TV, claiming they are 'constantly' monitoring the situation.

Of not being able to sleep, but falling asleep only to have the distress and the drama continue in my dreams. To wake up to realize that the dreams were really were not too different from reality. To watch in frustation, the cold realization of lives being terminated short a few hundred feet from where I was.

This is not Sierra Leone, or some such place. Or is this?

How did I end up there? Dinner in a restaurant in the vicinity, on a day when the car had a flat tyre and being practically stuck at the restaurant. Thank heavens for the almost godsent of a collegue, who lived in the vicinty, and who readily took us in for the night.

Some pictures :(




( More behind the cut... )

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You have to appreciate the impish audacity of this dude if nothing else....


".......The SEC had accused Scott Hirth - a former divisional CFO at ProQuest, a producer of electronic databases of archived information - of fraudulently boosting recorded revenues and under-reporting costs.

Without admitting or denying the allegations, Mr Hirth has agreed to pay a fine and be barred as a company director. ProQuest, which is now known as Voyager Learning Company, has also consented to settle SEC claims of lax controls without admitting or denying the claims, but it does not have to pay a fine.

Two things in the 24-page complaint filed by the SEC struck me as particularly fascinating. The regulator alleged that Mr Hirth had covered up his spreadsheet manipulation by using hidden rows and entries in white text on a white background.

That’s right: we’re talking about the accountancy equivalent of invisible ink....."

GE is selling its Appliances division.

Let me do some stargazing. There will be news reports linking Videocon to this in the next few days.

The investor relations section of the website of DLF asks you to register with them before you can download anything from that section of their website. And they ask you for all sorts of details when you try to register, like the name of your employer, designation, telephone numbers and an email address.

Now DLF happens to be the largest Indian real estate company, in fact it is the largest real estate firm in the world by valuation so one would expect that the website admin would follow certain minimum standards of information integrity, given that it probably would be managed by highly paid IT services firm/s. 
So then, as it turns out, out here on their website, you can download all the above mentioned details of some 2300 plus people who registered on the DLF website to access their investor relations section!!! In fact if you want, you can export the entire list to an excel sheet.  (And it so happens that the company that manages the site is the big and the blue one. I see vrikodhara grinning already )


Somewhere on this list is my email address as well (thankfully I did not divulge any other detail) :(

Update: They used to ask one to register a few weeks ago, but a recent visit to the website reveals that that is no longer the practice. 


and in unrelated randomness, "Because the Mother-in-Law Was Once the Daughter-in-Law"

bohemebelle pointed me to this website. And I swear to god, its the greatest entertainment I've ever had in a long long time. In fact it would be impossible to not come back thoroughly entertained from this website. 

What phun!

 

So I've moved to the US for a few months, as my employer decided that it was about time I got trained in some career skills. Unfortunately that means a few weeks of concentrated death by PowerPoint.

This is my first trip to North America, and needless to say its been some assault on the senses. The generic largeness (or largesse?) of everything in question is bound to jolt the sensibilities of anybody brought up in a middle class India family in an ever so clichéd way. Even as I flew into this country, I was already mildly surprised by the size of everything, the endless parking lots, the numerous golf courses and baseball parks as I looked down from my flight.
Now it so happens that my employer's headquarters are based in this small Midwestern town, cold and desolate for most part. The people are extra nice to you, and very few in numbers.

And a junked modem in my apartment the last week meant that I had hardly any non-office internet. Which meant I ended up watching a lot of Fox news (Why only Fox News, you may ask? Well I don’t know myself). And the programming has been 90% coverage of the democratic primaries, which is fine except that the remaining 10% consists of sundry news items like missing pets, kidnapped students, heroic postmen, and the likes. And the democratic primaries themselves are sort of a pretty unique and very sickly twisted manifestation of a beauty pageant. Basically you have these two historic candidates either one of whom will result in a first for American politics if they get elected. The recipe for the media is very simple characterized by an extreme microscopic examination of both the candidates, every word they utter, the grammar of the speeches they make, the tone of their voices every move they make, the colour of their suits, basically everything over a period of the months leading to the election. And then all the news content and analysis based on any hair-thin aberrations that might be revealed.

It makes for fantastic viewing the first time around but one tends to get terribly bored of it in some time.

And since I don’t have a car here (am not allowed to drive, employers safety polices), it will be some time before I get out of this slightly grumpy mood I am in ever since I landed here.

Arthur C Clarke, 1917-2008

This is a sad day indeed. The best has passed. Thanks for all the wonder that you created, a truly childlike sense of wonder that one could feel in everything you wrote. I grew up on it. And what better a thing for a child to grow up on, than wonder. And amazement, and love for science and the people who make science possible. 
But today sadly is the Childhood's End. 
RIP, big boss.