Out to sea..

(It shows up as low quality. Click on it to see a better version)

Another species gone extinct !

The once endangered "Great Indian Grizzled Bear" (Beardus unjoinus) is now extinct !



Never again ! hahah!

The price of distance..

..is too great sometimes. Every one of us who has ever moved away, even to the next city or to another locality nearby feels this at some point or another.

To be in another country altogether is even tougher. I will have been in the US for 5 years now this July. I've missed all the usual things from back home like food, drink, friends, family. But the thing that I miss the most is opportunities.

The opportunity to run into someone I know at a bar and have 10 drinks with them. The opportunity to pick up the phone and meet at the nearest coffeeshop. The opportunity to play endless games of scrabble. The opportunity to say hi to my dad when he walks home from work. The opportunity to play "kicchad football" after the first rains. To switch on the TV and just watch the most random cricket game. To sit around sea face and chat about nothing and everything. The opportunity to meet friends of a friend and "bitch" about them. A 100 and one different things. The opportunity to harass my sister about a neice or nephew. To relive moments that have had some meaning to me.

It's not that I cannot do that here. I probably could...some definitely yes but most definitely no. There've been countless times where I'm browsing through my phone book (which still has all the India phone numbers on it) and want to call people up. Random people...people I've not spoken to in ages. Sometimes I'll actually start dialing the international numbers but the time and distance make it difficult and then the moment is gone.

This december I plan on making hay when the sun shines !

Friday the 13th

Here's what happened to me on Friday the 13th.

Awoke to my mirror smashing on the floor with glass everywhere. This thing fell straight of the wall.

All 55 of my samples failed to sequence..this is SUPER rare. Wasted the whole day trying to figure out why..no DNA.

Lost like a newbie in Soul Calibur 3 (14-36) !!!!

Coincidence or a sign?

GOOD Thing I didn't go gambling..

My near-pit experience!

The one GREAT thing about the US and the close proximity I have to New York City is the venues for all the concerts!! This is one thing I will miss very dearly when I am away. Bombay always had its shortcomings in this respect that many artists wouldn't come here or wouldn't be allowed to perform there. The performances which did happen weren't of my favourite bands nor even bands that I liked. So of course I LOVED it when I could go for Roger Waters (he performed the whole "Darkside of the Moon" as well as some of his newer more nonsense stuff), MUSE (YES !! The best damn show ever!) and very very recently Serj Tankian (formerly System of a Down).

The first "real" step into the universe of music for me was Pink Floyd and Wish You Were Here. Now Waters was my very first concert and it was as Pink Floyd as you can get (if you can get it without David Gilmour at the guitar). However it was a great and really fulfilling concert, with the music taking precedence and the crowd more or less in the "swaying with the music" mode. Almost everyone there was donning some Floyd garb or the other, weed could be smelt in the air along with lots of beer. All in a very musical experience.

MUSE is one of the bands I've been following the last few years. Their music is unlike what I'm used to. Their songs are different album by album, their music changes song to song. It keeps things interesting. Matt Delarmy's voice is phenomenol and his guitaring superb! I could go on. The concert was OUT OF THIS WORLD !! They sounded just like in their album (which initially I thought was shady, but apparently the band is completely against lip-synching - watch what they do here!). In anycase, I was in the seated section ( I didn't know that standing would be more fun), but the seats were great. The concert was out of this world and I cannot wait for the next one...

Which brings me to the topic of the post. My near-pit experience. Now the two concerts I've mentioned above were pretty much a mellower music compared to System of a Down and Serj Tankian. Check out some of the tracks from System of a Down here and here (I don't know too many, but they are fairly hard metal). So even though Serj Tankian's new album is much much more mellow than System of a Down, that's obviously not going to matter to the fans..who are here to watch System. It did to me of course, cause I wanted no part of a MOSH pit. Here is a youtube video of some mosh pits though these are MUCH MUCH more extreme than what I was standing one man (sometimes) thickness away from.

So what is a MOSH pit? According to Wikipedia (and NO, I don't much refer to it all the time..) it's "the activity in which audience members at live music performances aggressively push or slam into each other. Moshing is frequently accompanied by stage diving, crowd surfing, and headbanging. It is commonly associated with concerts by heavy metal, punk rock, and alternative rock artists."

Now from the video, you can see that it can get pretty violent. Ours wasn't that bad..there were people shoving each other, one or two fell down but all in all it was relatively harmless. I did feel the pull of joining in; but you know what with my bad knee and my relatively small stature.

This got me thinking, what's with the moshing. Personally I don't get it. Moshing mostly happens at live venues but also can be done for recorded music. Now, I have nothing against people liking heavy and death metal; I'm not into it myself. However, I do understand enjoying your music. Lots and lots of people love hard and heavy and death metal with more screaming than singing; but hey - it's still music to their ears. So what could you get from moshing. I was going through the comments on the many mosh videos and most of them are not about enjoying the music or the dance form (if you can call it a dance) making you more engaged with the music - most of them were about "kicking the shit out of people" and "I cannot wait to get my ass kicked". WHAT THE HELL?!!?

Please someone make me understand? I can understand that while you're being shoved and kicked and scratched, you're actually listening to the music and it means something more - I can atleast pretend to understand that. If anyone reading this, likes to Mosh and it means something to you other than the novelty, then let me know !!

Some more of my favorite shots..

I took this one in Udaipur, Rajasthan during my trip to India in 2006.

This was a stone carving on one of the Jain temples in Udaipur. If you look really closely, the texture is just dried moss growing over the face. Incidentally, this was the only face that I could find carved on the temple walls. My "Indiana Jones" spirit immediately kicked in ! :)

This one is from the terrace of my apartment building in Bombay. The most gorgeous view ! That's Worli Fort (Worli village) on the left with the boats. Through the center and right is the upcoming Worli-Bandra Sea-link project..

There are many more..they are taking time to work on. Keep looking at this page ! :)

My hand at HDR!

So HDR is this new technique called High Dynamic Range.

Sometimes while taking a picture, depending on conditions, it may be too bright or too dark in parts of the photograph. In order to get the whole range of colors, HDR can take pictures of different exposures and compile them together. Then the user can manipulate certain aspects of the picture to get it the way he/she wants.

The pictures can look VERY stunning...albeit sometimes a bit surreal. I like the effect. It varies from person to person..

Here is the FLICKR link for HDR. Obviously as you can see from my pictures, I'm nowhere close to this...but I plan to learn !