Chillin' on a summer-like sunday

In the summertime when the weather is high
You can stretch right up and touch the sky
When the weather's fine
You got women, you got women on your mind.

Have a drink, have a drive
Go out and see what you can find!

Remember the song? It is not summer yet, but the weather is sure high..
If there is such a thing as a perfect Sunday, it would be something like today.
I’m lovin' it! :)

Lucie the pussy cat

I spent the weekend with a friend and his lovely wife at their house in a little Massachusetts town. The sun was at it’s best for most part of the day, and it was only the sea breeze reminding us it was not summer – not just yet.
Lucie, my model of the week is Don’s cat. Not too easy to befriend, but she definitely is not camera shy.

Terminal illness

.

"There are only two emotions in a plane: boredom and terror." ~Orson Welles
And I am sure I'm familiar with at least one of those. :)
My clock is still garbled, but I like the weather.

Lovely Rosa

Rosa is beautiful. Rosa likes to lick the underside of shoes (Tasty they are, but I dont know why mommy makes a fuss!) and Rosa likes it when daddy tosses her up like that.

This week has been crazy so far, and it is just about to get crazier. I'm having to travel half way around the world, among other things.
I should be getting back to work, dont you think? :)

Do not ask stupid questions, I say!

I like to drive on long winding roads: and long winding roads sometimes lead you to lands where logic seems wound a little too tight to comprehend.
Like this weekend when we drove to this place really far away: On our way back, we stopped at the easiest place in the world to catch fish. It was a creek underneath a little bridge on a little country road. Not too far from the road, the stream turned, and the water slid off the rounded edge of a rock into a deeper area. And there, there were these fish which would leap out of the water against the current, trying to reach back to that place over the rock. Not one fish: a very many of them. A blind man could easily knock one over to the side, make a fire and poach it right there.
Yet no one did, or so it seemed to be.
So we stopped an old man on the road and asked him why.
"Because there is someone watching, and you'll get smacked on the head if you do" came the reply.
The land downstream belonged to this Zamindar and he had exclusive fishing rights on this stream. The stream does not belong to anybody, but the fish is the Zamindar's. Funny!

When Spark met Singam

I brought home this bony sorry figure of a puppy last weekend, and I had to drive more than 300 kilometers to Rajapalayam in Tamil Nadu and back to get him.
Spark is shaken, and makes a sad face, but I’m sure he’ll get over it. Two’s company, after all.

Singam is a Chipiparai hound, an original Indian breed. He’ll grow up to be a great runner-hunter, I am told. His daddy looked like a larger version of a greyhound, and was quite a looker.

Does anyone know how I can get Spark to be nice to Singam? He now walks away when he sees the pup. And I'm worried he's stressed.

Gettin' Jiggy wid it

This has been a crazy weekend: I’ve been party hopping like mad (Guess whose birthday it was ;) ) and I’m too tired to think of anything creative to post. I don’t know if it is lack of ideas or the excess of sprits in my blood , I decided on trying my hands at some post-processing . So I dug up some stuff from a while ago, and tried making it look like 80s style album cover art. (what a pity that the good ol’ cassettes are not around anymore.)
Contrary to what I thought, I actually loved doing this.
Tell me what you think!

I am feminist

Woman is a stockpile of emotion – of love, of jealousy and imagination.
She can lead you to love, and she will definitely play with your mind: Not that I understand all that very well - they are all so intertwined! !
Ok, I am bad at this, and if you did not realize that already, this is a womens day post that has come a little too late.
Women are weird – but it is them who make this weird world go round, i guess. :)
I mean really, look what a mother could do to this boy who wouldn’t smile for a joke I told him in six different languages!

P.S (added afterI got home): I can this with more clarity now but I will not delete this.
Just a long day - a very BAD day.
Ok I'm going nuts here. I should stop.
All ladies - thank you, and I love you all! :)

Hoo's tales :)

Clowns, story tellers, puppeteers, mimes and a whole lot of happy kids:
That was Hoo’s tales in Cubbon park this Saturday.
In the age of Chinese toys and Playstations a story telling fair may look a little out of place, but the children definitely seemed to be enjoying every bit of it.
To tell you a secret, I did too. :0)

Mehndi!

What do you do when you’ve had too much action last weekend? You rest yourself.
But he bad thing about resting is that you get bored sometimes.. and worse still, you run out of fresh pictures.
This shoot came as a surprise – of the good kind, though.
A friend had once mentioned that one of her friends would like to have me shooting her at her mehndi, but like everything else, I had forgotten this as well.
So this evening (after being reminded and surprised the previous day), I quietly slip out of work for a rendezvous with the bride for some green room action.
Considering that I had no strobes, softboxes or diffusers, and was shooting out of the equipment in my office backpack, I am pretty happy with the way the pictures turned out.

A Gentle giant, and the 100th post

In the moist evergreen forests of Kerala, it is an overwhelming feeling just to be – you do not necessarily have to see it all to believe it : the fact is that you couldn’t, even if you wanted to.
The air is always heavy with the sounds and smells of what is on the other side – of a tree trunk or the thick undergrowth - of creatures watching your every move.
There is a rhythm ( I’d even go as far as calling it silence) to the noises of the jungle; for when there is a crackle of branches and a rustle of leaves, you will turn and look, and you will probably spot this colorful bundle of fur on a leap that is nothing less than unbelievable.

The giant Malabar squirrel is quite huge as the name suggests. What is unlike how the name sounds though, is that he is a particularly cute fellow.
It builds nests on intricately branched heights of trees, and hardly ever comes down : a reason why the creature cannot be spotted very easily.
The natural predators of this threatened species are leopards and large birds, but the real threat is from the two-legged cousins that live on the other side of the tree line.

Lady without a name

That is my brand new niece.
She is a few months old, and she still does not have a name.

Don't expect a loner to behave.

At first light, we still had a few minute’s drive ahead of us before we reached the first check-post into the jungles. Force of habit is an incredible thing to be working against - the otherwise interesting discussions on quantum physics and philosophy do not really work while your body keeps repeating just one word : “Sleep”.

And then our senses were yanked wake by a sight least expected. We were taking a turn when we saw a young bull elephant around the corner – a shy loner with piercing eyes.

The place was an isolated patch of wilderness – not inhabited, but with a lot of human activity along the road. There was no food in sight, and this was no known migration route. The herd was nowhere to be seen: this guy was danger.

The engine was turned off, and for a longer-than-usual minute, we waited as he surveyed the scene, and then slowly crossed the road to disappear into the bush alongside.

The opportunity was too good to be let to pass – a few cameras exited the car, and the men behind them inched forward slow as snails, trying not to infuriate the tusker. The car’s engine went on, ready for action if the need arose.

Amidst the clickety-clack of shutters the elephant turned around, and that is when I noticed the smudged swelling on the side of his head – This was a loner in musth.

Musth (or, alternately spelled, must) is a periodic condition in bull elephants, characterized by a thick, tar-like secretion called temporin from the temporal ducts and, far more notably, by highly aggressive behaviour. …

…scientific investigation of musth is greatly hindered by the fact that, once under the influence of musth, even the most otherwise placid of elephants may actively try to kill any and all humans.

The bird-man by the road

The man is a bird. But the bird man cannot fly. He does not chirp or sing.
His parakeet (with clipped wings) can pick my fortune out from a stack of cards.
The bird man tells me I will have three children, and that I will marry a dangerous woman : dangerous in a nice kind of way (he winks as he tells me that).

Ah, I can hardly wait!! ;))

The Old Tomato Woman

Well, I took a sabbatical.
Life was coming too fast, and me - I needed my break.
Honestly, I am busier than the average man of my age. I realized that squeezing time out to post pictures was not working for me anymore. So I stopped.

But with that, I also realized that i had slowed down on my pictures, and that I also stopped reading what some very nice people wrote.
So I am back - With the old tomato woman.

Lots of love..

May all things beautiful be with you this new year - and a jumbo-sized helping of love.
HAPPY NEW YEAR, everyone. Stay happy!

Oh, what a movie!

How can this movie not be loved!
When you work with dedication, a story that wouldn’t fill half a page turns into a brilliantly scripted, shot and presented masterpiece . Tare zameen par is - without doubt - the best movie this year.

I had a lump in my throat the entire time I was in the movie hall, and I am sure so would anyone who used to be allergic to books, to homework, and the system.
The trauma of the kid (at least to me) is of being judged by the world’s standards - Of slaughtered confidence, of being told he wasn’t good enough – And that is the beauty of the movie, if you ask me. It lets you think without making you look at your watch - The pace was a breeze and there is plenty of room to contemplate. The music isn’t redundant, is well timed, and actually good.

There is so much attention to detail - the titles just blew me away.
I walked in on someone else’s ticket (thank you Maneesha), and I was charmed from the first second on.

Oh what a movie!

Back to show-and-tell ;)

When the excitement of anxiety is spent, and there is no new game to learn,
light seems to shine from the corners, and you look on from your favorite window.

- Ammooma, Kerala.

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