hudday budday

Ignore the title, it's just an allusion to a crazy friend of mine.

Anyway, this post is another of a series of my silly copy-artist painting. This birthday greeting is a straight copy of this and stems from my continued obsession with the cuddly Pon and Zi.

So as usual, is the original and mine is the one on the right. Forgive the grainy image, it's from a cellphone. Done in watercolors and the outlines in Indian Ink. Indian Ink was good to use because it is waterproof and allowed me to finish the outline before starting on the colors. And I didn't have to worry about wet paint before working on the outline.

You can't ask too many questions on how 'Happy Birthday' fits the picture there. It doesn't,
but you weren't allowed to ask the question in the first place.


Shameless plug: adding in this other copy-pasted painting of mine, albeit buggy and patched.

Books, books and more books

Been catching up on my reading of late, and have managed to gather a backlog of books to read now. Buying books off this site http://indiaplaza.in where they give very aggressive discounts and I get atleast 25% off in lieu of my being an Indiaplaza book club member (which I have no idea how I became).

It all started with Potter's Hallows. Then went to a nostalgic reread of Amitav Ghosh's Hungry Tide (which reminds me, I need to pick up The Shadow Lines from Sridhar to read) . After that I was seized with a sudden urge to read/re-read Alistair Maclean. So I went to Amazon.com, pulled up his bestseller list and bought four books off it. Puppet On a Chain, Where Eagles Dare, Fear is the Key and The Last Frontier. Of these Fear is the Key was particularly good while Where Eagles Dare nearly put Bourne to shame. Anyway, my love of Maclean's books is founded on his classic (and first novel) HMS Ulysses which however is of a completely different genre.

Other books include Taken at the Flood, an okayish Poirot flick. And I shouldn't fail to mention Nausicaa. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind is a japanese graphic novel, the story of the princess of a small kingdom set in far away and yet to come times where little is left of a world destroyed by horrific wars. Nausicaa is just this completely beautiful novel and Arjun (who got these books as part of a test from one of his projects at Amazon's Narita FC in Japan) and me are waiting for someone to go to Japan so we can get the rest of the set.

Nausicaa reminds me of Piya (from the Hungry Tide). Both novels have these exceptional female characters as the protagonists and you can't but fall in love :P with them.

Coming up in this list are
* Eragon, Christopher Paolini's bestseller that has Tolkien written all over it. Hope to read Eldest after that.
* Chowringhee, a translation from Bengali by Sankar. Sunny read it and Debo's reading it now. Hope to get it when he's done with it.
* Love in the time of cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's classic, alluded to in innumerable places. Ordered this as a birthday gift for a friend but the birthday came and the book didn't. So, I defaulted to a chocolate pack for a gift and am retaining the book for myself. What better excuse :D
* Up Country, unknown book, Nelson DeMille, unknown author (atleast to me). This book and the King novel, I got both from Indiaplaza for buying flight tickets.

I too made a cookie

Got bored, needed cheering up, and was inspired by my earlier post/link. So I made myself a copy of this really neat PonAndZi cartoon.
But yeah, my copying skills need to get better by a good margin. Only now do I see how misshapen their poor heads are!

Pon and Zi

Thanks to the inimitable Arjun for pointing me to this.
If you're a male and one that confirms to age-old stereotypes, then read the series in secret. Everyone else, can let their pretty sensitivity free.

Point to ponder: Why this verbal charade for a simple link?

24 years

How to make your parents a greeting for their 24th anniversary?

1. Google image search for 'anniversary' and browse through until you find something interesting, like this


2. Then you find more of the same picture by searching for sony vaio 10th anniversary edition.
3. You then sit at office for three hours on a Saturday night and paint on a piece of card that you found lying around at the printer. Meanwhile, you've replaced the VAIO with a 24.
4. Having finished painting, you fish around for a camera phone from one friend and a data cable from a colleague of another friend, and get a digital copy of your 'work of art'. In my defence, the cameraphone does not do my actual work enough justice. The colors came out much better than what the image shows.
5. Then you find a nice envelope at the small stationary near your flat, put your card in and seal it up.
6. The next morning you go to the courier and find that the only courier in your area is off on a holiday. You make sure of the fact by actually walking over to his house and checking that the door's locked.
7. But you don't give up and the morning after that, drive over to the courier near work and hand it in. And with a tracking-id in hand, you track your envelope all the way to your home. And add in a couple of phone calls to the courier office at Vijayawada to make sure that they've indeed received your mail and that it's out for delivery.
8. Finally, you be childish to the point of stupidity and call up your parents to make sure they've gotten the card and have them say that it's nice.
   

Blogus Interruptus

I looked into my blogger dashboard today and saw a couple of unpublished drafts. Hilarious they were, both started off in such fashion that they seemed to be the products of a serious mind. But midway through they just die off and I end up postponing them forever. So I decided, I'd not leave them as drafts anymore and give them pseudo citizenship on this strange blog of mine.

The title is trying to state exactly the fact that these posts are rather abruptly interrupted and unpublished pieces of junkieness.

Interrupted on 22 May 2007
Disclaimer: This is to taken with a strong dose of nitrous oxide.

That's definitely what it is. It's an OCD. Of late, my life has had this constant obsession that is so entirely strange in its manifestation that I just cannot pin it down to a single real reason. Its just this thing that is such a constant and invariant that I find myself awake at completely unholy times of the night occupied with exactly that. And then it comes back at every other point of the day too, so much that the casual observer might think me mad. The only time when it subsides to bring me to seeming normalcy is when I'm involved in my first obsession in life, that of getting involved in the next person's work and dishing out completely unasked advice.

So what we have here are two bad obsessions instead of one. And with the combined effect that my normal life has to make way around them. So, here I am up at 5 in the morning pretending to work and instead writing up this completely questionable entry. :D Its now 8 in the morning and I'd fallen asleep for the last three hours unknown to meself.

------

The above paragraphs are so incoherent that I'm finding it hard to complete them. I'll post it anyway and wonder about correcting it later.

Interrupted on 30 March 2007
Given that the last post is dated Dec13, and indeed dated it is, a roundup of life is essentially long overdue. But then you might question the need to make what little happens in my life public by turning it all out on a closeted blog. So, given that I do not want to seem like a self-obsessed idiot who really can't look beyond himself and write something creative, let me try keeping the personal details to the minimum.
To make it interesting, let us chronologically reverse our events. I'd like to throw in some lexicographic sorting but I really have no idea what that is.

An obituary to the Indian team is mandatory I'd say. But, with the Indian public memory being short almost to the point of a really bad case of amnesia, I'd say that it won't be long before the team rises like a phoenix to defeat the next hapless team that dares step on our beautiful pitches.

So, a couple of weeks back I was rocking my head to IronMaiden at their concert in Bangalore. (Note my use of CamelCase, it is the result of excessive usage of Wiki for documentation). However, the very fact that I've not heard more than 3 songs of theirs ever meant that I was one more of the posers in the crowd. But, letting that fact alone, I'd still acknowledge that it was one crazy show and a magnitude more awesome than the simpler acts we see normally.

I'm an intellectual whore

Go figure.

6 months

6 months! Its been that long since there's been something here. Well, not exactly, I did have a post in between on a rather interesting but strange topic which I tore down shortly after that. But yeah, it was rather irrelevant.

Some interesting facts
1) In 20 days from now, I actually finish an year of working here. Lot to look back upon and little to look back upon at the same time. I've grown in some ways and regressed in others. But all in all, it's been a happy jolly time with loads of money in the bank account :P More on this when I actually finish an year.
2) Our office has grown at an awesome pace and from where I started off in a lonely corner, we now occupy a whole floor of office space. And we have the obvious perks/pains of being the early birds. But yeah, being what I am, I try harder than I should to remain the dorky noob around :D
3) I bought meself a bike, and I ride about a reasonable bit. Done about 1440 kilometres in 75 days now mostly the daily trip to and fro office despite that we have a rather comfortable cab service at our disposal. As a side effect, I've tanned crazily especially given that it was the summer.


4) Meanwhile, I realised I've not entirely lost my hand at painting and sketching. And that I don't suck at it. The photo of the painting is not exceptional and is a little blurred and dull. Yeah, but it'll work.

Lifewise, bunch of stuff has happened that doesn't really fit into blog pages like this. I've been up and down and around. The undergrad batch after me has passed out. And a bunch of freshers have joined us at work. My brother is now past two years at IIT and doing surprisingly well completely unlike me. Classmates, friends and cousins are moving on and ahead in life. I should also get a bit of my inertia out and make serious efforts to move on and up.