Posts filed under 'General'
It’s swelteringly hot and HUMID in Mumbai and the rain is sort of teasing us here. It falls for sometime then its sunny the other. I am sick of this hide-n-seek game that the weather gods have been playing with me @#$% It gets so stuffy in the train sometimes that you can’t help but watch the other person drip on your Arrow or Louis Phillipe :-)
The average Indian likes to SIT wherever he goes. My friend Randhir has a very good theory about this which predates to our ancestors. India faced famines for centuries and thus her people needed to conserve energy in whatever way they could and hence the sitting posture carried forward from generations after generations. Hmm…interesting. But if you ever travel by the local trains, it is painful to stand for one hour and looking around, you find people nicely dozing off, sometimes salivating as they dream.
Hence..(back to the original topic)….I hope it rains so I forget whatever happens around me. Amen! :-)
July 12th, 2005
I seem to have gone mad after I was introduced to
Corel Painter and
WACOM Intous by Shyam. Infact I was ruing about the fact that I could not get the tabby on saturday itself :-( But anyways, I am trying to pick the basics right now although doing the same with a mouse seems very difficult but I will manage till this weekend when the tabby will be there for me :-)
I went to Jayant’s place for a luncheon and a get-together today. I liked the place a lot which is located at Prabhadevi, right next to the Arabian Sea & the view from his 9th floor apartment is fantastic. I found a few books on art at his house and it caught my fancy immediately. I did mention earlier that I now want to diversify into fine arts with the aim of digitalising and the book on the Louvre Art Gallery put more oil in the already raging fire inside me. Anyways, the food was good and both Jayant and Ranjana were excellent hosts for the day. Thanks a million:-)
Since I and Aadesh are spiritually inclined we decided to drop by the Prabhadevi Siddhivinayak temple to pay our respects to Ganesh. If there was anything that caught our attention instantly, it was the high security presence there after the Ayodhya incident. It seemed more like coming to some airport or a defence facility rather than a temple. Sadly, it seems like Lord Ganpati will have to live with this for sometime now.
July 10th, 2005
I met Shyam from the
SurfUnion gang for the IAF Aeroshow at Mumbai. Before that he had already carved a name for himself by posting some awesome sketches from his portfolio. The guys at SurfUnion instantly developed a liking for this “great” illustrator since they hadn’t seen anything like this before. Shyam was working for CHIP magazine at that point of time. If you really want to know who shyam is then you should see some of his work
here and
here. And this
work is his self portrait which he revealed today that he used only a mirror (to see himself) and a mouse with Adobe Illustrator (gulp!). Also you can find him at his
GFXArtist page where he has a good fan-following.
He’s now off to IDG at Bangalore which publishes such magazines like MacWorld, PC World, etc on a global platform. Since this was going to be his last weekend in Mumbai I decided to spend some time with him. Actually he’s inspired me a lot to take up illustration since I do some caricatures and hence we had decided to buy the WACOM Intuos for myself from Andheri but it could not happen. Later we went to Cafe Coffee Day at Carter Road and then loitered around the promenade there itself. The evening was supposed to be over by 6:00pm but we went for a dinner at Golden Orchid & rounded it off with a Sundae Treat at Cream Center.
It was a great evening no doubt where we discussed, gossiped, shared jokes, & whatever else that means fun :-) Good Luck Shyambhau. I will see you at Bangalore someday…definitely :-)
July 10th, 2005
I went to see Sarkar today with Aadesh and a couple of his friends. Unfortunately I had to go back to office and missed the beginning a bit but thankfully I could complete my work and enjoy the movie at ease. The movie is about a don called Subhash Nangre whose wish is the final command to his men. He rules over the city and even the chief minister is his puppet. “There is no right or wrong. Only Power” is what the posters say and that is the reality of today’s life. This was the first time I saw Amitabh and Abhishek together. I have yet to see Bunty Aur Babli. Both the father and son outdo each other in some sequences. If ever there was an actor who could play Sarkar it was only Amitabh.
Ram Gopal Varma undoubtedly has come to reign the Gangster movies genre. He’s now made Shiva, Drohi, Satya, Company, D and now Sarkar under his ‘Factory’ shed. I liked the cinematography - the sepia tones, which look pretty much real-to-life. His another style is his close ups of actors till you can see their pores on the skin :D There are no songs in the movie but only one track ‘Govinda Govinda’, which keeps playing in the background.
On the other hand, I have got, so much used to the multiplex seating arrangement, that it hurt while it lasted at Eros :-( But please go and watch Sarkar because it’s going down as one of the best performances by Amitabh in recent times :-)
July 9th, 2005
It felt miserable to start something and end it yourself. The Surfunion MegaMeet 3 (SUMM as we call it) was supposed to have been a real ‘Mega’ event alongwith a workshop with prominent speakers from the industry. The hotel was booked, complete with microphones, projectors and the works. But it required a minimum guarantee of 25 members & they needed to be told a week prior to the event. All this combination was too large to handle. There are 550+ members but very few are active and most of them needed to come to the board to get information about the meet. Looking at this scenarios we might opt for some method to galvanise the cadre in the coming days.
Also I spoke to Tushar on Friday about arranging a stay at his farmhouse at Lonavla. July is the month when the rains are at its heaviest and going to Lonavla in the hilly Western Ghats would be an amazing experience :) Let’s see how it all turns out to be. Anyways there are going to be only a few invited guests so that we can all be at peace without any ego hassles to take care of.
July 4th, 2005
