Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

AOL brand bottled water?

WTF? That’s the best acronym they could find?

Proxy attendance is one thing. But a proxy complaint?

Or: no fire, no glory. Depends on how you look at it. What’s your take?

The Rotary Club of Rajmahal Vilas and the Bangalore Shutter Bugs are organising a photo exhibition and sale for charity. The exhibition opened this evening and continues tomorrow and the day after (30th and 31st), at the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan on Race Course road. About 180 photographs are on display, including two of mine. They are priced at Rs. 2,500 each; all proceeds go to charity. More details here.

Seen here is veteran photographer T. N. A. Perumal examining the pictures.

A one-legged auto driver. That’s his crutch by his side.

Isn’t it interesting how one small, well-made ad overshadows a large, lousy one? The Times needs to learn that splashing money around doesn’t always work.

latelyontime’s rendition of A. R. Gurney’s Love Letters is on for another two days. Attendance is highly recommended. We both loved it.

I don’t feel particularly articulate today.

A hoarding that wants to leap out and grab your attention. Your captions, please!

Prediction: In the not-too-distant future, reality videos that document an unusual event as it unfolds will also involve the cameraman in the video. This will be achieved by using two cameras and dedicating one to following the other; editors then interleave footage from both cameras.

Why do this? To emphasise the realism, of course. It can’t really be reality if there’s no indication of how it was recorded. It’s just a matter of audiences starting to get uncomfortable about the invisible parts of what they see.

Can you imagine spending the rest of your life isolated in a 10×10 foot enclosure with no sunlight? An enclosure so compressed, there’s no point to testing its limits anymore? An isolation so long, you no longer care who’s come to admire your grace and beauty?

This photograph cost me a twenty rupee tip to the animal’s keeper. Credit to shruthirao for convincing him to give us access to a restricted area. Maybe he was hoping to show us their plight. Maybe he only wanted the money.

Monkey business in the monkey park.

Such a rush!

Cloth is the cousin of plastic?

The village’s very own meat market. The human search engine will retrieve a mate from the hold, matching your specifications as closely as possible, glossed over where not. Satisfaction guaranteed, or your query is saved waiting for a suitable match.

Winter is coming. I love Bangalore winters. The dreary rains are gone, the temperature stays within the early twenties, the morning breeze is utterly delicious. The weather is so perfect. Winter in Bangalore is my favourite time of the year.

I remember one winter in the early ’90s when the temperature dropped to 8°C. It was the lowest recorded temperature in a century. The environmentalists began shrilling that pollution was responsible for the extreme temperatures and that the government needed to get its act together. (This was back when Bangalore was still a retiree’s paradise.) The newspapers carried statistics on homeless people who died of the cold. I wondered what it would be like for them if we had truly extreme weather, like maybe snow. I had never seen snow, didn’t know what it was like. It was always worthy of fantasy. (When I finally did, I went gaga.)

Sometime around February, winter in Bangalore folds up and goes away, and the trees suddenly lose all their leaves. Back then, we used to live on A. N. Krishna Rao road (then Diagonal road) in V. V. Puram. The road is lined with four-storey high trees that deliver fresh carpeting daily. Sweepers clear the road each morning, moving the leaves to the pavement, where we’d happily wade through ankle-deep piles. On particularly good days, the piles get a foot deep, making for some very satisfying underfoot crackling.

A few years later, I attended a college on the same road. Then I stopped going there because there was no longer a reason. I moved out of the city, moved back, moved out and back, and out and back again, never spending a full year in the city since. I haven’t been to that road again in years. I’m looking forward to it.

This truck is carrying some water weed that stinks so bad, you can smell the trail a kilometre away. I have the misfortune of encountering one of these every few weeks. Getting stuck behind one is among the worst things that can happen to you on Bangalore roads. I suppose in the name of cleaning a lake within the city, they are dumping the weeds in another lake somewhere down Bannerghatta road, where a decade hence residents will start complaining about the pollution, at which time the “cleaning” process starts over again.

This month’s electricity bill says the net payable amount is minus seven thousand five hundred and six. The chaps at BESCOM sure know what they are doing!

Has the Biryani Merchant renamed?

Why artists need common sense: if that calf completes its leap as depicted, either it’ll hang itself or the girl will find herself yanked on to the cow’s horns (off left). In either case, the scene isn’t going to be as serene just a second later.

It looked like a mosquito, but it was rather large for one, and of the most unusual colour. I’ve never seen a golden mosquito. And it spent more time on the surface than flying.

Anyone know what insect this is?

Photography lessons learnt:
The depth of field is painfully shallow, so much so that jitter introduced by hands was enough to put the picture out of focus. I had to use a tripod. Even with a tripod, part of the insect kept going out of focus, so I had to use narrow aperture (f13).

The trouble with narrow aperture is, dust on the CCD becomes painfully obvious, like the spot in the upper left—I’ve discovered that those spots I previously reported were from the CCD, not the lens. The trouble with trying to clean the CCD is, it’s rather small so even a barely visible dust speck makes a difference, and there’s enough dust in the air that a blower just blows more dust onto the CCD.

It’s been a long day, and it’s not over yet.

Potato chips by the road. That ladle requires two hands to lift.