Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

Thank you, all. Those personal stories must have taken quite some emotional energy. Thanks for sharing. I’ll get on with the pictures tomorrow.

What would you say to someone who starts smoking at 23, on the belief that “Lights” cigarettes are harmless, and takes to smoking several cigarettes a day in the very first week? (The stated purpose being fighting stress.)

This is a serious question. I’m very concerned. No flippant comments, please.

This public toilet sign complements the standard girl-in-frock glyph with a woman in a saree. The girl also has ribbons on her pigtails. Kudos to whoever designed this for adapting to local context.

I think I’ll go with the upload-in-batches idea. I can think of a few: pictures from the tea estate, including tea picking and the place we stayed in; Coonoor town, which was about 10km away; and portraits of the people.

We had an awesome time. If a few more had turned up, it would have been cheaper and more fun for all of us. It was a geek gathering, as must be obvious from the picture.

Pictures coming whenever I can find the time to process and annotate them.

PS: Those of you who agreed with whatever outcome of my indecisiveness, come on. Really.

How rather apt in an Udupi restaurant.

Poll: should I upload all my pictures at once, or one at a time? I’ve shot over 300 so far and have several nice ones. As a group they won’t get individual attention, and by posting one at a time, I’ll have enough to cover lean periods. But most of these are simply pretty pictures with nothing unique to say. They have more meaning in a group. All at once or one at a time?

What say you?

This is Elizabeth Rani. She’s from Kerala and works here at the Adderley tea estate as a tea leaf cutter. I always thought leaves were picked by hand and dropped into a backpack. These people use an instrument that cuts and collects leaves in a pan, which they then empty into a sack lying nearby.

The sacks are piled into a truck which takes them to the factory a few kilometres away. The truck is weighed whole (instead of individual sacks). The sacks are lifted a floor into a drying area where a fan blows at the leaves from below for seven hours. The leaves, now somewhat drier, are ground, dried again in a chamber heated to ~180°C, filtered to remove sticks, and classified by granularity. This is the orthodox process. In the CTC process, tea leaves are directly cut and threshed and sent to the heating chamber.

This tea is then sold by auction. A small percentage is also directly sold in the neighbourhood.

Elizabeth has invited us to the local church for Easter Mass at 7:30 AM. We’re hoping we’ll get some interesting pictures there too.

bernhard_k, skarra, sriniram, thaths, udhay and I are spending the weekend at Coonoor near Ooty in the Nilgiris.

Getting online is hard. The only cellular signal is from the town of Karamadai two kilometres downhill. My phone’s sitting out the door right now, straining to catch a feeble signal. It took 40 minutes to upload this picture. I’m running an open wireless network for the others, and for some reason they’re having it even worse. sriniram spent an hour yesterday attempting to dial up to BSNL and VSNL, also without success.

I discovered yesterday that landscape photography is difficult. We’re at a guest house in the middle of a tea estate. Rolling hills all around with tea plantations. Passed through the camera, all that comes out is a little green thumbnail. I think part of the problem is due to the difference in scale. A landscape is large. To even see all of it requires turning the head around. The camera’s narrow field of view covers lesser than an eyeful: covering the scene requires several shots, and then differences in light quality make metering tricky.

Maybe I’ll get lucky.

Have you ever wondered why street corner stores carry ambiguous names like Enterprises and Traders instead of describing what they actually do? Why’s the real business always in fine print?

Behold the traveller’s powerstrip, available in three or five socket variations. Found at the local FabMall. They had a whole range of them, including strips that take only Australian plugs! (Must have been a cheap mass import.)

If you travel like me with, on average, five chargers, you’ll know what a boon this is. brainz likes to joke that when I drop in, I take up all the available sockets. No more!

Empty Inbox!^† Hurrah! Now I can go have dinner.

† Which basically means I filed away everything I was not feeling like replying to.

Siddhartha Deb has talked to several journalists to find out what is going on with Indian print media. He does not pull punches:

When The Times of India, under [Umesh] Anand’s editorship, ran a series on the presence of pesticides in bottled water, the business side of the paper was not happy about it. There was no direct pressure—Anand said he always had good relations with the family that owns the paper—but that kind of editorial content was seen to be at odds with the paper’s market-friendly approach. And the market, increasingly, determined the content. “I was sufficiently disgusted,” Anand said, explaining his growing disenchantment with changes in the mainstream media and his decision to start a small, independent magazine.

[Sankarshan] Thakur remembered the day [Laloo Prasad] Yadav had been temporarily let out of jail to take part in a major religious festival. “We had a great picture of Yadav at the banks of the Ganges,” he said. Thakur was on the phone with his editors [of The Telegraph] in Calcutta that day, asking them to use the Yadav picture on page one. He considered the picture important: Yadav was one of the most powerful leaders in the eastern region, a controversial figure because of his low-caste background, anti-elite postures, and alleged corruption. “But they said there was a feelgood ad on page one, a soap ad showing a woman, and they thought a bare-torsoed man would spoil the reader’s feelgood.”

Go read it, folks. (Via CSF.)

The bastards. Even I hate traffic jams. Even I will pose in fancy clothes. Will even give them juicy quotes like how our traffic problems are caused by having too many vehicles, and therefore my advice to all people is to buy fewer vehicles. How come they never feature me there? Why this partiality? I fit the requirements. Why am I being ignored? I know! They have something against me! They must have seen me bitching about them, and must be snubbing me intentionally. The bastards.

Plaza theatre on MG Road is shutting down. Yesterday, March 17, 2005, was the last screening. Plaza is 69 years old. The building will be demolished shortly, and presumably, a high-rise will take its place. I’m not aware if the new building will contain a movie hall.

Lawrence Liang got birdonthewire and me access to the place. Since theatres traditionally frown on patrons bringing in cameras, I took much joy in photographing the place inside out. Unfortunately, I was carrying only the 18-70mm lens, which has a nice field of view but at a maximum aperture of only 3.5 (smaller number is better), requires a lot of light. I had neither light nor tripod and so had to shoot at ISO 1600, resulting in extremely grainy pictures.

Lawrence’s colleagues Namita and Surabhi were also present. Namita was photographing the place (my presence with a camera was accidental), and Surabhi was filming it.

This picture is the theatre as seen when sitting below the screen. If it appears unusually bright, it’s because I used a flash. I could afford that since Meet the Fockers didn’t exactly bring the hordes in. 24 pictures »

Overly harassed by land sharks?

A coconut tree coming in through the floor. It’s funny how buildings are constructed around coconut trees, while other forms of flora are mercilessly cleared. I remember something about it being sinful to take down one of them. Anyone knows more?

Pradyuman Maheshwari’s recent debacle is regrettable, but his tendency for bias is hardly unusual. Several reputed publications indulge in it regularly, and sometimes you have to be a hard cynic to even notice. ToI’s adventures are rather well documented. Here are a few other examples that come to mind. I make no claim to be unbiased, and I may even be out on a limb here, since this is all subjective speculation. You, the media consumer, should learn to judge for yourself. If you have more examples, comments, or criticism, please share.

From BusinessWeek, March 21, 2005 (cover: Outsourcing Innovation), page 16,

Read on...

To the anonymous chap who left me this comment:

You’re an LJ whore. When you’re busy pouring your energy into something else other than this journal, you’ll make it then. Unless the business plan is to sucker people who read your journal into buying something related to you.
That was always the plan, wasn’t it? Being popular as a substitute for having an idea eh?

First of all, “LJ whore” sums it up quite nicely. Thank you. I’ve added it to my bio.

Now, about your business logic: ideas don’t make millions. Ideas don’t matter. What matters is the execution. Execution is everything. You can take the lamest idea, execute it brilliantly, and “make it.” Keep that in mind when you shop your grand idea around for capital.

As for my “business plan”, I don’t have one, but if your middle three statements came titled as such, they’d be spot on target. Nearly every client I’ve had in four years came to me after reading my website and journal. Past, present and potential clients all read what I write, including this very post. I don’t write for them, but I write fully aware they are reading. And I sell them my time. Time that takes me away from this journal. Time that I gladly spend away from morons like you, who see this journal as my only public presence and imagine it to imply that I spend all my time here.

Pradyuman Maheshwari’s media-watching tabloid blog, Mediaah!, has been strong-armed out of existence by a bigger tabloid. While I’m no fan of the Times of India, I have no sympathy for Mr Maheshwari either. His criticism of the Times utterly lacked finesse. His doom was self-inflicted. Witness these exhibits: one, two.

When you criticise a publication’s lack of ethics, you do not do it by calling their editor a prostitute, fabricating a story, and excusing yourself with “haha, just kidding.” One unnamed writer has a longer story detailing what ailed Mediaah. It’s well worth reading, including their earlier story announcing Mediaah’s return from a previous demise.

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Date: March 16, 2005 12:41:55 AM GMT 05:30

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Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2005 00:41:55 0530

give me crow pictuers

Why, here you are, sir. Want more? It is unlikely these crows have ever been to the sea though.

Citigroup Private Bank ad slogan: “Too many private bankers promise 360 degrees and deliver 180.” Really Mr Ravi Raju, are you implying your competition promises no change but delivers a turnaround?

This hoarding makes a mockery of Bannerghatta road, which continues to remain terrible. Remember the mayor’s statement last year that work on the road was on hold until the end of the monsoon? At this rate, even this year’s mayor will have to say the same.

Tyre puncture. I watched as the kid laboured to unscrew wheel and disconnect brake and chain, danced on wheel to retrieve tube, proudly displayed the sharp-tipped screw, and inflated tube and immersed in a basin of water to find the leak.

I stopped watching, trying to make this picture, while he patched the leak, tested, and again danced on the wheel to reinsert the tube. Then he had the unenviable task of putting the wheel back on the bike. Tightening the screws was especially calling on his little hands.

Fifteen rupees and half an hour. I’m no automobile enthusiast to understand the consequences, but I think tubeless or steel-belted radial tyres make sense for two wheelers. It’s simpler to use a better tyre than to fix the road.

Signboards all over Brigade road have been defaced like this. Was there some kind of riot recently?