Creativity explosion

Multiple Exposure Disorder:)
Originally uploaded by !**sid-art**!

Siddhu is in overdrive

Friend roundup

Arvind and Nandita in Tokyo and visiting Mt. Fuji

http://picasaweb.google.com/goestoinfinity/NanditaTokyo?

and some more:

http://picasaweb.google.com/goestoinfinity/GinzaDeptStore?

PS: Privacy issues? Let me know and I'll remove the photo...

Siddhu celebrates Mothers' Day:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sidwork/3512828816/

Zenrainman laments the lamentable hacking down of Bangalore's beloved trees:

From a Water Portal event this weekend

Kannada song

Very cool traditional Kannada song that you may appreciate even if you don't know the language. Its from the Voices from the Waters film festival. Video was taken by me, which explains the bad quality ...

I attended a grand wedding recently and particularly liked the beautiful fabric decorations that they had on the walls and ceiling.

"Beautiful Minds" videos

I had blogged earlier about going to the "Beautiful Minds" event.
View here: http://despoki.blogspot.com/2009/03/beautiful-minds.html

Here are videos I took at the event. The one by Nandan was rated 5 stars by someone and had the most views so it gets pride of place:




Ullas Karanth:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWGHiJZiYH0&feature=channel_page


Hasnath Mansur:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYE17jaOJJU&feature=channel_page


Subroto Bagchi:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPw5r5wTH5s&feature=channel_page

Mahesh Bhat:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suzWDtWrnIM&feature=channel_page

Quite a remarkable video. It captures with a certain quiet clarity core aspects of American foreign policy, after cleaning away obfuscation and non-essentials.
Americans should see this video to understand how some people abroad perceive it.

Noam Chomsky would be happy.

Forwarded by zenrainman

(Arvind you can start vituperating now)

Addendum: I guess one thing is that this is somewhat dated. My personal theory is that the US is now in historic decline. However historical context does not hurt

xkcd

xkcd.com is a truly cool comic. Whimsical, occasionally X-rated (there, see the jump in interest), occasionally I don't get it.

PS: At their website (not in the image above) mouseover of the comic image shows a nice tidbit extra

Bought a frig

We bought a new frig recently. Every frig in the shop was marked with an electricity consumption 'Star' sticker that told you how much power it consumed and what the volume of the frig was (click on the pic to see a nice closeup). It made picking the make/model remarkably simple (normally a very fraught process with me and my wife). I picked out the energy efficient models in the relevant size range which straightaway reduced our choices to 2, and my wife then picked one of those (though she cribbed about the color).  

Really, this is quite remarkable. Any standardization between makes and models is useful to make a choice and a standardization that is relevant to environment friendliness is so rare to find. I have no idea who does this star rating but god bless them (and I hope they do a good job of it).

Most of the manufacturers had atleast one 5 star rated model.

 

BTW -- I read somewhere that the frig is one of the most or the most powerhungry devices in the house, so picking an energy efficient one really does make a difference.

 

 

 

streisand-art.com

We recently got a version of the above painting as a gift for someone at Streisand Art in Indiranagar. Its a pretty unique shop and business model, the shop is crammed from top to bottom with paintings (mostly oil on canvas), perhaps two thousand of them. It seems they have 500 artists over the world doing this stuff for them, and their only retail outlet seems to be in Indiranagar, Bengalooru, India! Also think I read somewhere that the owner is Barbara Streisand's brother.

While mass produced art is not something I'm generally a fan of (remember Thomas Kinkade, painter of light?), there were a lot of nice paintings in this shop. There is something to be said for owning (and patronizing/supporting) real paintings by artists as opposed to reproductions of the greats. I felt a rekindling of the old interest in art (haven't been to many galleries lately).