Friday, May 01, 2009

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).

Sunday, April 26, 2009

From a forward at work.

I confess I didn't have the patience to spend much time on this, but in case
you do..

The picture contains a whole bunch of famous people, can you identify all of them. Click on the pic.
Maybe we can do this as a group task, start commenting with all those you identify.
Person who can identify the most gets a prize of a guest post on this blog.

From here and there

1.) I started tagging my older posts (scroll down and look for the "Labels" section on the right hand side of this page). Still a huge task if I want to tag all the posts from day 1. However, I'm quite happy to see on going through some of the older posts that I actually like them and find it worth looking at them again. Too often, when I go back to look at something I wrote, I feel nauseated, so this is a good surprise. If/when this exercise is completed it might show some interesting patterns about the kind of things that interest me and that I write about

2.) I went to the other end of town for a meeting today, and bought organic mangoes from the lady of the house who runs a small shop out of the house selling organics. This seems to be a cool idea. Organic food seems particularly amenable to having lots of small neighbourhood shops selling them. I want to set up one

3.) And a note on one of the bees in my bonnet (or should I say closet): clothes. Think about this: you could evaluate your clothes by dividing the cost of the item by the number of times you wore it. You'd look for a low number to come out of the ratio as that would indicate that it didn't cost you much and you used it a lot. It seems an interesting way to evaluate the worth or the value you get out of it. Couple of points: especially for women, I think the value would be concentrated on a low end and a high end, with a dip in the middle, rather than evenly distributed. This is because there would be some pretty expensive thing, and then precisely because it was so expensive, we would wear it very few times, so that its worth by the above calculation would be very high. For eg. all the suits I've bought I've used only a couple of times, and then they've gotten too tight for me :-(. And then you'd have stuff like jeans, whose worth would be very low.

4.) We were at the doctor's clinic over the weekend, when a couple rushed in. Shockingly the lower portion of the woman's sari was completely stained in blood and she was in great pain and moaning. The doctor was quite upset -- this was her consultation clinic with no facilities for taking care of patients and the lady had been sent there mistakenly by a hospital. They were sent off to another nearby nursing home.
It was painful to watch. Since the doctor was a ob/gyn, it was probably a pregnancy or an abortion related problem. The couple was from a lower economic background. A sad reminder of how the other half lives, which we are insulated from, most of the time.

Saturday, April 18, 2009

Mayawati

BSP UTTAR PRADESH CHIEF MINISTER MAYAWATI.......


The Economist's recent article on the Indian elections:
http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=13492427
is centered around Mayawati. It triggered the following:
A necessary though not sufficient step to get past identity politics and caste hierarchies will be to have CMs and PMs from the dalit castes. Perhaps we should just have Mayawati as the first and most unsavoury of these and have done with it.


Photo from raman raina on flickr, click through for more

And our man in Vidyaranyapura



The sensitive zenrainman has started a series profiling the lives of ordinary working class people whom we come across all the time but never really know well because we don't care to. I heartily applaud the project. Here's one, of a 'green leafy vegetable' seller in Bangalore. Sopppppuuuuuu !!!!

More from zenrainman:

A beautiful ecological home in Bangalore:



and

beautiful owls !

Our man in Tokyo...




Arvind Narayanan's recent photos from Tokyo can be viewed here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/goestoinfinity/EbisuNearMuseumOfPhotography#slideshow

Above photo is from that set. When will we in India ever figure out the attention to detail that went into the pavement in the picture ?

Our man in Tokyo

Arvind Narayanan is very excited by this artists photography and recommends it. I was not overly impressed:

http://www.yanagimiwa.net/My/e/project/19.html

Tickettttt !!!!

BMTC Bus, Ashok Leyland

I feel bad for BMTC bus drivers (and the traffic policemen, but that's a post for another day). They have to deal with so much crap on the road; scooterists (like me) weaving in and out, stupid-ass pedestrians (like me) crossing right in front of them, arrogant car drivers who think they take priority over the proles in a BMTC bus (not like me) and so on.
Wouldn't it be interesting if bus drivers in India got paid very well. Like say 60,000/- a month. Reflect on the effect of such an action.

Driving quality would improve a lot, roads would be safer for everyone. The socio-economic hierarchy would get some nice churning. Society would be placing the right value on human life and safety. And not the last, several kids who excitedly say "bus driver" or "train driver" when asked what they'll be when they grow up, will end up fulfilling their childhood dreams.

Seems like a good idea, no?


Image by kumar_08 on flickr; click through for more

Friday, April 17, 2009

I get many enthusiastic missives from Mohammed Abubaker and his friends of the sort:
==
Dear Friend, With due respect to your person and much sincerity of purpose I make this contact with you as I believe that you can be of great assistance to me.My name is Mr.Mohammed Abubakar,from the Republic of BURKINAFASO,West Africa. Presently i work in the ministry of 'Energy and Mines' as the secretary in charge of foreign contractors payment.I am contacting you to seek for your assistance and possibly, partnership for investment purposes in your country, if you sincerely make up your mind to assist and also cooperate with me fully to actualize my dream;I promise you will never regret knowing me.To enable us discuss further on how you can fully render assistance kindly get back to me soon with this my private box.Thank you very much for your anticipated cooperation. Sincerely, Mr.Mohammed Abubakar.
==
No doubt you have been presented with such business opportunities too. There is surely a hilarious story to report, that will result if one follows up on one of these mails with the same false sincerity that it was sent. But somehow I don't have the energy for it. Perhaps someone else can pick up the challenge...

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Nattering Nabobs ?

Met up with an ex-colleague Aparajith who went off the beaten track to do a Ph.D on the history of engineering at Imperial College UK.
Photo at a restaurant in Bangalore