Blue

I love to take pictures of different hues of the sky. This was taken at Twilight.

I like the light in this one. And the mysterious feel of the photograph.

My little model!

This photograph was also taken in Yosemite. All right, this will be the last one. 

This is one of my favorite pictures. It is one of the million pictures I took of squirrels on this trip. This cute fella kept posing for me.

Paradise must be like this

This one was taken when I went to Yosemite, earlier this year.

This place was closest to my idea of heaven on earth.

Close enough to the snow that I could see it but not close enough to freeze. I could still breathe the fresh mountain air. The stream flowing by brought with it a feeling of relaxed bliss. All I could hear were sounds of the stream, the birds and the breeze.

It was so beautiful I can’t begin to describe it. Even my picture does not really do it justice.

Introducing......Pic of the week

I was reading through my previous posts and I remembered that I had decided that I will post more of my pictures. Actually, it was a sort of resolution for the new year. I know it is October already but better late than never, right? So starting this saturday, I will post one picture that I've taken every week. Yeah, I know it means I have to use my camera more. But for now, I'll cheat a little bit. You see, I have a few which I've been meaning to post, but never got around to doing it.

Any feedback with regard to the pictures are welcome. In fact, it will be nice to know what you think.

I took this photograph during the New Year celebrations, 2011 in Singapore. One thing I learnt during that photography session was that only the first few photographs turn out good. After a while, the sky is covered with smoke. You can actually see the smoke appearing already.

Contagion

When I started this blog, I had decided that I would not do movie reviews here. Don’t ask me why but that’s one of the things I had told myself. But after I watched this movie, I just had to write about it.

Contagion was probably the only movie, which was not only entertaining but appealed to my brain too. It was one sci-fi thriller I could actually watch without cringing once at the “science” involved. This movie was also special to me because it is probably close to the kind of work that I do. Ok that is not exactly what I do, but it comes quite close. 

Here's my take on the movie. Be warned, there are spoilers ahead.

Contagion has a star-studded cast: Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Laurence Fishburne to name a few. But the highlight of the movie is definitely not the cast.

The movie is about a deadly pandemic and how the CDC along with other international research organisations and public health workers combat the challenges that come along with a pandemic of such magnitude.

It was a very well thought out movie covering all aspects of a pandemic and very close attention was paid to all the minute details. I read about how Prof. Lipkin and his team built a 3-D model of the said virus and then worked out how it would spread and evolve and how vaccines would be developed. They actually worked with scientists to plan the movie, no wonder they got the science right.

 The mass hysteria, which is brought about by various situations during a pandemic and the collective behavior of people is well depicted in the movie. The helplessness, the ignorance, the panic and the outrage of the masses due to lack of communication from the higher ups and the loss of social order due to that is definitely something to worry about during a pandemic.

I was also impressed by the accuracy of scientific protocol in the movie. The protocols followed, the steps needed to identify patient zero, the difficulty and the timelines to generate a new vaccine and the characterization of a novel virus are all dealt with precision. It was so different from the general “Oh, I’ll have DNA evidence in a jiffy” kind of depiction mostly made in sci-fi thrillers.

I thought it was nice how scientists were projected as people with lives outside of the laboratory. The nature of researchers and their obsession with their own research is well depicted. Dr. Sussman, in the movie continues to experiment on a cell line in spite of being given orders to destroy his samples but he is the one who comes up with a way to grow the virus. Also, Dr. Hextall tests the vaccine that she comes up with on herself first, violating several protocols. Yeah, scientists love to break the rules.

Jude Law-very annoying: both the actor and the character he played. He played the guy that scientists love to hate. The amateur blogger making false claims about a homeopathic cure and spreading rumours about quack medicine. I would agree that there was some truth in what he said about pharmaceutical companies and their mission to make money. There was an amusing line in the movie when someone said to Jude Law- “a blog is nothing but grafitti with punctuation marks” LOL!

The movie kept the audience at the edge of their seats all through. It gave the audience a scare of what might come in the future. In fact after the movie ended, nobody dared to cough or sneeze. Even if someone did, it was not without getting stares from people around.

The movie ended with identifying how the virus infected the first human being (patient zero). A bat initially harbours the virus. The bat then drops a half-eaten banana in a hoghouse where it is eaten by a pig. The pig is then slaughtered and is being prepared by a chef in a casino in Macau. This is where patient zero shakes hands with the chef who has not washed his hands and she gets sick with the virus. 

The lady sitting next to me in the theatre exclaimed, “Oh, it was the pig, who was responsible”.

“No”, I wanted to tell her, “It was the chef who didn’t wash his hands.”

The Smile Spreader

• This man is 78 years old and he still works for a living. 
• In spite of that, there is never a bitter moment around him.
• He is almost toothless but his smile is perfect.
• He always sports a smile and you can’t help but smile back at him, even when you’re having a really bad day.
• No matter what you say to him, he always has a funny retort. There was this time when I asked him, “What’s in your pocket?” and he said, “my girlfriend’s letter, don’t tell my wife”.
• He walks with a stoop but he always opens doors for the ladies.
• He plays pranks on the aunties on the floor. In spite of that, they all pamper him.
• He has nicknames for everyone. He calls me Mona Lisa. And tells me I must smile more often.
• He reminds me to comb my hair.
• He is one of those people who make you want to believe the world is good.
• He told me today was his last day at work today.

Goodbye, Pachek. I’ll miss you.

Simply Raahat

This post is long overdue. I went to this concert over a month ago and this half-written post has been in my drafts folder for too long. About time I posted it!

I’ve been a long-standing fan of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and I’ll always regret that I never got to see him perform live. I’ve also liked the songs sung by Raahat Fateh Ali Khan and he does seem to have a style of his own. So when R called me to ask if I wanted to go to this concert by Raahat Fateh Ali Khan, I was quite eager to go. After waiting eagerly for so long, D-day finally arrived.

One major grouse I have with these concerts is that they never seem to start on time. So far, only the Manna Dey concert started on time; all other concerts I’ve been to, started late. So it wasn’t a surprise that this one too started about 30-45 minutes late. But the good thing was there were no opening sequences or singers.  Raahat came on stage almost as soon as his musicians did and introduced themselves.

I don’t need to tell you that Raahat is indeed a very good singer but one thing I can tell you is that a performer, he is not. He did not seem to interact with the audience. Though it was quite obvious from the audience’s reactions as to what kind of music they preferred (bollywood), he refused to take the hint. Though I enjoy both bollywood and sufi music too, the overall audience obviously didn’t. He kept coaxing the audience to cheer for him but even when they didn’t, he refused to take the hint.

His team of musicians was obviously for qawwali music. The musicians didn’t really do justice to his singing. I thought they were out of sync a few times and the music wasn’t that great either. Even the acoustics of the hall and the sound organized by the organizers was bad.

But there is not a seed of doubt that the man himself is very talented. His voice was magic. His singing has a quality that I’m sure cannot be achieved without years of practice. Raahat sang some beautiful songs of his own like the bollywood numbers ‘Dil to bachcha hai ji’, ‘Teri ore’, ‘Surili akhiyon wale’, ‘Aaj din chadeya’ and many others. There was also some sufi music with like ‘Mera piya ghar aaya’, ‘Allah hu allah hu’. He also sang Nusrat’s ‘Afreen afreen’. He sang it well but I still like Nusrat better.

Over all, it was a decent concert. Not so paisa vasool.