Photography

There is something wonderful about photography.

There’s something about photography that makes it more something from something than the music, painting, sculpture... While obviously not literal creation from nothing, in all these arts, there’s an obvious element of deliberately forming a blank slate. A photograph, in contrast, is not a creation from nothing but a recording of something else. That is, perhaps, why so many people don’t know quite how to react to photography as an art, especially so-called “straight” photography — photography that is, in some sense, of the world as it is, rather than of a world deliberately constructed for the photograph. When the photograph is heavily manipulated, or depicts something constructed specifically for the photograph, we can immediately recognize a sort of creation from nothing. In straight photography, there’s no part of the creative process that is quite like sculpting or writing.

Given all this, I can’t exactly explain where the sense of satisfaction from creating a straight photograph comes from. I think many professional photographers feel the same, judging by interviews I’ve read, in which a jumble of different suggestions and theories are put forth, but none of them seem to capture exactly where that sense of satisfaction comes from. It exists, but in a sense it’s different from the satisfaction that comes from a "from nothing" creation like a drawing.

Trapped in the Mind

"Is there no way out of the mind?" ~ Sylvia Plath

I wish I wasn't so dreamy whenever I get time. There are some things which don't have answers.

Why is man on earth?
Why are humans so petty? Why can't we all just work together on the things that matter?
Can't you be both happy and informed at the same time?
Why does thinking too much make you feel insignificant?

Can I be younger again?

BBC Booklist

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here

bold = read
italic = owned but unread.

1. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series, JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
6. The Bible (not in its entirety)
7. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
11. Little Women, Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
13. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare, William Shakespeare
15. Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch, George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia, CS Lewis
34. Emma, Jane Austen
35. Persuasion, Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernières
39. Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
41. Animal Farm, George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney, John Irving
45. The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
50. Atonement, Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi, Yann Martel
52. Dune, Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
62. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick, Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
72. Dracula, Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island, Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses, James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal, Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession, AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple, Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web, EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven, Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection, Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks
94. Watership Down, Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet, William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
100. Les Misérables, Victor Hugo

I think thats 19/100. Would have been more with a few of Wodehouse's in there.
How many have you read?

Kerala cleans up Indian Cricket Again - IPL

The Shock

When Rendezvous Sports consortium first won the bid for the Kochi IPL team, back in late March, there was jubilation around Kerala on getting an IPL franchise. I was a bit worried though. On the dias with Mr.Modi, Shailendra Gaekwad looked a bit out of sorts and there was a real lack of harmony on the stage.

Rendezvous had just upstaged fat bids from known entities like Adani and Videocon (who has suddenly hit a cash cow, the way they're spending money on ads) by bidding for the unfashioned Kochi city for a very fashionable $333.33. For that kind of money, they could've bought an NBA franchise!

There was a very clear feeling of surprise all across the board. Even in Kerala, where the local newspapers and channels normally latch on to anything even remotely Malayalee, the press had no clue this was coming. Looking through the previous days Malayala Manorama (which is very good at finding Malayalee connections to every damn thing) had not got wind of this bid. They had mentioned Adani, Videocon, Sahara and few others as the ones leading the fray.

The Awe

This was Shashi Tharoor's first ploy. And it worked wonders. It was quite obvious from the start of the woo-ing process of the IPL bid that Shashi Tharoor would be backing any bid that would come for the Kochi team. Initially, there was interest from the Malayalam Film industry through Mohan Lal and Priyadarsan. But when they gawked at the expected bid value and left the fray.

All was quiet up until the day of the bid.

It was only after the ruccus surrounding the bid had died down that people got to know who was behind the Rendezvous Group. And boy was that a surprise. The people were :

1. Elite Group -
A company from Kerala that had been running a diversified business with hardly anything to do with cricket. They have a cheesy website too.

2. Anchor Earth
The mother-ship of the Anchor Switches brand. They're based out of Gujrat/Mumbai.

3. Rosy Blue Diamond
Its a fairly large Diamond company based out Mumbai/Gujrat. They obviously had a lot of money! They potentially have a Dubai connection here.

4. Gaekwads
The name Rendezvous is theirs. They're a fairly big and not so scrupulous business house based out of Maharashtra and the ones with (possibly) the deepest pockets of them all.

5. Shri ram Ship Scrapping Company
What is this guy doing as part of the bid?!

There were others involved in the bid, like a few real estate developers, but thats another discussion entirely. No one was prepared for this kind of a bid coming from this motley bunch of business-men, not even Modi.

The big men of the BCCI, all politics no cricket here, weren't best pleased about it. I'm surprised Shashi Tharoor didn't get wind of this and contact Tehelka and pull off a candid camera stunt. Kerala has historically been a bad place for Indian Cricket - reputation wise. The match fixing scandals of 2000 were broken in the Taj Residency in Kochi.

Modi was a man shown in the media (till then) as a great businessman and smart fellow who got IPL to where it was at the time. Shashi Tharoor meanwhile had no friends in politics and had already been in the middle of a number of silly controversies. The timing of what was to be brought up couldn't have been better.

The Card

The media got wind (I wonder how) of a Ms.Sunanda Pushkar who Tharoor was to marry exactly in the middle of Dr.Manmohan Singh's tour of the Americas. Manmohan was the one who had earlier laughed off silly accusations against Tharoor in the "cattle-class" controversy. The leading man was away and the media had a week to have a field day.

The pictures of Tharoor with Sunanda (which had magically been found only at that time) was quickly added on to the news that Sunanda had a "free equity" in Rendezvous Sports. Interesting that the usage was coined anew. I can't find any references to what "free equity" means. But the use of the word 'free' sent the media into a tizzy as they drew up situations where Sunanda was getting free money as a proxy for Tharoor. Well played Mr.Modi. Great tweet.

The reality of that situation is quite simple. Sunanda Pushkar was hired as the brand manager of the company and she was to get a share of any value added to the company as a result of her work. Its a common practice in start-up companies where you will have a part of your salary pegged to the overall performance of the company. The term is called "sweat equity".

It became quite clear that Modi was under tremendous pressure to kick the Kochi bid out with a view of bringing in a more lucrative state (like Gujrat?) into the fray. The PM wouldn't be able to support Tharoor much longer and he would have to step down. The news channels were quite literally baying for his blood. The less said about Times Now the better. But on his way out he brought to the notice of the Income Tax department that they haven't been doing their jobs right.

How could it be that in 3 years someone could buy a fleet of S-class Mercs and a private jet and NOT be investigated by the I-T department for wrongdoing? As it turns out there is (unsurprisingly) a web of inner dealings relating to IPL franchisees. The documents of which are all safely stowed away in Mr.Modi's house. Modi also owns part of the Rajasthan Royals franchisee through a benamee (proxy).

I really don't care if Kochi gets an IPL team or not. I'm just happy that the gang which runs this is getting investigated at least. I don't expect much to happen. Modi is strongly backed by the Pawar lobby and he'll probably be quietly moved to the side, only to be replaced by another. Before becoming the IPL chairman where was this Modi? Why getting jailed in the US. Where else :P

After all this shit and a very ordinary IPL s3. I have decided to watch only test cricket. It more fun and there is more GENUINE excitement. Not more forced DLF-shitbags.