A few good men…

These folks were around the munusami temple under the tree in the NH45 road. We had wiling models for some portraiture and had a lot of fun. The most interesting thing about village people is that they will readily talk politics and you can call anyone an ass and get away with it.

We were talking about whom to vote for this election in the state of Tamilnadu and who would probably win and who would go to jail after winning etc., Gayathri was scared of all this talk and was screaming that someone is going to get killed and be on the 7 o clock news with all this political trashing talk. The fact of the matter is I love to do this every time I’m around villagers. There is an awesome thrill in it, in getting to hear their perspective of things.

You can have everything you want here in the city but there is nothing more charismatic to the adrenaline pumping arguments and reasoning of a villager on some random politician or the government. 3 large grey goose on the rocks cant buy this thrill, I can tell you that for sure.

Of course, this time Ashwin decided he needs to take a pic with these amazing guys. On second thoughts i guess i should have gotten a pic too but then ashwin will agree with me if say that we will drive to this place again just for shooting portraits of these folks.

Canon EOS 400D with the Canon EF 50MM F/1.4 USM. Aperture Priority, F/11 at 1/30th of a second.

Moving On..

More blasts, more people killed, more rubbish useless statements that aren’t worth a paisa from our world class politicians and leaders. We still move on after burning/cremating our dead and yelling a few words in pain, shedding a few tears in despair and accept the fact of the matter that this is India and our lives are cheaper than a white man or black man elsewhere. No racism here, honestly.

When a Caucasian woman can complain “suspecting people taking inappropriate pictures” of her, when the bitch ventured out at 2 AM in the morning with two complete strangers in an alien country that she stepped into 15 hours ago (despite her husband’s orders to the driver to drop her in the hotel room, which she promptly ignored by skipping the driver and her own car) and the cops closing down every pub in town at 10 PM and frisking every brown man and woman on the road, even the innocent everyday call center job guy/girl driving to work with his/her company badge/ID.

What makes this brown man’s life negotiable? Is it because we are brown, dear government of India or is it because we spend in rupees when you could expect dollars and pounds? The white man left in 1947 or rather we chased him out! I wonder why we are continuously trying to kiss his ass, still?

What I would like to know is does India have an “Intelligence” department? If we do are they doing something or are they still jerking off to kinky DVD’s in front of their computers? Why am I getting the feeling that this is total intelligence failure or maybe lack of intelligence?

I now start getting forwarded SMS about some bomb alert in Chennai tomorrow and to avoid public places where there is a lot of crowd. Do people even know what they are talking about? Do you know that you are talking about a country like India where tailgating and sometimes bruising the bumper of the vehicle in the front is normally the accepted way of driving? Do you even remember how people come and beg you to “adjust” with an unreserved ticket in a reserved train compartment, when there are already 5 seated in a seat for 3?

There is no such thing called “not crowded” places in India. Oh wait! There are family planning hospitals and corporation public schools. It’s always empty and we never go there, not even take shelter when it’s raining like cats and dogs. I guess all of us are safe there. I guess we finally found some use for these places, our crores of rupees blown and completely safe and inhabited bomb shelters!!!

This too shall pass…

We all know the value of Indian life is cheap. Once again our terrorist brothers have done a wonderful deed to re-iterate that fact today in Bangalore. Disappointingly though, the death toll did not even cross 100, hang on it was not even 10, oh hell, just 2? Two is all you got this time? Two? Looks like you’re getting a fucked up appraisal this quarter at work, Mr. Terrorist because I’m not impressed and I bet your Pakistani or whatever boss the heck he is, isn’t either.

I can see the future ahead like I’m a fortune teller of fantastic norms. I bet there will be an enquiry commission and I bet there will be a buzz about this for the next 1 week in the news papers and TV and “The Big Debate” is going to be this topic for a few days to come, after which the Indian press will seriously write useful things like how our favorite big bachan’s are doing a great job for just being there for us and how homely aishwarya rai looked in a sari like an Indian girl when she came to open that school named after her.

‘I am shocked and strongly condemn this act aimed at creating panic among the public. I appeal to people to maintain calm and peace and the government is with you,” said Yeddyurappa.

Why do I get the feeling that the Indian Press and Politicians are actually funding terrorists so that they can bomb more places and they can write about this more while ignoring the recent trading of MP’s in our parliament house. I mean, I seriously don’t get it? If you can buy men for a sum of money inside the parliament why can’t we buy women or children on the roads for the same sum of money? I don’t see how different slave trade or flesh trade is from what our parliamentarians are doing inside the parliament. At least in slavery and flesh trade you are fucking around with one person’s life.

As for the 60 year old senior citizen who died in the blast, sorry lady, I really am. You will be forgotten before your corpse burns at the cremation ground. You are weak and the ones who love you are weak and they have no money. If you are not might then you can no way be right, because might is always right in India and I can tell you firsthand about it. I don’t believe in soul’s but I hope your family at the least gets a decent Rs. 1 lakh as government aid and after all bribing around the thasildhar office and what’s left of the few thousands of it allows them to rebuild their broken hut in their slum or send your grandchild to school.

An Account of a Civil Engineering Marvel…

Have you ever been to historic places in south India and ever wondered why the heck on earth you find so many ugly holes on huge rocks, right next to nice carvings and scriptures? Well if you have the discovery DVD’s and seen it already, good enough. The folks who still have no clue, listen carefully.

The maximum load that you are allowed to transport in the USA by road is about 30 tonnes. Anything more than this requires a license and specialized equipment and of course a lot of things. Now come to India, rewind your time way back to say 3500 B.C or 300 B.C or 700 A.D when most of these huge temples were built. We did not have airplanes, we did not have trucks or cranes to do the job. Nope, god did not do shit as usual, nor did black magic or divine power. Engineering science did the job.

The average weight of each and every rock is about 1300 tonnes and many of them shot past the regular 7000 tonne mark. Now how do you take these rocks up the hill, about 700 meters up the sea level? The simple answer is you gotta break them into pieces and take them, but then how the heck do you break such huge rocks. If your answer was drill and hammer them out, sorry mate, you scored an F (i did too!)

Drilling, hammering et all was time consuming and resourceful and required impossible amount of manpower and horsepower. Explosives are a thing that happened a few hundred years ago and were unheard of during these times. Even if they were available, blasting off mountain rocks meant you could not use them properly and cut it on a shape you wanted them to come out for specific purposes. So, here is what they did.

Instead of breaking the entire rock, they drilled very small holes into them along the line where the rock was meant to be broken. As soon as the holes were drilled, soft pieces of wood was thrust into these holes and the rock was heated so that it would expand (remember the physics lesson, objects expand on heat) and they thrust more soft wood into these holes and sealed them with mud and plastered it with lime. Now pour cold water  over it in large quantities, the rock cools down and contracts, however the wood inside absorbs the water and expands due to its soft nature and absorbing characteristic. So rock shrinks, wood enlarges/expands and thereby forces the rock to crack along the lines where the wholes were drilled.

Ta daa! You have a neatly cut rock precise to the line where the engineer drew the line and you could not cut them again into smaller pieces till they could be carried over or carved here for whatever use they were meant to be. That’s exactly how they did it. Engineering freaking genius, 1000’s of years back!

Just Beat It

Just Beat It
Originally uploaded by Dilip Muralidaran

I had a great time tonight, I went to a pub with friends and had loud and hard hip hop music played at volumes that would hurt your stomach. Music played my way, just like how it would please me at best. However going here to this place and getting to this fun with friends and having some good personal time for me is just not easy as you think it was.

Regardless of what the fuck Indians think on par with their Hindu dogma, I love a drink. I’m not much of a drinker but I find a good taste of vodka, vodka based cocktails and wine. I pay for my booze out of my paycheck, i don’t drink too much and throw up and make a scene, nor do I behave like a pig when I have a drink and of course I clearly know what I’m doing and I’m legally entitled to this shit as an adult Indian in this fucking country, so I don’t see why people should have a fucking problem with it, but some pussies think otherwise and fear their non-existent virginity being lost to a puff of evil whiff in the air god can blow out of his fart from heaven, sigh!

5 hours ago I headed to Dublin a very famous disco / pub at the ever famous Park Sheraton in Chennai to see a friend who invited me over for her birthday party. I head over to the place and just when we were about to get into the pub a bouncer tells me I cannot enter. Another one tells me I should not have come in the first place and it was unethical and stupid of me to have come. The former one says that physically disabled people should not be drinking and its immoral and illegal for them to do so. I told him that anyone over 21 years of age can inject whatever crap they want into their body in a free country like India (sarcasm intended, really!) but the dumb fellow says Its hotel policy not to allow physically disabled people inside the disco and an added logic of "he has a crutch, whats the use of him getting into a disco anyways" dialogue from another wussy while locking my laptop bag in safe custody locker. I ask for the manager and asked them to give me this stuff in writing.

I finally politely and discreetly threaten one of them that I would file a lawsuit for racism and as much as I hate it I had to play that fucked up racism card to let them now I’m a bad ass mother fucker when it comes down to business. Finally after a couple of phone calls and scratching their bald heads the cheap ass Indians think my business worth about Rs. 10,000 that night is worth the risk of them letting me in despite their hotel policy not to allow cripples like me into a disco. The best part is I had three women screaming “he is with me” at the top of their voice and yet I had to pay a cover charge of Rs. 1000, which is applicable for stags.

5 hours since this incident, I don’t regret putting up my stand. I have 3 large vodka’s inside me, a couple of new friends made across the globe, 3 hours of solid fun and 3 hours of thumping music to enchant my senses. Life is hard; sometimes it’s worth fighting for, like for example, today. However being told you are not worth entering a place in front of 3 random women whom you have just been introduced to 45 seconds ago, for any man, I can give it to you is no fucking joke.

Park Sheraton won’t get my business anymore; they can kiss their ass goodbye. I won’t schedule any of my office meetings or conference calls or training programs there anymore, unless I get an explanation whatever the fuck in the world they were trying to tell me this evening. My crutch isn’t my sign of weakness; it’s my symbol of empowerment. Despite a dislocated hip, a post arthritis condition that slowly damages my spinal cord to kill me and the excruciating pain I face every moment of my lifelike a screw driver drilled through my bollocks (yes, I really know what pain on the ass means) it gets my ass moving from point A to point B. If one can’t have the brains to understand that, maybe they should go back to school and stop watching too much mega serials, Tamil movies and leave their fucking religious morality and views at the fucking doorstep when they come to work.

Canon EOS 400D with the Sigma EF 24 - 70 MM F/2.8, Aperture Priority, F/4 at 1/200th of a Second.

One practical applciation for creationism, please!

Wonderful set of arguements and kent hovind is such a jackass.

I mean why cant he give up and accept creationism has NO practical application at all and is a useless piece of crap?

Funny Barrack Obama Video

Found this funny Obama video on the net.

For those of you who don’t follow Hip Hop music, this is a spoof of Rihanna’s Umbrella video featuring Jay-Z which was on #1 on the billboard charts for 9 weeks and was a major sensation across the world.

Original Video here…

This is just unbelievably funny.

Expelled - No Intelligence Allowed

Found this one on YouTube…

The title text at the last is a killer, wow…. what a genius whomever made this damn video, lol!

Photography Assignment

Jayanth Sharma has an interesting offer for Amateur Photographers. The gig goes like this…

“I am looking for one person who can assist a Photography Expedition
in the coming weeks. The requirement is for an amateur photographer
with considerable knowledge/experience in Landscape Photography. The
person would be provided with equipment and all other facilities for
the expedition. His/her stay, travel, food and other misc expenses
will be taken care of. The duration of the travel will be about 3
weeks. How ever there would be no financial benefits to the candidate
but I am sure it will be a great learning experience.

Interested candidates please send me your brief profile with a link to
some of your photographs.”

So if you feel interested, please do send me an email and i shall put you on to her asap.

America, the deist nation