“You are not beautiful” These harsh words have to be endured by almost every girl/woman at some or the time of her life – unfortunately it is the chauvinistic setup of the society we live in. However it is not just male chauvinism which is at play here but something which angers me much more, though this is in no way tolerance or acceptance of MCP behaviour by men.
Continue reading You are not beautiful
Sangita! If there was anyone in my life I place after my mother it would be her. Even though she is just a year older to me she always held that place of a woman I could go to for comfort. I have known her since I was fifteen. We grew up together, kept in touch for a long long time but as fate would have it, life took somewhat divergent paths about ten years ago.
Continue reading A face for the unnamed… …
I like to look at pink….
It is a lovely Sunday morning, am sitting outside in the garden – Shiku, the Shikra chick we raised and release, just paid a visit – he has got into this habit of occasionally coming very low and inspecting the front yard. At times he shouts till one of us comes out…
A very young squirrel is hopping around – she better be careful 😉
The construction activity has been slowed down a bit – the current ETA is 120 days more to finish the civil work, however I very much like what has been done so far. Some time last week we saw River Tern as well as a Little Tern fishing over the pond/lake which is our backyard, a common kingfisher came and sat on a window ledge – I really hope that the bird life remains undisturbed there… unfortunately it won’t be for long.
Yesterday night we saw an adaptation of “Night of January the 16” it was an adaptation which I feel even Ayn Rand would be pleased with… and yes the verdict was “not guilty”
Lastly, I have decided to stop taking any new photographs for atleast next 3 months – the number of good photographs which I have not been able to post process has gone totally out of control…
The plan started from here A BIG thanks to the very helpful and sweet who made it happen.
The original plan was that we will take an early morning local train from Thane to reach Dadar at around 7am and from there Ashwini would take us to Sewri. However one of Swati’s friend somehow got enthused enough to wake up at 5:30 am on a Sunday and wanted to accompany us, plus was willing to drive us to Dadar. This was indeed creditable on his part as this was his very first birding trip and his usual Sunday waking up time is somewhere around late afternoon.
A fast drive and we reach Dadar station a bit early. We made good use of the time drinking cut chai from the roadside thela. From Dadar station Ashwini skillfully drove us to the observation point on the jetty where the first thing I noticed was a fairly muscular man doing push-ups right in the middle!
It took a while for the fact to sink in that the complete place was swarming with Flamingos. At the same time I also noticed what I had been warned about – the light! We were in the west and all the birds were either back lit or short lit. Photographing them was not going to be too rewarding…
However since we did not have time enough to be there in the evening this was the best we could have.
NO! we were not disappointed at all. After a few shots from the jetty Shishir took the initiative and talked to the pehelwan on the boat which was docked there. Soon we trooped on to the deck with our equipment. The birds were very close from that vantage point. Next two hours were spent in haven!
There are several more pictures of the Sand Plover and Curlew Sandpiper which I will upload as soon as I get some more time…. for now take a look at some of the flamingo pictures HERE
The week just zoomed past….
Throughout the week we were sifting through resumes, We are currently running at full capacity and it is always a bad idea to do this for long – there has to be some redundancy. Yes, project overlapping is there but I want to have at least 30% spare man hours. Besides this we are also working on ways for faster project transfer than what is currently in place, this just means further standardization of coding practices and more extensive Unit Tests for the Models. Also spare hours means that the programmers contribute more to Open Projects. I am very pleased with how Koppermine – The KDE client for Coppermine Picture Gallery is turning out.
Swati and Aasim hopped over to Delhi for the weekend, Aasim wanted to hook-up with Kabir and Swati was meeting some of her old old friends.
Yesterday I indulged myself with a day full of bird watching along with a few more birder friends. First we visited this amazing place right in the heart of the city which we recently discovered. It has a huge heronery of Black Crown Night Herons and Cormorants with 100+ nest. Noticed a very interesting thing, the chicks of Black Crown Night Herons are out of the nest even before they can fly and scamper around on the branches begging from any adult which cares to feed. Some of them even manage to get down to the ground and forage!!
We then proceeded to the nearby Wena Lake where the wader breeding is in full swing. Got a ‘photo lifer’ – Oriental Praticole! it is a very beautiful and relatively unafraid bird. Oh! by the way – I use the word photo-lifer to describe a bird which I have captured on camera for the first time. Another interesting image captured was of a Club Tail dragonfly eating another dragonfly.
Last week also saw the commencement of the first Nagpur-Bangkok flight which will be a great time saver for us, wasting nearly 2 days at Mumbai was a pain. Also, it looks like the Nagpur Flying Club will soon start, if not that then the Gondia Flying School will definitely start – I intend to get my Private Pilot License as soon as they start.
Yes, thats her name and she literally personifies it with her skin tone, but thats not all there is to her – she is 30+ a kathak Bharatnatyam dancer and – hold your breath – a geek by profession. Though (un?)fortunately not much into FOSS and I am not going to push my luck in trying to convert her.
She is one of those rare type of women who knows herself and not afraid to reach out to get what she wants, neither is she afraid of letting the world know what she is. Amid all this she still manages to be non-aggressive and almost merging with the crowd.
Yeah, yeah! I know the question and I have to admit that I am lucky – I saw her in a shopping mall and mentioned her to Swati, next thing I see is that Swati is talking to her – the rest, to lamely borrow a phrase, is history.
She is not from Nagpur but will be around for a year… and has agreed to be my muse for that period of time.
More?! Search and you shall find….
Suddenly it is cold! week before last it was as if we are going to have an early summer and now the temperature has dipped ushering an extended winter – I love winters in Nagpur specially sitting in the warm sun on Sunday afternoons.
It has been a very hectic past few days with Swati playing nurse/foster parent to her niece who has had an accident and then to Aasim’s class teacher who was operated upon to have her appendix removed – Swati’s verdict – She (Aasim’s teacher) is a 27 year old Aasim 
I guess anyone who see’s Yoda in Degobah when under anesthesia rightly qualifies as such! Swati’s also discovered that how being empathic towards the physical suffering of others can sap you up emotionally… this is something which I use to complain about when I was practicing but one needs to experience it first hand to truly understand what I meant….
Yesterday morning saw us again at the near by Wena Lake for watching birds – this time while Aasim, Swati and Raju roamed about I sat inside a hide which Raju had fashioned out for me using Ipomea branches right on the spot. I had the thrill of seeing Common Teals, Greater Cormorant, Little Ring Plover and some more waders at nearly handshaking distance – unfortunately the close proximity also meant that they could not be photographed really well 
Late afternoon turned out to be very creative and fruitful – we have finally found a new model (after interviewing and rejecting many dumb tweenagers) who is intelligent, creative (she is a Kathak dancer), 30+ and most importantly comfortable working the way we want her to… looks like the year is going to be interesting! 
Fun started right from Saturday afternoon once the barbecue party was confirmed.
All the ingredients were just right for a great party – a few friends, great white wine (and rum), excellent prawns, lots of chicken with great marinade from Swati and crisp dried easy to light coal… sorry no pictures were taken, slept at 1am but was again up at 6am. I just can’t seem to sleep late no matter what but on the flip side it gives me a lot of time all by myself, I post processed a bunch of pictures for https://nagpurbirds.org – if you have not looked at the birds on the site I would suggest do take a look – It now has 910 pictures of a total of 181 species.
The birds some how sensed that we were home and were creating a ruckus outside so for a large part of the morning Swati and I sat out in the sun feeding all our familiar courtyard visitors, it was heartwarming to see all the old friends coming, inspecting, muttering, chirping, tweeting in excitement or displeasure. The most vocal amongst our visitor is a pair of Common Mynas…
Early afternoon we got hooked to a movie on the cable “Neal n Nikki” which we like despite the fact that the movie bombed at the box office – may be general movie going public does not like fun being made of the stuff they really enjoy 😉
After the movie Swati just did not want to stay indoors so I called up Raju and asked if he was game for some bird watching, he was! he has just acquired a new 10×50 and I baited him with my fresh copy of Ripley’s Guide, within 20 mins we were off to Wena Lake situated about 20kms away. For the first time I saw a flock of “Pacific Golden Plovers” and there were 9 of them….
Ummm, seems like awfully small number of words to describe the awesome amount of fun we had over the weekend – but thats that.
The song for yesterday’s evening was Piano man by Billy Joel
“And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar
And say, man, what are you doin’ here?”
Was very tempted to steal some presentation format and fill in the blanks but then as far as LJ goes there are a lot of gaping blanks in what I have chronicled, yes I broke the new year resolution of writing at least twice a week almost the very next month.
On the personal front the year was largely dominated by photography, I managed to setup a small studio and Nivedita was the first model to be photographed there, wish I could have more sessions with her. I attended the New school workshop on photography. In response to a retort that my site was popular only because of my abstract.minimalistic nudes series I stopped updating them for almost 6 months and reintroduced them only after proving my point, have however now removed them to an independent site, will be expanding the project with collaborations and more… I did manage to put up the 1000th picture for display on to my site.
Nagpur Chapter of BNHS triggered the re-launch of passion for bird watching and I splurged on a D70 with a good set of lenses – this was my 500th LJ entry
Things got very hectic from April onwards, We again went to Bangkok. I still had a clean bill of health for the year and we made another trip to Kanha, soon there after Aasim travelled alone to Delhi.
Events are mostly a blur after that – We created the site NagpurBirds.org with a promise to put Nagpur on the birding map and succeeded. I did another ‘first time in life’ thing – joined a gym – have still not given up…
September saw me turning 39, around the same time SANIsoft turned into a private ltd, we got ourselves a new car and took a mini vacation in Pattaya.
This year Diwali Eid and Aasim’s 8th Birthday happened in the same week – the first week of November…
foss.in happened this year was Aasim’s year, we almost did not take him to Bangalore though. For a change I did not give a talk and enjoyed the event much more than ever before. Interspersed between these are periods of work work and still more work. Thankfully I have managed to reign in my working hours and learned to delegate responsibilities at work and the sky does not really fall.
2006!? It is starting with promises of things which are bigger than I/we had ever imagined to be, it is almost scary in a way, like, like school exams but I guess we are prepared. Will write more as things unfold