I‘ve owned the Canon G9 for several years now and for all that time it has been my main camera. It’s a tough little beast and handles most of what you throw at it, but it’s not the most weather and dust-resistant thing. Every time I’ve been off the beaten track in India, I’ve usually come back with some visible dust spots on the lens and near the sensor which have needed cleaning up. This happened a few times within the warranty period, which Canon took care of for me free of charge, but the same happened on my recent trip to Bombay and this time I did not want to spend the large service charges on my ageing camera. So obviously I decided to do it myself.
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About a year ago, a friend saw my original fountain pen drawings of figures and wanted to take some off me to put on his wall. Those were done on regular A4 copy paper and done in regular school-grade blue ink, so I wasn’t too enthusiastic to part with them. I promised I’d do something more elaborate for him on better paper and a larger size in a similar vein for his wall.

As it is with these things, my attempts at drawing figures in that particular pen and ink style didn’t really continue into the rest of last year, although I did plenty of drawing. But when it was time for my friend’s birthday, I decided it had been a long enough wait and worked on this pen drawing of a wood nymph on A3 drawing paper.

This was done with the very same school fountain pen I’ve used previously but this time with black ink, and working on the heavier drawing paper and on the larger scale really helped. I’ll be putting up more process pictures and details in time, but for now, I’m glad to call this project done, and the results are quite pleasing.

Samir

Some of us pride ourselves on our flexibility; Not of the yogic contortionist variety, but of the human kind. Flexibility of beliefs, habits and character is in some ways the filtered evolution of what most human beings are: set in their ways, narrow-minded, and completely self-centred. Flexibility makes for people who are more open to new ideas, new behaviours, and change, that ever present factor in human life. For a species as adaptive as our own, flexible individuals are an essential driving force. Still, flexibility is not the trait of the majority and if you are one of these flexible people, to whatever degree, you are in constant danger of being taken for granted by everyone around you. Whether it is done consciously or subconsciously, it can get very tiring, and frankly, as a flexible person, you should know better than to be so exploited.
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All of us worry, but some worry above and beyond the call of reality. If you’re a writer, storyteller or other spinner of tales and fantasies, you not only worry like the rest of them, but are able to take it to whole new levels of elaboration and absurdity. The average writer’s mind is a scenario engine, a sifter and collator of possibilities and combinations; It is how writing is done, not just on the level of plot, dialogue and character, but also on the level of syllables, words and sentences. Alternatives, and analysing their relative strengths and weaknesses, are at the very core of a writer’s craft. As an unfortunate side effect, worry can come only too easily to a wielder of words.
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I haven’t written a Hindi movie review since Band Baaja Baaraat, not because there have been no films worth writing about, but because none have seemed to need the extra attention, or have required that I share my point of view on them beyond a recommendation. Like the previous film by the same team, however, Ladies Vs Ricky Bahl is a deceptively simple but intricate creature, which pleases me on all the levels at which I enjoy watching movies. Once again, I’ve been given a film I do have a few things to say about.
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Of all the much touted maxims of modern society and intellectual thought, things like separation of church and state, equality and equal opportunity for all and the like, the one I think is the most artificial construct is detached, unbiased and impersonal reporting. There is a prevailing falsehood about the effect of personal bias on the story that a reporter tells and how it affects the perception of ‘the truth’ by the reader. The falsehood is not in believing this bias exists and changes things, but in that it may actually be a perfectly avoidable evil.
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Like much of my fiction reading, The Gates of Eden (1983) by Brian Stableford was picked up in a bargain bin, where all the strangest treasures are to be discovered, this one in a second-hand book store. The cover art by Doughlas Chaffee showed an auburn-haired beauty standing handsomely holding a spacesuit in an alien landscape. I love the traditional science fiction paintings of the time, so I had to see what this was about.

Before the hyper-space vessels could go from planet to planet, stations had to be set up. And that meant manned spaceships cut off from Earth for decades.

The explorer vessel Ariadne had gone toward galactic centre and was considered lost–until its call was heard appealing for a xenobiologist.
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And the blurb continued on the back cover, but I was already hooked and wanted to know more. So I picked up the book.
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