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.

Most of today has been spent trying to keep my hands very steady while taking apart and putting back together the amazingly engineered insides of this camera. This is probably fairly standard compact electronic and mechanical design for those who see this on a daily basis, but for a layman such as me, the insides of the G9 are truly beautiful to behold.

The entire day went by doing this because I only had a general notion of the whole thing after reading up online and watching a video. Reality is always a little more complex, so it did take me a bit of trial and error and messing up to get things done and get it all working again.

By the end I’d taken apart and put together the camera three times. The first time the shutter release stopped working. The second time the camera stopped working completely. Thankfully, in spite of the urge to run around the room screaming in panic, I did go over the whole procedure again and both times it ended up being a loose connection that cased the issue.

There will be more on the topic of the insides of the G9 and how to clean the sensor area in time, because I wasn’t wholly successful on that front either and will have to do all this again. But for now my only thoughts about opening up your camera are these. For most of you, just don’t do it. For the rest, try to know what you’re doing and research it a bit before you get started. And for the truly mad, I suggest not knowing everything before you start. As long as you’re patient and careful, you’ll learn a lot along the way and hopefully put Humpty-Dumpty back together and clicking again.

Samir

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

Table Manners

Food is a basic part of all our lives. For some, it is a defining factor, due to its shortage, or excess, or due to our growing world obsession with food as a cultural interest. There’s a lot of etiquette and modes of behaviour when it comes to sharing food that varies from culture to culture, family to family, and much of this we pick up as children when we aren’t really thinking about it, or when we’re being told what to do. For example, I grew up in a family where it was made clear always that things needed to be shared. If you were eating something you offered it to everyone else. What was there was evenly split and that was that. But that’s not necessarily everyone’s experience, or even the ‘right way’. It is just one way, and one that is practical when resources are not unlimited. Increasingly, I think urban people are growing up imagining that resources are unlimited. We must all have everything and now, not a practical way of looking at the world, but this sense of entitlement is at an all time high and food, being one of the most biologically easy things to obsess over, also gets treated the same way.

Entitlement leads to all out greed and so you will often observe tiffs over food, even in strata of society where there is no shortage of it. Food becomes a competitive sport among children and mostly among adults, which is where the children learn it, let’s not forget. Most siblings will have stories of competitiveness over food and most adults continue that into adulthood, albeit with the delusion of more sneakiness or subtlety. They’re not subtle.

Invariably, in the great food wars that break out silently across tables, floors, fine china, cheap plastic cutlery and every other possible culinary stage, someone either eventually gives in, or is less competitive and let’s others have their way. Know it or not, you are on one of the sides to that equation. Over a bag of French fries, a box of cake slices, a plate of food, are you the one who attacks first and picks the largest piece, or are you the type to wait, to specifically try to take a modest helping, to give others a chance to pick? Choosing food is actually a great indicator of character, I find, and you can sometimes tell more about people over a dinner table than you can over years of small talk and deep discussion. Such things can’t be read into from one stray incident, but most of us have consistent behavioural patterns when it comes to food. When we talk, we usually show what we want to show, but when it comes to eating and such basic instinctive needs, our social filters are less effective. What do you say about yourself when there is slice of cake to be picked off a plate? Something to consider the next time you’re sharing a meal or a snack.

Team work

I really hated group projects in school and college. It always meant one or two people did all the work and the rest just pretended to be doing something until they didn’t have to do anything any more. That was almost my universal experience on the subject and perhaps it was because I was always one of the former group. Of course, ask any of my group mates and I’m sure they’ll tell you they carried the whole group on their back down a flight of flaming stairs personally. But then most people are likely to rewrite such things in their heads, so we’ll forgive them their one and only exercise in imagination.

I remember one particular class where a group of five of us had two weeks to research and prepare a 15-minute presentation. The idea was for the team to decide a topic, break it apart, let the individuals research and prepare their own piece, and then the actual performance would be a coordinated effort, each speaking for 3 minutes or thereabouts. A relative piece of cake. As the two weeks passed, and group meetings made it more and more clear than no one knew what they were doing or even the material that they had supposedly researched, the final day saw me standing up there for 15 minutes, alone, with slides made by me, covering the entire topic. You see, I was flexible, and frankly that presentation wasn’t even a blip in my busy schedule of proper design-projects that kept me working into the early mornings at the time, but the inflexible always take advantage of that. Our group was penalised a little for everyone not presenting, but the mild penalty didn’t really bother me much and the rest of the group probably got a better grade for their “work” than if they would have actually opened their mouths in public. Such is life if you want to ‘get the job done’ over assigning blame, but it’s easy to make a habit of it.

There’s an other aspect about working with others that is important to realise, from offices to families, from colleges to creative collaborations, and I touched on it glancingly with the bit about burning flights of stairs before. In the average team, you have one or two people who actually do everything, the rest will pretend and keep delaying until time has run out and the one or two have no choice but to shoulder the extra burden. After all, they now know more than everyone else; It’s only logical. At this point, or even before, the light-weights will talk, and boy will they talk endlessly! The stories they will tell, the theories they will spin about the intricacies of the work at hand (which they didn’t do and aren’t doing). These people will likely go and write the book about the work that they didn’t do, and it will surely be filled with a lot of large words and lofty concepts. It will also include stories of how they saved the day by carrying the entire team down a flight of burning stairs on their backs.

The ‘system’, whether it be education or employment or industry, is often set up by those who talk, not by those who do. They’re the ones who have enough time to set up the rules and make all those neat little labels on coloured paper while others were shouldering their actual responsibilities. The system will often tell you about ‘playing well with others’, which is usually their way of telling the ones who work to do so quietly and not spoil their delusions of indispensability. As a person who works, you might go along with the charade at times, and sometimes you might not, but it is useful to really dig deep into your self and find out which side of teamwork you fall on. Do you talk too much, or do you do too much? Because I’m sorry to break it to you, but the majority of us talk too much.

Making Time

Of all the resources that you can be flexible with, your time is the most precious, and also the most often and casually exploited. This becomes doubly true if you go through most of your life wearing the label of freelancer. Like it or not, in most people’s heads, this translates to ‘jobless and sitting at home with infinite time on your hands’, and they will often treat you accordingly. The same can be said when you are on vacation, and since my life is usually divided between freelancing and rarer bouts of being on vacation, I know a bit about this topic.

I think time is important. I think people should be on time and keep to agreed schedules and appointments and such. I also think our modern world is too anal-retentive about the subject, and selectively and hypocritically so. In the real world, stuff does happen, even to the most conscientious of us; Tyres go flat, traffic gets blocked, there are emergencies, and some days are just not your days. All these things, I think deserve to be shown a bit of flexibility on some occasions. If someone is stuck in traffic everyday and keeps you waiting an hour, then you have a problem.

During my days of more actively chasing every stray comment about someone needing a ‘designer’ — I use the quotes because what they usually needed was a nanny-slave — I’ve done my share of waiting for people to show up, or even waiting for people to open the door to their office and simply let me in, usually not for any good reason. When it comes to work and business, there is a lot of power-play surging under the surface, a sign of feeble and insecure minds, the same that are secretly declaring war over a dinner plate. People seem to think it’s impressive and intimidating to make you wait in some ways. I just think it’s childish, but needless to say the population of the childish above the age of 10, is not to be underestimated.

If you are a flexible person, everyone else in the world is always much busier than you. It doesn’t matter if you run a nuclear power plant, or a 24-hour cat delivery service, somehow, people with 9-5 jobs where they extensively update Facebook have no time when you need it. Try to make any shared plans, and they are bound to be cancelled or postponed several times, because you take it. Try to get them to commit to a casual meetings, and you’d think a United Nations disaster-relief feasibility team needs to get involved before their schedule will be clear enough for you, mostly because you take it, and also because you will say yes immediately and adjust around your priorities when they call you on a whim. Which kind of creature are you? Are you always waiting and twisting your schedules around others? Or are you the one making people wait and juggle?

Being Understanding

Being flexible starts off on a more basic level, that of empathy. The ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. If you think in that particular way, it’s not always easy to take everything people do as a dire personal affront. It makes you understanding, not just in the practical worldly issues of food, time and work, but also on a more abstract human level. Human beings are complex creatures and our ability to think abstract thoughts have made us both extremely adaptive and also messed-up. Our thoughts and motivations are often at war with themselves and it is quite a miracle that most of us maintain a modicum of sanity.

Part of the mechanism that helps us stay on the mental straight-and-narrow is not an internal one. Social interaction is in many ways our steam valve. We make friends and share things even with strangers because it helps us cope. In communicating, our internal idiosyncrasies are robbed of their sharp edge and we continue functioning normally and without the cares that would overwhelm us without any outlet for our thoughts and worries.

For sharing though, you need people who are not just as enthusiastic to share, but are even more enthusiastic to listen, to understand, to empathise. These listeners are not as common as you’d think, even though they hold such a crucial role in human society. Think about your own life and friends, how many of them would you trust with your thoughts? Your real inner thoughts, not the stuff you say at people to make conversation. I would hazard a guess that that list of people is closer to one or a very small number rather than many.

Listeners need to be understanding, because they cannot be judging what they listen to all the time, and even if they are, they can’t express it to the person trusting them to listen. That would remove the effectiveness of the listener in the transaction. The peril of being a listener, however, is that if you think most people have it tough finding someone to talk to, you as a listener are going to find it exponentially tougher. Most people don’t want to listen to the listener. More likely, they aren’t even really capable because their relationship with the understanding listener was formed largely because they had things to say and he/she was an understanding listener. The deal was never that the favour would be reciprocated, or even could be.

Don’t get me wrong, those who listen well usually like to listen. It fills a need in their lives too, to absorb and understand and comprehend and help. But, listeners are just as fraught with internal conflict as anyone else and even they sometimes have enough of being a resource of understanding. Then there is the fact that the listener is automatically in the position to see patterns of behaviour and recognise when someone is being an idiot in whatever they are thinking, or complaining about, or worrying about. Understanding calls for kid-gloves and mild suggestions rather than full-frontal attack on the motivations of the person sharing their mental secrets, but sometimes a sort of understanding fatigue does set in and all of us who depend on others to listen must always appreciate that burden. We take it for granted too often that they will always be there for us, even when we are not for them.

Personal Space

In my home town of Bombay, there is common refrain in the local dialect of Hindi that says “adjust karneka”. Basically “One must adjust/accommodate”, a sound piece of advice in a city with 20 million people, where personal space is a luxury you are not always allowed, certainly not in public transport. The trains in the city are a phenomenon that defies description and I’m sure breaks all sort of records for number of untrained contortionists that can be fit within a closed container, but I’ll speak more about the buses run by BEST, which are both wonderful in their convenience and ubiquity, and are also a great exercise in studying the adjustments and impositions people make on each other’s personal space.

I love the buses in Bombay, they are rudimentary, simple, airy, cover almost every nook and cranny of the metropolis with startling efficiency, and they just work. Of course, there is as much of an important human element involved in this sort of travel; You interact more with the users of the service than the providers of it and a lot of patterns and unsaid rules get formed out of the chaos. First off, the dos and donts in a bus in Bombay seem to vary based on location, with the more pragmatic office crowd in the centre of town being a lot more adjusting and live-and-let-live than the sometimes hostile and petty familial crowds of the suburbs; It is a strange dichotomy, but very apparent at times.

When I was very young, I remember being told of a time when the buses in Bombay had abolished the system of reserved seats for women. There were still a few seats up front for the disabled to be given preferential access to the door at the front of the bus, but I remember my Mother telling me that public feedback and gotten rid of the women’s special seats because in a teeming culture with no broad segregation of the sexes, it complicated travel to unacceptable levels. But then that was probably sometime in the 70s. Obviously that wouldn’t last. Over the following decades, the reserved seats have been increasing. There’s a block for women, some for senior citizens, the original few for the disabled and the rest (the actual majority in number) need to scramble for what remains, because anything with a label on it is always in danger of being claimed by someone, often wrongly, out of sheer entitlement. That in my mind has been the biggest shift, a move from a culture of social courtesy and adjustment, where a seat would be offered to a woman or someone elderly through deference or request, to a culture of entitlement. Respect being demanded, not commanded. This isn’t understanding any more, this is enforcement with threat of consequences. Threats don’t make us more understanding, they make us disgruntled.

In general, however, things are extremely smooth on the bus as long as most of the passengers have seating. It’s when the standees collect and grow in the aisle that the human element becomes more interesting and challenging. Technically, a bus is rated to carry a certain number of standing passengers and no more. Practically, as with most things in Bombay, transport and space functions at levels of load much beyond the the call of duty. Buses do get packed, to levels that would alarm those that value their personal space, but the whole exercise goes surprisingly well, or as well as it can under the circumstances.

The central aisle in a regular BEST bus is not a grand boulevard. It can comfortably let two average sized Indians pass each other, in 1972. Today, it would only accommodate one average sized McDonald’s junkie. Additionally, at rush hour, the increasingly above-average-sized urban Indian must deal with being either one of the two rows of standing passengers pressed against the sides of the aisle, or the lone acrobat trying to make their way down the aisle, pretty much running the gauntlet between plump persons, heavy handbags, angry commuters, and a sliver of hope at the end of the human tunnel. There are those that make way and those that are inconsiderate, both in the ones hanging on for dear life and those trying to walk through the mass of humanity.

Even if you do get a seat, there are adjustments to be made and those who are civilised and those who aren’t. During rush hour there is a lot of adjusting to be done with those standing over you in the aisle and sometimes leaning over you, out of necessity to let someone pass behind them, or out of sheer exhaustion. Some of this you need to allow for, as a sensible person, because you know that in their position you would not have a choice just as they don’t, but some of it is also simply people being insensitive or not caring. You can understand the occasional handbag that will bump you in the head as someone passes by, see it in the right light and you will even smile at it, I have. But some people do walk by with no regard for their fellow passengers and that’s not a good thing. There are even those who will stand in the aisle and lean on the side of your seat, and will let go of all responsibility of holding themselves up in anything resembling a standing position, until you’re practically bent over in your seat for having to adjust to their laziness; That’s not a good thing either. And then there’s the person you’re sharing your seat with and how they might be good and stick to their side of it, or assume the whole thing was actually for them and you are merely intruding. It takes all types.

Speaking of sharing seats, this reminds me of an observation I need to make about the back seats of cars and penises. No, no, it’s really not what you think. Whatever gender you might subscribe to, have you noticed the startling ability of some men to always instantaneously grow a large penis when they are sharing the back seat of the car with two other people? That’s the only explanation I can think of why they need to keep their legs wide apart enough to take up half the seat and force their co-passengers to squeeze into the space that remains. I only point out men because it is a more common phenomenon with them (ignoring the real or metaphorical penis), but I suspect it is largely social conditioning that allows them to do that while most women still prefer to sit in a more (and I use quotes for a reason) ‘lady-like’ stance. I also suspect that as gender conditioning becomes less of a black and white issue, such imagined tumescence will begin to plague the female population as well. Besides, lets not forget the scientific fact that any three people of female persuasion can and will block corridors of any width no matter how modest their individual girths might be when they are walking together. Flexibility and inflexibility in sharing spaces with other human beings is everywhere to be seen. Are you the kind to make way for people or the one who’s constantly elbowing people into submission?

Saying yes

Being accommodating is partly hard-coded into us as social animals. It is the encouragement of our social systems to be a good ‘team player’ and that often involves accommodating the needs and demands of others. This is why we, as a species, have an inherent fear of saying no to things and this is why marketing works. Having said that, we are quite hypocritical about this issue. We seem to have no trouble saying no to some things, like pesky charity representatives, but have an inordinate amount of trouble with other things, like that limited special offer on TV for the combined refrigerator and vacuum-cleaner with free lifetime supply of garlic mayonnaise. Our propensities are often selective and convenient.

That said, accommodating people isn’t always about someone selling you something, even if an idea. Often it involves making changes in what you want to do, for friends and family, or changing plans or dreams or hopes for someone else’s and to suit some one else’s hopes and agendas. Flexible people do this all the time, but so do cowards and it is often difficult to draw a clear line between the two. I’ve talked before about how saying no is important and how it’s also important to say it well and without losing control, but it does get to a point where the decision to say no is crucial above all else, and how it’s done and to whom need to be ignored. Flexible people can often let their own accommodating tendencies get the better of them and being accommodating while resenting it is not very accommodating at all. You must learn to say no, and others must learn to hear it. It serves everyone well.

On the subject of flexibility, I claim no moral high-ground; I am on the inflexible side of many situations more often that I’m happy with, but that doesn’t change the fact that such divergent behaviour exists and can be seen in you and around you. While flexibility is an important element in society, it is also one that is too often taken for granted, and for that exploitation, the flexible have only themselves to blame. Be flexible, because I think it’s the right thing to do, the human thing to do in most situations, but to make it your blind and default reaction to the world with no regard for whether or not those around you have earned your understanding is an inhuman and automated choice.

If you think you’re flexible, I applaud your work in the world, but flexibility is the ability to adapt and adjust to every situation and need, and sometimes that need is to be inflexible so that others may realise their mistakes, see their inflexibilities, or just realise the existence of the many crutches you provide. If you’re the ever flexible kind, growing a back bone is always a good idea. On occasion, scare the hell out of the cowardly horde by displaying yours. Out of the blue, choose the largest piece of cake, refuse to carry their weight in a team, cancel on too often changed plans and appointments, tell them they’re being stupid when they share their unrealistic worries with your patient ears, stand up and sit tall and unaccommodating to seat hogs and every other manner of insensitive co-traveller on your journey in life; Say no.

And if you’re one of the cowardly horde — Yes, we all like to think we are sacrificing angels, but most of us are in this category on most occasions — You’ve been getting too many free rides for too long. Wake up. Flexible people can stretch a lot, but they don’t always have to and without them you’d likely be lying flat on your face, both literally and metaphorically, in many of life’s situations. Temper your ways, because you won’t like it when they snap back, and you’re not flexible enough to take it.

Samir

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.

The human ability to imagine futures is what makes us creatures of invention and creation, because we can visualise objects, works of art and even ways of life that don’t yet exist. A writer does the same with stories, people, events and conversation. None of this exists except in the writer’s mind until put down on paper in the decided sequence of what is real, and what were mere alternative possibilities. This is how writers create worlds for us to inhabit with our minds, they are the architects of our collective imaginations.

If you’ve ever tried to write anything beyond academic essays, and managed to do it reasonably well, you will be familiar with the mental gymnastics that I’m referring too. When you’re thinking about plots and characters, you ask yourself broader questions. What if this character was tall, or short, or disgruntled, or brave? How would that change the flow of events in this story? Because the best writers are not so much random builders of event and circumstance, they are tinkerers in the vast laboratory of human storytelling, ever adding this element to that and seeing what combinations bring in the colour they are looking for, what pieces produce the explosive emotion they need, what tells the story exactly like they imagined it. This is what makes writing a craft and not merely an art.

Take that ability and mental dexterity into the personal realm, however, and the testing of future theories and the considering of scenarios, conversations and responses becomes an obsessive chess game, the thinker always guessing and second-guessing the next move, and the next million moves of the person or situation being considered, or all of existence itself, if they’re feeling ambitious. And since worry lends itself to pessimism, it’s only natural that even writers, the ones with new universes twirling around their fingertips, tend to concentrate on the scenarios they most fear, the ones that would cause them or their story the most pain, and delve on those, ever replaying the possibilities that lead there and those that lead beyond.

Worrying comes easy to writers, because a kind of controlled worrying is what makes the craft of writing a craft, and a complex one at that. Most of us with some level of literacy can write, stringing sentences together as pure communication, but few can call themselves writers and tell the stories that must be told, or those they have imagined, well and with a sound internal logic and a magnificent beauty. That takes a worrying mind, and in writing and life, the bane of the worrying mind is in not knowing when to stop, not knowing when the considerations surging through its synapses have begun to feed on themselves and serve no purpose other than a soul-sucking downward spiral.

For worrying and for writing, the only solution, the only way out of the maze of forks in the road, of alternative routes and traps along the way, is in decision and action. Thinking can only take you so far, and eventually you have to decide on that one scenario, on that one idea, on that one thing to say which will be the right thing, and then having said the right thing you will let things fall where they may, for even the writer cannot always know where the world of their creation is leading them. Theirs is as much a leap of faith as any other mortal’s, but leap they must.

Creation, whether external or internal, reserves its mystery, even from the ever computing mind of the writer. We can dabble in conjecture, educated guesses and experienced opinion as to what will work and how, but we can’t predict the outcome of the things we create with absolute certainty, in life or in fiction. As writers and as human beings we can only give the process of considering scenarios the benefit of our best understanding; We can draw a line on the blank surface ahead, and keep writing our stories.

Samir

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.

Ranveer Singh returns in this, his second outing as actor, playing a conman who travels through India, swindling young women out of money using a variety of schemes. In Delhi he uses his position as boyfriend of the effervescent Dimple Chaddha (Parineeti Chopra) to con her father into buying property he doesn’t own, in Lucknow he quietly convinces the in-laws of young widow Saira Rashid (Aditi Sharma) to part with a payment for a large order of hand-crafted fabric he has little to do with, and finally in Bombay he cons the hard-nosed corporate employee Raina Parulekar (Dipannita Sharma) to pay millions for a fake painting. The publicity behind that last scandal gets the three women together and they decide to track down their common foe and con him into returning their lost money and more. To do this deed, they take on the help of Ishika Desai (Anushka Sharma), an exceptionally talented sales woman at a local department store, to be his fake new mark. To con the conman, what can be a more challenging game?

A year ago, I described Baand Baaja Baaraat as resembling a golgappa, an explosion of street-side flavours all forming a startling and appetising whole. To continue the street food analogies, I would have to say Ladies Vs Ricky Bahl is more of a Bombay Sandwich. A Bombay sandwich is a similarly deceptive beast. Seemingly made of perfectly ordinary ingredients — tomatoes, onions, cucumber, potato, all sliced and layered between mass produced white slice bread and enhanced with butter, a herb chutney and some workman-like ketchup — you’d think this food, made on street corners by people with a small glass box on a stand, would not be much to write home about, but if you are a fan of food without the pretension, the Bombay sandwich, is delicious, filling, a marvel of food preparation and so much more than what it seems. This film is like that, layered, complex, including entirely predictable ingredients, but the resulting package is surprising, refreshing and endearing in its directness and lack of ostentation.

True to their word a year ago, the film-makers have returned with a film that is very much in the same vein; It is a simple and straightforward tale about enterprising people. This in itself is strange for the world of films, often filled with amateur dramatics by people who are constantly letting circumstances get the better of them. Here a spirit of experimentation and entrepreneurship is lauded and admired rather than ridiculed. Ranveer Singh has grown into an even more refined actor in this film, in a role that requires more restraint than the village-boy character of the previous film did, and Anushka Sharma is similarly more understated and worldly than her firebrand Delhi-girl of the last film. These two are very likely some of the strongest acting talents we have at the moment, and their youth gives us the possibility of many years of interesting performances ahead. The cast delivers handsomely, including a rich collection of supporting characters to tell the story. The three ladies of the title have well fleshed out characters and major roles to play in the film to rival the top-billed protagonists, with Parineeti Chopra doing an exceptional job at incidental humour in her debut performance.

All the hallmarks of Band Baaja Baaraat are here, the exceptional attention to detail brought in by the director Maneesh Sharma, Habib Faisal‘s excellent dialogue, this time lent a touch of sophistication over the rampant colloquialisms of the previous film, a nice shift that suits the tone and setting of this one. The film is exceptionally shot by cinematographer Aseem Mishra, who makes Goa look more attractive and like more of a real place than all the films I can remember that showcased it before. The same goes for the various cities mentioned, which are given their own distinct visual treatment. Set in a more gentrified section of the social milieu, the dramatics have been cut back further in Ladies Vs Ricky Bahl, with much being conveyed in silences, subtle body language and good editing, a brave move in a world of Hindi films approaching ever greater levels of circus-kitsch in the name of irony and intellectual homage. Ladies Vs Ricky Bahl is unapologetically clean, minimal, calculated, and entirely free of cheap tricks, clawing melodrama, and unnecessary twists.

The real wonder of Ladies Vs Ricky Bahl is that like the Band Baaja Baaraat, it embraces the methods and madness of its subject matter. If the previous film was in many ways one long wedding celebration, this film is a very elaborate con. The trailers will have you expecting a very slick and extremely ‘cool’ film with the cool protagonists acting cool all the time, as numerous high-concept cons are in progress. The reality is much simpler, less dramatic, and much more heartfelt. Ladies Vs Ricky Bahl remains about the people, and the cons are straightforward, fairly practical and do not try to break new ground in convoluted scheming. More importantly, you might walk in expecting a huge showdown between the two protagonists, the allegedly warring con artists, but what you are given is a story that’s as much about the three less-than-scrupulous women who are conned, as it is about the two people on most of the posters. The alleged supporting cast are more often the focus of this film, and the hero and heroine are the means to an end; Albeit a very talented and extremely entertaining means to an end.

As a big fan of heist films, I know one of the oft repeated rules of the genre is that you can’t really con an honest person. That is the unsaid crux of this story; No one conned is truly honest, with the conman merely exploiting what they want in all the cases. And as the audience, this film demands of you a certainly honesty too. If you are a true lover of movies for all the things that make them one of the greatest mediums of storytelling and entertainment, you will love the con of this film, of giving you something very different from what you might have expected. If you’re in it for the frivolous glamour and to gossip about the steamy blatantness of it all later, you are likely not going to get it. Like the Bombay sandwich, all you may see is bread and vegetables, when what you’re given is so much richer than the sum of its parts. Needless to say, I am an ardent admirer of both the Bombay sandwich, and this little masterpiece of a film, and I hope Maneesh Sharma and gang continue to makes these surprise packages of entertainment whenever the mood suits them.

Samir

P.S. It seems unfair that only I should have Jigar da tukda, one of Salim-Sulaiman‘s excellent musical contributions to this gem, stuck in my head on loop, so here you go.

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.

I just finished reading Dreaming in Code, and what stays with me after Scott Rosenberg‘s comprehensive and appropriately fragmented tale of the early years of the Chandler open source project, is not primarily the insights gleaned about the process of programming software, although those were numerous enough even for a closet coding enthusiast like me, but rather the impressions that remain from his last concluding chapter with his more personal take on his involvement with the project and its originator Mitch Kapor. Stray bits and impressions from a quick scanning of his end notes, and the human dynamic of 3-years on a project like this, which emerges from his acknowledgements, is what will stick until my next reading.

Detachment is a fine theory, but what does it most often yield? Dry, uninteresting, unengaging, indecisive waste, for the most part, which forms the daily news. There’s a reason I don’t read the news, because as we step into a world of instant feedback, always-on telecommunication and global sharing of information, you come to realise that ‘the facts’ are in fact not all they are cracked up to be. I never read the news, on paper or on screen, so you can save your breath about my personally contributing to the downfall of fat publishing empires by not buying a ‘real’ newspaper. In spite of my disinterest in the news of the world, however, I am somehow constantly aware of the facts of the world, more than I would like on most days. For example, I can’t help but see a few headlines on the Yahoo! home page every time I log-out of my often neglected email address. Even less avoidable is the exposure to the essentials of what has people huffing and puffing in short 140-character bursts on Twitter. And this, mind you, is after following less than 50 active tweeters, none of whom are closely related to traditional news media. ‘The Facts’ are much simpler and cheaper than you think.

There are, of course, the ever fascinating gory details of how many dead, and how exactly people died, and what new suffering I should be fearing for myself based on what’s happening in the world, but those are drugs I’ve never been interested in smoking. I find my thoughts, as cutting and disturbingly cynical as they can be, to be infinitely more interesting and educational than any amount of surrogate suffering dished out on a daily basis by objective reporting and devoured by most. So I decline to partake.

As soon as there is a reporting of events, even facts, there is a subjectivity to them. Subjectivity, the bias of the observer, is a simple fact of existence that even science has a growing realisation of, so it seems pompous and entirely self-serving for news and non-fiction writing to maintain some religious sense of objectivity. There is no real balance, or covering every side, or seeing both viewpoints, when we gladly ignore the viewpoint that’s clearly counter to any social norm or against the current mode of politically correct thinking. News and objectivity in reporting is a myth and it is about time we realised this. Perhaps the slow decline of print media and traditional news channels is in part an unconscious realisation of this fact, brought on by that great leveller of ‘balanced’ opinion, the internet. The internet, as an amorphous entity, is ever ready to go off on clearly inhuman tangents if those tangents are popular enough, or to challenge nonsense if it isn’t popular enough to ignore. The reality of balanced reporting, and the fantasy of everyone having their say, is closer to utter chaos than utopia.

Why then chase this outdated dream, when the invested reporter or writer, one who accepts their role in the process of observation, interpretation, and representation in relatable stories, is so much more affecting and informing? Why must the events and stories of the world be read in long pages of pretend facts when those could be read and gleaned in bullet-points, and when a personal story about the broader sweep of events, developments and people, even if it attempts to stick to the ideals of objectivity, can be so much more informing, involving, eye-opening, insightful, and most importantly, more human?

As human beings, we read for an insight into what another human being thinks and feels, and what they glean from their interactions or observations of other human beings. This is the fundamental human activity, the one thing that takes us beyond the level of instinctive beast, this sharing of memories and stories of self-analysis. Stories are human, the ones that are born in the human imagination, and those that merely pass through the imagination between the observing senses and the storehouse of experience. The human imagination is an essential aspect of our humanity and also the way we perceive and understand the world. Yet as a society, we have chosen to ignore this equal power at our table, and we’ve banished it to the position of unacknowledged bastard or entertaining buffoon, the black sheep of the family we must all be ashamed of. It has gotten to the point where we even refuse to acknowledge that the imagination is the only one at the table that reads and describes a picture of our world to the rest of our being, the virtually blind masses of our intellect. ‘Stop dreaming’ is the commonly spit out warning of the vengeful adult as the unfettered child is slapped out of listening to their imagination, their storyteller, and another bastard is born.

We lose ourselves in fiction and fantasy, because in that realm the human spirit is sanctioned in its biases, its emotional investments, its unbalanced interpretations, its unobjective reporting of the facts. But in the things through which we learn of and understand the world, the stories and non-fiction accounts through which we explore our real world passions, learn our crafts, form our personalities and absorb our opinions, we choose to banish all those parts of our minds that make us who we are. We see emotion as a guilty pleasure, tucked between the lines and secretly sniggered at in mental back-alleys like a dirty thing, all the time self-righteously proclaiming a perfect objectivity that cannot exist. We live a lie, when what we should be doing is embracing the filter of our existence and demanding that our tellers of facts and stories be human rather than feign inhumanity, while remembering that there is no perfection in the given truths.

As writers, we must strive above all else to be human, tell the story of human affairs honestly, and with all the emotions, pains, biases and joys which our humanity grants us the ability to see and to share. To not do so would be dishonest and hypocritical. To imagine that doing so is a completely avoidable evil would be delusional and dangerous.

Samir

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.
…

And the blurb continued on the back cover, but I was already hooked and wanted to know more. So I picked up the book.

Lee Caretta is the xenobiologist who narrates his tale. The book drops us straight into one of his nightmares, which we learn he suffers from on occasion, along with blackouts. All this is unknown to his space-faring colleagues and is nearly forgotten as he gets a call to visit the vessel Araidne which currently orbits a strange habitable swamp planet dubbed Naxos. The entire initial survey team has died suddenly and mysteriously, and Caretta, along with a few other experts, is called in to find out how it happened. They must determine if the planet is safe enough for further exploration and possible colonization, which was the Ariadne’s original mission in heading off into the unknown.

The author, Brian Stableford, is a scientist. It shows through in the thoughts and words of the characters in The Gates of Eden. Thankfully, he is also a very fine writer of fiction and the short book makes for gripping reading with much to admire in the crafting of the phrase and the succinctness of the words. The book plays out like a very tight procedural, a science fiction murder mystery of sorts, with the usual assortment of shady characters and unknown motivations, but mixed liberally with a whole lot of biological discussion and hard-core science-fiction musings. The reality this story creates is an intriguing one, because on one hand humanity has found other habitable words and intelligent alien species and faster-than-light travel, and on the other hand, Earth has undergone no revolutionary changes and remains very much as we can experience it now, stagnant for centuries. It’s a premise that is dramatic in its mundanity.

I enjoyed The Gates of Eden, not just because it is very well written in a technical sense and engaging, but because it took me back to a childhood of reading Asimov and those more straight-forward and clean science fiction stories of old. It is from a school of science fiction written by a particular type of geeky writer, perhaps for a particular type of geeky reader. The story is, at its core, an episode of Star Trek. A ship arrives in orbit around a planet, there is a mystery to solve, teams go down to the surface and intrigue and adventure follows. This is procedural science-fiction at its best, and it even abides by many archetypal elements from those old stories I grew up reading; There is the mildly ineffectual male protagonist, a female sidekick who is his superior in many ways, the both practical and philosophical discussions about science and humanity, and in the end, the real problems are solved by people putting their heads together and figuring things out with words and discussion rather than just incendiary devices and bravado.

There are complaints that can be made about The Gates of Eden, mostly to do with the fact that it might feel too short, and in its brevity, many of its plot choices and character motivations come out feeling clichéd. However, I do wonder whether those choices would have seemed tired back in 1983, before all of us had been exposed to thousands of hours of rehashed television plots and a multitude of pulp fiction in every conceivable medium.

While this is by no means a masterpiece of fictional storytelling, I can say unequivocally that it is gripping, it kept me entertained throughout the reading, and I know I will read it again given a spare day with some time to kill in cerebral relaxation. That can’t be said for a lot of fiction, and I don’t think there can be a better testament to the qualities of a story.

The Gates of Eden is a wonderful little nugget of science fiction which is over a little sooner than you would like it to be. But within that time, it creates in your mind a comprehensive universe, alien and yet not too far removed from our own, characters who are utterly relatable even within their archetypes, and a story that keeps you entertained, occupied, and imagining. Such stories are always a pleasure to live.

Samir

My ever-restless and creative friend Reena was recently talking to me about a series of photographs she’d taken over her last trip to a national park in her neck of the woods. They were just not turning out as dramatic and eerie as she wanted them to. This, of course, set my photographer-sense tingling and I wanted to know what the original pictures were like and why they weren’t working out.

She had already attempted a black & white version of one of the images of a rock pool, and while it was fairly dramatic, the flatness of the tones and a very bright highlight told me that the image was very likely overexposed. Since my curiosity had been piqued, I asked her to send me the original image to play around with. Since I was playing anyway, I thought I’d record my thought process as I tried to fix this overexposed photograph.

Exposure Correction Tools

The best cure for overexposure is prevention. Making sure you get a properly exposed shot from your camera is really the only true answer, and you can usually do that by setting the Exposure Compensation to a negative(-) setting in your camera (if you’re using one the automatic or semi-automatic modes). In daylight, at least, I find most digital cameras tend to overexpose, and a bit of negative exposure compensation does nicely.

Even with these precautions, however, the odd overexposed shot does slip through, so it’s helpful to know how to salvage them on the computer. For these corrections, a proper photo-editing application is the best way to go. I am well aware that there are now a slew of software tools like Aperture and Lightroom and the like, which make it much easier to handle large volumes of images with various automated pre-sets and complex features. They take a lot of the decision-making out of the hands of amateur who just wants a stunning image with the least amount of fuss. I don’t know anything about those and am more of the hands-on type of photo editor, so my choice of tool is a more nuts-and-bolts image editor which I use for all my professional work, and that is the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program).

A layer-based photo editor gives you the best fine-grained control over the final image if you know what you’re doing, and if you’re serious about photography in the digital age, you would do well to learn your way around one of these. It’s very much like printing your own pictures in the dark room in the old days as compared to handing it over to a photo shop, even a professional one.

GIMP comes with a fairly complex collection of built-in features and capabilities but I will also be using one additional plugin script for the software called Shadows & Highlights, which well help us deal with some of the specific issues faced in badly exposed images. So if you want to try these methods on your own photos, I suggest you get a hold of these tools, which are both free, keep the GIMP manual open to figure out the specifics if you get lost, and follow along.

What is Overexposure?

The concept of exposure is at the very basis of photography. Photographs are formed or captured by light falling on a sensitive surface for a specific fraction of time. In the old days that surface was film, and today it is often a digital sensor. Either way, the concept remains the same; A certain amount of light energy is required to be captured to form a clear image. Dark scenes thus need a longer exposure, while bright subjects require a shorter exposure time. A dark scene that isn’t exposed for long enough turns out dark and underexposed, while a bright scene exposed for too long creates an image which is overly bright and overexposed.

This is exactly what has happened in this original image. The sensors in cameras that decide on exposure and other settings in automated modes, look at the average light quality of the scene in front of them and mathematically calculate the optimum exposure time. If a scene is very evenly lit, these averages turn out good results, but in scenes with drastic contrasts of light and dark, averages are often skewed away from the ideal. This is how, in an image like the one above, the camera can select a longer exposure to properly capture the dark and shadowy cave and rocks, which leads to the sunny parts of the scene being washed out with an excess of light.

This is apparent when you’ve looked at enough photographs and know how it works, but it is still useful to analyse these images more thoroughly to understand exactly what has gone wrong. One method to do this is to use a visual tool called an image histogram. This is a graph representing the amount of light, dark and medium value shades in an image. Many cameras can show you this read-out live on the scene, but once you have opened your photo in GIMP, you can display its histogram by going to the image menu Color > Info > Histogram. That displays the Histogram dialogue shown above.

The histogram represents the occurrance of shades in the image ranging from black on the extreme left to white on the extreme right. So as you can see from the histogram of our overexposed photo, it has no pure black or very dark shades at all, and you can see a sliver of the graph that shoots up on the white end, showing that some of the highlight areas of the image have been washed out into pure white.

This washing out of highlights is the more serious issue with overexposed images. Dark shades can be darkened, but once a highlight has been washed out into pure white, a phenomenon called clipping, there is very little that can be done to restore the visual information lost in those places.

The fact is, nothing in the real world is ever a mathematically pure white. There is always a tinge of colour and variations of shade in even the whitest of objects, so when something is captured as pure white in a photo, it is merely a symptom of not enough information being captured for that area. Look at the excessively darkened section of our image above and notice how the highlight foliage is beginning to turn red. That is because the pure white has no correct colour information, so the computer mathematically jumps to red when extreme darkening is attempted. There is almost nothing to be done about this particular problem, but first, let us tackle the broader overexposure problem.

Level Adjustment

The best place to start correcting exposure problems like this, is to remove that gap in the image histogram we saw earlier, and stretch the photo’s values across the entire range of dark to light. We can do this by bringing up the Adjust Color Levels tool through the image menu Colors > Levels.

The levels dialogue includes a histogram display, but this time with adjustments for the black point, white point and mid-point or gamma of the image, which are represented respectively by the black, white and grey triangles below the graph display. You can adjust the image by sliding around those triangles to new positions along the graph, or changing the numerical values in the boxes below them (0-255). For this image, the idea was to close the blank gap on the dark end of the graph so the black point was moved towards the point where the image data actually began. To solve the excess brightness of the image the gamma point was also moved to reduce the level of the middle values to something more natural looking.

As you can see from the resulting image above, this one adjustment to the photograph already gives it much more depth, and makes it look more true-to-life than the washed-out original. Levels adjustment is one of those essential tools in a photographer’s toolbox to improve almost any photo and bring it close to what was intended. Learn to use it well, because for a universally applied adjustment it pays dividends for very little effort.

Selective Layer-Based Image Improvements

Universal adjustments to image quality are all you need if you have a perfectly exposed shot, but as the scenarios get more complex and the subjects more varied, you need to start delving into layer-based adjustments to the whole or parts of the image. Some areas of a photo often need to be processed differently to get a good result and that’s where editable layers and layer blending come in.

In photo manipulation software, layers are like transparent plastic sheets stacked on top of each other. Things can be put on these sheets to super-impose them on whatever is below without erasing it, with what is below showing through the transparent parts.

Photo editing layers go further in allowing the top layer to affect the look of the layers below it by blending with them using various mathematical methods. There are a growing number of blending modes in most software, but there a few basic ones that are universally helpful. In Normal mode the layer simply super-imposes itself on the layer below, depending on the transparency of the imagery on the top layer, and also optionally on the opacity setting of the layer. In normal mode, layers work exactly like plastic sheets.

The three modes shown in the image above are particularly useful in photo editing. The three sections of the image were created by duplicating the image layer, so that there are two stacked layers with the original photograph on it, and then changing the blending mode on the top layer.

The Screen blending mode lightens the result depending on the lightness of the the image on the layer. A light area lightens more than a dark area. The Multiply mode has an opposite effect, darkening the final image, with the dark areas having a stronger effect than the light ones. The Overlay mode mixes the previous two modes, with light areas lightening and dark areas darkening the final image result. By applying these blend modes on duplicated layers of photographs, many exposure issues can be corrected with a great degree of control, by varying the opacity of the affecting layer.

Since layers can have only sections of the image and transparent non-affecting parts, it allows us to selectively apply these effects on only some parts of the image to make more localised adjustments. This is exactly what the Shadows & Highlights script mentioned earlier helps you with. If you downloaded and installed it correctly, it should be accessible through the Image menu Filters > Light and Shadow > Shadows & Highlights.

The Shadows & Highlights dialogue that appears has two settings which you can change but you don’t need to, because they have no permanent effect. The plugin works by extracting a blurred version of the shadow areas and the highlights areas of the image and creating new layers with them.

The new layers are set to the Overlay blending mode with the ‘fix highlights’ layer rendered in black and the ‘fix shadows’ layers rendered in white. The image above shows what the two layers look like if set to the normal blending mode. If you remember the earlier description of the Overlay mode, this means the ‘fix highlight’ layer darkens the highlights and the ‘fix shadow layer’ lightens the shadows. How much of an effect they have can be adjusted by changing the opacity of the layers and it is simply their initial opacity which is affected by the plugin settings.

For this image I chose to switch off the ‘fix shadow’ layer (click on the eye icon in the layers list), because the problem wasn’t with the shadows. The ‘fix highlights’ layer was kept on full opacity to bring back as much detail as possible from the light areas.

Trying to Recover Detail in Clipped Highlights

The clipped highlights are always the trickiest part to handle, because there is no amount of mathematics that can be applied to it to get back what was lost. Baring painting in all the missing details manually, there really is no way to recreate the missing detail, like in that one blown out branch in our overexposed image. That doesn’t mean the loss can’t be minimised, however, so I experimented with making the best of what was available. This entire section is entirely optional and may or may not even work for many images.

Since detail had gone missing, I thought I’d try to add in some random noise at least, to not have that part of the image be the only blank colour. I created a new layer filled with a middle grey, and then applied the RGB noise filter accessed from the menu Filters > Noise > RGB Noise.

The noise needed to only be applied to that one clipped highlight, so I right-clicked on the noise layer and created a layer mask using the Add Layer Mask option, setting it to white when asked. A layer mask decides which parts of a layer are opaque and transparent, without losing any actual image data. White makes the entire layer visible. The ‘fix highlights’ layer already had a selective representation of the highlights, so selecting that layer, it was copied (Edit > Copy), and then selecting the layer mask of the noise layer, the copied image was pasted (Edit > Paste). With the new floating layer anchored into the layer mask by right clicking on it and selecting Anchor. Now all the highlights were black on a white background in the layer mask, but since that would make the highlight areas of the noise layer disappear, the layer mask was inverted by selecting Colors > Invert from the menu.

All the highlight areas of the image now had the RGB noise appearing in them. Since I wanted them only for the branch in the top left corner, I selected the layer mask and right clicked on it to make it visible using the Show Layer Mask option. Then used the Magic Wand tool in the toolbox (with a threshold setting of 20 in this particular case) to select that white shape of the branch. I then used the Selection > Grow menu to increase the selection by a few pixels in every direction to make sure the highlight shape was fully covered.

To make sure everything else on that layer was transparent, I inverted the selection on the Layer Mask and then used Selection > Clear to make everything except the branch black. Now the RGB noise layer would only affect the branch in the corner.

Now, since pure balck & white noise isn’t exactly a natural occurrence, it was time to bring some colour into it. Making sure the RGB noise layer was selected and not the layer mask (notice the white border around the grey noise in the Layers list, rather than around the mostly black layer mask to its right), the Colorize dialogue was brought up from the menu Colors > Colorize. The Hue and Saturation slider were adjusted to create a leaf green. Here the saturation slider has been set to 100 to heighten the effect, but that should be lower to fit in with the natural colours in the image.

Perfectly sharp noise is also unnatural so the noise layer was then blurred using the Filters > Blur > Gaussian Blur dialogue set to 10 pixels to create a more muted noise effect. To complete this attempt to add detail to the clipped highlight, the noise layer was set to the Dissolve mode which creates a mosaic-like noise effect on the image below, and layer was also duplicated with the top copy set to the Burn mode to darken the highlight area using the noise as a template, with a lowered opacity to make it blend in.

The dual noise layers did a decent job of adding some detail to the highlight and even helped recover some of the edge details of the branch. I wouldn’t say the dissolve and burn layer modes are the definitive method to achieve this effect. In fact, the dissolve mode can be quite distracting in most images, but I hope this gives you an idea as to the sort of thinking that can help you experiment with the various modes to achieve the effect you need.

The final layer-adjusted image above is quite strong and would be enough of an improvement in most cases, but I thought the image could still be pushed a little more for that extra dramatic flair.

Monochrome Layers For Dramatic Images

No matter what political and social arguments can be put forward about the dangers of the supposedly new issue of manipulated images, there is no such thing as a real photograph. Every photo is a representation, either a limited one, or a heightened one, based on what the equipment is able to record. So there is no less validity in processing an image to create the desired effect as there is in trying to make it “real”.

Since this little experiment started with the need to create a dramatic image, I thought I’d try bringing in the power of B&W into the mix. While a conversion of a colour image into monochrome isn’t always desirable, black & white images do have a sense of drama and a graphic starkness to them that few will deny. So even if you don’t want to lose colour information, a monochrome layer can often help you push an image into pleasingly dramatic territory. I flattened all the layers that I’d created thus far and made a new image file to work on from this step forward. Such consolidation is often necessary when working on large images, for both your sanity and that of your computer hardware.

I duplicated the image layer to create a B&W version to play with. The simplest way to do the conversion is through the Colors > Desaturate menu, which will convert the current layer to monochrome using the setting provided. For many images, it can do a decent job of it, but there are other methods too.

The B&W conversion method that can provide the most dramatic flair, I find, is a GEGL operation in GIMP simply called c2g (colour to greyscale). It can be accessed in the menu under Tools > GEGL Operation, and then selecting c2g from the drop-down list.

This c2g operation can be very slow and processor intensive, so use it and make settings changes with care, especially if the live preview is enabled. It allows for 3 settings. Radius is a pixel size that is considered to create the range of greys. Setting it to around the width of your image will give you good results. Samples should be used with care because a higher number makes for a smoother image, but anything more than an increase of a few points can bring older computers to their knees. Increasing Iterations is also meant to improve quality, but the effect isn’t clear enough to bother with in most cases. Using mostly modest settings, I created a c2g version of the image on a new layer.

Considering the very high contrast look of the images produced by the c2g method, I set the layer opacity to 50% to temper the effect on the colour image, and blended the layer using the Darken only mode. This way the white areas of the c2g image wouldn’t effect the colours while the dark areas would deepen the shadows and provide more visual depth.

A final touch was to add a darkened vignette effect to the edges of the image. This was achieved by creating a new layer filled with a plain black. I then created a layer mask for it to control how much of it shows through. To create the vignette itself, the layer mask was filled with a radial black-to-white gradient with the whites towards the edges, so that the black fill of the layer would show through. The Colors > Brightness/Contrast adjustments were used to tweak the gradient as needed, and the vignette layer was then set to the Soft light blending mode to allow it to darken the edges without completely drowning them in black.

I am generally happy with the final result, because it corrects the problems with the image and also manages to achieve the drama that was missing. Having said that, it’s not perfect and I’m sure more tinkering would yield better results at various steps in the process described. Also, there are always options such as cropping to solve some of the issues, which were not considered for this particular walk though. The noisy highlight at the top left is an improvement, but the image would be a lot better if that top horizontal band of the photograph were removed completely to create a more wide-screen format image, for example.

These and many other improvements are possible and entirely different ones will be possible with the particular image you try these methods on. The purpose of this exercise has been less to tutor you in exact techniques and more to expose you to the thought process of trying to correct images. Once you understand more of that you will be better equipped to adapt your techniques to the need of the individual images and your intended effects for them.

Most of all, experiment, and learn your way around the software and the way layered editing works. Your photographs will be better for it.

Samir

We all made paper boats when we were kids. If you lived through even a single monsoon in India, it would seem unnatural not to, and they were a lot of fun to make too. My Grandmother’s place in Bombay used to be an old muddy compound back then, and when it rained a small pond would form at the base of the stairs leading down from the building. The water would collect there and as the monsoon progressed it would get deeper, because eventually the soil was saturated and couldn’t absorb any more. It was probably only ankle-deep water, but you know how proper civilised people are about “dirt”, so after much “suffering” someone decided it might be a good idea to throw a few bricks there as stepping stones to save them from the muddy water.

When the monsoon passed, these three or four bricks lay scattered in front of the stairs quite senselessly in the summer. Of course, they wouldn’t stick around for too long. Eventually some galli cricket (street cricket) crew would run out of stray objects to use as their wicket, and the precious life-giving bricks would be stolen away, once again to leave the good people of Paraag building at the mercy of the coming deluge.

One day, at some point before the rains arrived, the bricks were thrown around as always and someone had the brainwave that this thing could be made steal-proof, and into a permanent solution for future monsoon seasons. The local mason was called, I’m sure his advice was taken on the cheapest solution, and a half bag of cement was poured like dough right over where the slip-shod bricks stood by chance and stray kicks from careless feet in the darkness of night. The next morning, in the shadow of the Jaam tree that canopied over that little front yard of the building, this strange misshapen bridge led from the stairs to the middle of nowhere. In this case, the middle of nowhere happened to be the place along the slope of the muddy yard where the water reached acceptable civilised levels of monsoon yuckiness.

It soon rained, and the bridge worked fairly well, although when the torrent was extra-heavy the water would go over even that device. What it did for the compound though, which I’m sure was not in the civil engineer’s plan for the ambitious bridge, was to divide the waters that flooded the front yard in two. You stepped off the stairs and to your right was the majority of the yard that formed a large shallow puddle that would seep into the soil in time. To the left was a smaller portion of the yard, guarded by a head-high tree with little white flowers, which we would often pluck to suck out the meagre nectar from. That portion of the newly dammed yard was deeper, and maybe because of the small tree, the water would stick around there for quite a while longer than in the other half.

Thus the waters were divided in the front yard and the left pool was always deeper than the right. The large pool on the right had the mentioned canopy of a large pink-fruited Jaam (wax apple) tree that loomed over it. The tree was technically in the next compound, but trees have very little respect for real-estate boundaries. The left side pool had the little flowering shrub, and it had a sparse canopy of another Jaam tree, this one the white-fruited variety, that hung over it. An old Ashoka (Mast) tree stood in the corner, before the yard led into a widish path that led towards the street between buildings. When it rained, the smaller deeper pool would be a shimmering mess of droplets attacking the surface, while the large shallow pool in the shadow of the tree’s canopy would be quite detached, with the large droplets of collected water from the 3-storey-high leaves making giant ripples in the overgrown puddle.

For paper-boat-making children, the new cement bridge was a mixed blessing, at best. On the one hand it had cut off the yard so that you had to choose which side to deposit your vessel in, if you were going to step down for that. If you were going to be brave and drop the boat from my Grandmother’s first-floor balcony, it had to be the large shallow puddle which it over-looked. But, on the other hand, the deeper puddle off to the left could sustain a well made boat for hours, and with the eddies and currents formed around the bark of the flowering shrub, the boat would make its own complex voyages around its little ocean.

Still, the large puddle that covered two-thirds of the yard had its attraction, beyond the ease of a dropped boat. It was large, but also more adventurous because there was always the danger of your perfectly crafted vessel being downed by a good solid droplet from on of the leaves above. More frustratingly, the pool shallowed out towards the edges very quickly and many were the brave explorers who were grounded on treacherous land before their time. Thankfully we were patient, and not beyond the adventure of sneaking down in the rain and setting a grounded boat adrift again; Gods playing with the fate of imaginary heroes, watching their every move, hoping for the winds to be favourable.

On some occasions, when were were truly in the mood for seafaring, we would step down to the ground-floor, sit in the meagre shade of the little landing at the base of the wooden stairs, protected from the elements, and old school notebooks would be plundered. Boats were built and launched, and the misshapen cement bridge acted as fancy jetty into the very heart of the vast divided ocean.

Companions at our shipyard at the bottom of the stairs varied over time and with occasion. There were always my cousins who lived in the suburbs, who would often stay over during holidays. There was this little girl who was the niece of the Bengali lady who lived down-stairs. She visited during a few summer vacations from Calcutta. Well, she was not little then, slightly older than me, ever active, vaguely bossy, and always wearing a white petticoat.

There was also the resident cat, who would sit there to get out of the rain, only to be shooed away by the Mangalorean family who lived across one half of the ground-floor. They were used to doing this from the many visits of the fish monger to their door step when the cat would try to insert itself into the proceedings. When driven away on these rainy occasions, it would run off, stand a little away and stare back with a look that seemed to say, “I’m not here for the fish this time fools!”, and then wander off in that vaguely disdainful way of cats.

Also, at the base of the stairs, in the mud, were an ever growing population of earthworms, crawling up the masonry to escape the big deluge. I tried to step around them carefully as far as possible, and while none were knowingly harmed, one or two might have been sent off on voyages by sea. It seemed like the decent thing to do considering I couldn’t go myself.

Many discoveries were made there in the rain. The best way to make the standard origami boat. How important it was to have that little hat of air at the bottom, to keep it from tipping over on its side. And also new boats and new tricks. Either by some serendipitous folding from a paper balloon design, or with some instigation by someone else, (I don’t remember now, although it seems like something I could have come up with) eventually we discovered a floating boat-like thing that looked like a tank with a gun-turret in front. Soon entire navy fleets were setting off, and since the design was a blow-up rather than an open vessel, it often survived longer if the paper was stiff enough.

In time, double-hulled boats were tried, and even sail boats, although I never had much luck with those. And then an Italian gondola was attempted, which like all my initial origami knowledge was supplied by my Father painstakingly having learnt it somewhere and repeating it for me till I got it right.

Eventually the fun would stop. Other more concerned parents would order their children back into their houses, or my Mother would give in to my Grandmother’s proclamations of the end of the world and a calamity of children’s health of galactic proportions, and I’d climb up the wooden stairs with the smooth banister and head home. Heads would be vigorously treated with precious dry towels, clothes might be changed, and then I’d be back leaning over the balcony checking the progress of my comrades on the waters.

In later years, when the school frenzy reached new heights, there were no vacations in India during the usual monsoon season, and these chances diminished. In time the cement bridge was demolished and the entire compound was tiled in stone; Some all-encompassing municipal order to avoid stagnation and mosquitoes, and just like that the seas were gone.

Now the rains fall and the leaves drop their droplets in a shallow film of water over the stone. There is still suffering to be had in the rains for those who insist, but for some strange reason, even though I don’t have to, when a torrent is on and I’m heading towards home, I will always follow the path where the old brick and cement bridge used to stand. There are no oceans on either side any more, no stepping stones to step on, but my feet are sure and my mind set on not disturbing the sailing grounds of all the adventurers who sailed before.

Samir

For writers, bookshops are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you were probably first inspired to have writing ambitions somewhere in a bookshop, surrounded by the wonder of words; On the other hand, bookshops and the books in them can be the greatest obstacle to writing that was ever conceived.

I am often asked by people much better read than me, whether I have read their favourites from the recommended reading list, be it a Victorian classic or a modern fantasy marvel. More often than not, I haven’t read them, because I never followed the recommended reading lists and because I simply haven’t had the time. Think about it, the most common sort of book, the novel, is hundreds of years old. Many of its classic examples are from the early decades of its existence, but ever since then that list of recommended novels has been growing every year. There are the popular but well regraded yarns, there are the much awarded and much lauded brilliances, and there are the cult favourites that grow in popularity with time and discussion. All these are recommended, and with time, it becomes more and more impossible to read even a minor selection of them, if you wish to do anything in life besides read. That’s not even considering the other forms of book in both fiction and non-fiction.

Obviously, doing nothing but reading in life is a possibility, either as off-hours entertainment or as your work, if you’re one of those few people who worked their way into the position of a book reviewer or other commentator on literature. On some days it might be a chore, but on most days you are doing what you love for a living. If you are a writer and not just a reader, however, losing yourself in the created world of others is not a healthy option for your craft. For a writer, reading is an education but education is also the easiest form of procrastination, especially when it comes as easily as to a writer.

When I walk through the doors of a large bookshop, especially one with a sprawling fiction section, with its multiple aisles of carefully segregated genres and wonderfully balanced stacks of best-sellers, I am at once overwhelmed and also taken over by a form of book-lust. Those among you who would consciously admit to your bibliophilia will know what I am talking about. For that moment, you are utterly consumed by an impulse to read absolutely everything in front of you and posses every beautiful edition of every middling piece of franchise fantasy, because you are besotted and that is how lust works. Then your rationality kicks in, to some extent, and you resolve to not give in completely to your impulses. You lose yourself among the sweet smelling aisles and you come out either victorious against the overwhelming paperback hordes, or having come to a respectable compromise between your spending money and your book lust.

Respectable compromises are a relative and varied thing. I know many people who likely dispose most of their disposable income on books, and quite random ones at that. Not necessarily good ones or memorable ones or collector’s editions or special editions, just any books. They are addicted to reading. They’re reading all the time, every day of he week, every hour of the day, and when they’re not, they’re either pretending to work at a job or bragging in various social circles about all the books they just read.

Some of them even have ambitions as writers. I understand the feeling completely, they would be writing right now, but they really need to read more to hone their craft, to absorb the techniques of the masters, to ridicule the foibles of the literary quacks, to criticise the uneven sentence formation of the popular authors with their long-running book series and their populist fan followings. They need to learn more and then their masterpieces will be written. I know that most of them will never write.

No one ever became a master chef by eating a lot and doing little else. No one became a magician of culinary flavours by only analysing the preparations of others and never crying over an onion. The only way to learn how to write, to write well, and maybe even become a “writer”, if you must, is to write, and the more you read without control, the less that is likely to ever happen.

Sure you can fool yourself into lauding your continuing education in the craft of the written word, but all you’re learning to do is read, if that. Writing is a whole different ball game and you know it. You know why there are so many mediocre writers out there who are published in glossy paper backs so that you can question their intelligence and their literary merit? Because they’re the only ones who bothered to show up everyday, write, and finish their manuscripts. The rest of you literary geniuses were too busy raiding bookshops, obsessing over thematic inconsistencies, and arguing the pros and cons of race and gender archetypes in genre fiction.

In writing, as in every creative field, there is a fairly strict divide between the two sides of the realm: there are the creators and the consumers. The creators might start off as consumers and continue to be consumers at a very limited and discerning level, but the real consumers always remain consumers and do nothing else. To write, you have to make that transition from being a consumer to being a creator. You have to build up your skills and more importantly your confidence to put your effort where your mouth is and do the work. Reading all the books in the world and being able to spot grammatical niggles at twenty paces will make you a very good consumer, a very opinionated consumer even, but never a writer. A writer writes. A writer writes a lot, and consistently, and bravely, and against all odds, and against better judgement and many detractors.

Unfortunately, most of us choose to be detractors. It’s easier. It’s so much easier to tell someone what they’ve done wrong after spending a few hours with a book than it is to spend the few months or few years writing it, and revising it, and revising it again. It’s so much easier to read and read and imagine you are creating a better writer within than to write more and actual learn to write better. It’s so much easier to be a serial escapist, forever losing yourself in the next imaginary cocoon of someone else’s work, rather than to face the harsh reality of wrestling with words and sentences and beating them into submission, and seducing them into poetry. It’s so much easier to be a book lover and aspiring writer than to actually ever have the courage to write.

The next time you find yourself in one of those situations where you’re surrounded by the temptation of fresh, crisp, reading material, where the plump prose and the sensual covers call out to you to posses them and make them your own, hold back a second. Before you give in to your bookish instincts, decide on whether you want to write or you want to be a reader who forever deludes themselves with grand claims of wanting to be a writer. I can tell you categorically that wanting to be a writer is a lot easier, and a lot more glamorous in the mind. Writing on the other hand is hard work, a slow process, and what you write is guaranteed to be misunderstood or misinterpreted by everyone who reads it. But writing is better, because then you would have written, and you will have created, and you can let the other weaklings worry about your own seductions that call out to them from the shelves and trap unsuspecting readers in their embrace.

Samir