At The Edge

October last year, I wrote about the problems one faces trying to develop a 'Game' product in India that can compete at a global level. [ Development Log ]. Well, in January this year, the product broke into a top grossing list on Google Play Market for US. And it has stayed there since. All it needed was six months and a team of three guys - one Developer, one Designer and one Game Designer. Android is the thing for small developer. For us, between Android and IOS for Installs and Revenue, the ration is almost 4:1. And that too without relying on any major Ad Spending. I guess I just wanted to prove, it can be done. In other News: In December last year, I found identically out that a popular kitsch store down south in Chennai made a bag out of my blog's header . Of course, they didn't ask me! The way internet works here! What else... In December last year, Bart Plantenga wrote in to inform that his book ' Yodel in Hi Fi : From Kitsch...

In 2009, after an entire day of experimentation with a scanner and a photo-editing tool, I posted an interesting newspaper cutting from year 1997 pertaining to year 1947. It was front page of The Hindustan Times, 15 August, 1947 . I am a Kashmiri. It was probably an eventless day for my ancestors. If I think about it well enough, the day is not supposed to mean anything to me. Just a footnote on myth building and nation building. Paper selling. But what about other people? Do they see through it too? Do they too know the absolute endgame of an epic nation building process? Car Sales. This morning I found the image used as a pointless prop in a stupid car ad. In the morning I felt like a mad dog who has been chasing fast cars for too long. If things keep going like this I will probably have to start an ' 8ate Impact ' section on this blog about how media from media industry posted here is re-consumed by media indust...

"In 2002, a survey carried out by the Nobel Institute on 100 of the world’s best authors from 54 countries led to Don Quixote being declared the best book of all time. Newspapers trumpeted the news. But how does one arrive at the “best book of all time”? A year later, Salman Rushdie, one of the writers who took part in the survey, claimed the writers who took part in the survey were asked to list, in no particular order, 10 of their favourite books, then this list was fed into a computer. In the end, the computer declared Don Quixote to be the greatest and most meaningful book of all time. Only decades ago, the fact that a machine was deciding matters of art may have raised some eyebrows and maybe given rise to some interesting critique of the methodology. But not a whisper was heard. Compare this to the plot of Asimov’s 1955 story Franchise and the debut of Multivac. The story is about the US election in 2008. The election was a simple affair. Computer selected a man, a repres...

This is not a post about how my content recently got leeched by The Man, instead this is about various ways in which my content, collected from various sources, recently got served and re-used, for various purposes, by other people. It is also about how I came to know about these usages and why I think Indian webspace is just too small and flat and almost too uncultivated. Instance 1: ludicrous A friend and a former colleague of mine who works for Hindustan Times Media group owned DesiMartini walks into his office one day and finds these giant hoardings of a collage of Hindi movie posters laying around. Something about the image strikes him as familiar. He thinks he has seen it somewhere. So after watching it for a couple of days, one fine evening he calls me up to tell me, 'This might interest you...' We had a good laugh when he told me the issue. The original  collage is based on the song  'mere jeevan saathi' from the movie Ek D...

A couple of weeks back I got an email from someone working on an online community driven project 'compiling South Asian colloqualisms, peculiar local english jargon, slang etc.' For the first release, the folks behind this fine project had chosen an old collage creation of mine, Face the Indian Heroine , as the background art. They wanted to know if I was okay with it. The collage was created using a collection of vintage hand-painted Indian movie posters available at  Picasa  gallery of Praful.  Given the nature of the project, I was more than happy to be part of it in someway.  More power to Creative Commons  motto: Share, Remix, Reuse. The  samosapedia.com  is now up and running, doing quite well if you consider that I am already seeing some of my friends sharing the link on Facebook. Do check it out for some serious pun. -0- Words of Wisdom at Daryaganj. 2011.

She does that thing. Kumkum in 'Dagha Dagha Vai Vai Vai'  from Kali Topi Lal Rumal (1959). It's a gif than can be easily made using any of the tools easily available online. Displaying a gif in Blogger though needs a little trick as blogger doesn't support gif. I first uploaded the gif to Google Docs, then set its share setting to everyone, took the image link url and then used it here. That's the easy part. Now, here's the  real mindbender. Created using a Python script created by Philip Guo  (at Stanford.edu) It basically takes a static jpg image, adds a user defined Zoom effect to it (using a beautiful logic that let's a person even control the 'Zoom' area) and then outputs it as a gif (using ImageMagick , making which work with the script in Fedora proved the first hurdle. I kept running into "x11"  problem that was finally solved by: yum groupinstall " X Software Development".) The Python script is meant to ...

March 12, 2011 Came across an interesting article in today's HT. 'The national body' by Gopalkrishna Gandhi [ HT link ]offers his musing and anecdotes on the whole popular business of Bharat Mata's Body - Kashmir is the crown head, Delhi is the heart, then there is pancreas, liver, so on, left, right, down, lower, there are some unmentionable but nevertheless important parts, so on and so forth.  You get the idea - the national body. Gopalkrishna Gandh devotes quite a few lines to the crown, Kashmir, as the article was triggered by the fact that someone had asked him to 'chief guest' an event about great treasures and antiques of Kashmir. The event was to be called 'Crown of India'. The print version of this article carries an inset image of 'Bharat Mata' [ image ] famously drawn by Abanindranath Tagore in 1905. Towards the end of the article Gopalkrishna Gandhi writes a bit about the beauty of Abanindranath Tagore's...

24/2/2011 -0- A fun activity. Requirements: Firefox with Firebug  (or even Chrome with Dev mode) and some basic understanding of 'calls' and related things. Go to Facebook. Enter your username (which in facebook's case is your email id) and next do not enter your password. Instead enter a wrong password. Now Facebook Facebook will send you to a 'login_attempt' page. Now enter you actual password. In the 'Post' call to 'login.php', in parameters you will see your dear password getting 'pass 'ed nakedly. Isn't that fun.

A quick recall: Some months back I hear from Devi Pictures ,  they were looking for  print advertisements for old old gramophones/radio/VCR /cassette players/spool players and such, they were working on a film on  intellectual property rights, copyrights, piracy, technology and stuff like that, advertisements are for a sequence in the film. And thanks to  Memsaab  I was able to offer them  print advertisements for old old gramophones and radios from 1930-1947 . For more I send them over to Soumyadip  who offers them some more incredible material.  Now: I hear from them that the film is ready. It's called 'Partners in Crime' by Paromita Vohra and hits the screen at  Persistence/Resistance film festival, Max Mueller Bhavan on 7th Feb 2011, 6:30 PM . -0- Update June 8, 2011 Trailer of the film video link

Or maybe the Time is slowing down. To this blog, on 3rd Oct 2010, I posted photographs of Sharmila Tagore from 16th Aug 1966 issue of Filmfare that had her on the cover, famously in a bikini . On 9/10/10, TOI, part owners of that magazine, came out with this: For  Ist Anniversary of Times of India - Crest Edition. Spooky. -0- Update: Here's the cover of TOI crest anniversary edition. Via: this blog

From Hindustan Times dated Saturday July 17, 2010. They published extracts from C.G. Somiah's 'The Honest Always Stand Alone'. Interesting read. But it was the image that really caught my goat. It was my goat. My yellow goat in their brown barn. See the collage used as inset image. I created that collage way back in 2007 for my post on Indian 80s . Here's the actual collage: I have taken a lot of stuff from them and I certainly don't mind if they took something from me. 

A couple of days back got an email from someone named Arun J . Told me he runs a quarterly PDF magazine called Aahsome (do check it out, really awesome! And it's all under Creative Commons license ) and that for their latest issue themed on 'food' the magazine had sourced vintage ads from my blog . It's really nicely done. You can download the issue Here Aahsome.

A couple of months back I got an email from someone named Roopa Pemmaraju. She liked my Vintage collection . Told me she's a designer from Bangalore ( her website ) and was planning a vintage collection for her next season. Told me she could use some help with ideas and images. She was looking for 60's -70's style actress, images, styles, prints. I told her she was free to use stuff from my blog and directed she to some links. Sometime back she sent me the wonderful images from her Calantha Wardrobe’s Vintage Sari range (FB page link) Sample this. Her collection - modern, yet vintage. And this: from The Reader's Digest, March 1972 ( the post )

Around two years ago I took this photograph of Baglihar Dam on Chenab River while on way to Kashmir. While writing a post on it for my Kashmir blog i realized that the wiki entry for this Dam had no image, so I uploaded the image to wiki with a creative common license   which basically means  - you are free to reuse it, but give credit. Last week I got a 'thank you' email from someone with World Watch Institute . Apparently they picked up this photograph from Wikipedia and published it to their magazine (May-June issue) alongside a story on 'water challenges in Asia'. Not only they gave credit and notified me about the usage, they also send me a free pdf copy of the issue that normally cost around $6. How about that!

 Finally managed to make the newly launched Facebook 'Like' button work with Blogger. The thing wasn't plain easy so thought of sharing the procedure that worked or me. Following code is an upgrade on the great hack provided by devfuel . Steps. In the Dashboard, goto Edit HTML First and the most important step: Backup your template by clicking Download Full Template. Now, Click the Expand Widget Templates Like me if you want to have 'Like' button for individual posts Use your Browser's search feature (Ctrl+F) to find the following line of code(or similar code line): <b:if cond="data:post.url"></b:if> and just after it put the following code (the actual facebook iframe code with the hack) <iframe allowTransparency='true' expr:src='"http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=" + data:post.url + "&amp;layout=standard&amp;show-faces=true&amp;width=450&amp;height=25&amp...

 A couple of weeks ago got an email from a journo with Indian Express. A story about vintage ads. Just came across the story: Nostalgia is most definitely a seductive liar. It places a rose-tinted glass over your eyes, and then coaxes you to view past without hard feelings. The result — we end up feeling wistful things that we weren’t so crazy about the first time around. But when 27-year-old, Vinayak Razdan chanced upon a tattered copy of a 1972 edition of the Reader’s Digest at his relatives place, the word nostalgia acquired a new meaning for him. “I flipped through its pages and found myself staring at a very young kohl eyed Zeenat Aman endorsing Taj Mahal tea in a purple salwar-suit, her hair - a pair of pigtails. It was a discovery. I stashed away the magazine,” says Razdan. Thanks to all these vintage ads, my blog got mentioned in this piece by Prem ankur Biswas for Indian Express .  -0- And this week, some of my Kashmir photographs (can be found at my oth...

Societies prefer to learn from their failures rather than from successes. As the rise and fall of Indira Gandhi recedes into India's past, the true lessons of her rule are apt to be forgotten and people are likely to discover in her the various aspects of their own rejected selves, thus mythologizing the entire experience of her rule as the battle between the good and the evil, the progressive and the regressive, and the hard and the soft. - Ashis Nandy in his book 'At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture' (1980) starting off the essay 'Indira Gandhi and the culture of Indian Politics' Nobody is more into the business of mythologizing in India than its film Industry. And yet. If we think about Films, Emergency years and Indira Politics, name of films like Gulzar's Aandhi (1975) and Sudhir Misra's Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (2005) come to mind. Most often, that's about it. And both these films in pure terms are not actually about p...

Traditional Hindu blessing for women ' Shat Putra Vati Bhava ' (May you have hundred sons) also comes in a (lesser used) variation that promises eight sons - ' Ashta- Putravati Bhava ' - eight being a 'good' number for Hindus. Not good enough. If we are counting on blessings alone, the old 'blessings' need an upgrade - a beta version , fast. "A United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) study in 2007 said even if the sex ratio at birth were to remain at the ‘normal’ level of 950 girls per 1,000 boys until 2030, India is likely to have a female deficit of 25 million by 2030 in the marriageable age group of 20-49. More realistic studies that have factored in a limited and even further decline in the ratio have suggested the deficit could be anywhere between 29 and 34 million." - from a fine feature article ' The Lost Girls ' by Shreyasi Singh for Japan based current-affairs magazine The Diplomat . [Got the link via an email from Jason Miks,...

You might have heard about Yahoo shutting down Geocities . Yahoo acquired it in January 1999 and after 15 (10 of them under Yahoo) years of hosting  all kind of pages (a lot of them having funky .gif images hammering in 'Under construction' messages and in between they offered most arcane information about most obscure topics ) they finally shut down the service on 26th October 2009 .  Around 7+ million public web pages and 8+ million images (according to Google), gone leaving internet with lot of dead links and broken images (thanks to hotlinking) and 404s. On 26th I spent some time randomly browsing through (and saving ) some Geocities sites, stumbled across this 'sean connery on moon' image and remembered what a delight these pages used to be. In pre-blog days (and in some cases even in clatter of blogs) it obviously had some of the most labored upon user generated online content, labour not just of working with HTML and creating all those gif files. -0- P...

A vintage Diwali poster leached from ebay. -0- When people use Google search for spell check right before sending those mass greetings through sms, emails, 'scraps' and 'messages'. Did you mean: prosperous Google Search Stats for 16th October, just a day before Diwali. Leached from Google trends for India . Certainly India knows no prosperity.