Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Design has long been an obsession. It has invaded my life block by block. I can no longer watch a movie without going “Oh! the soundtrack is a milli-second out of sync”, or “Dude, the scanning is too choppy. I can’t stand this!”. I can no longer walk past my hostel IP boards, without cringing at the pathetic choice of fonts in the posters. I can no longer code without a never-ending itch to push in an insane amount of uniformity in my indentation and spacing.

All these, I’ve somehow learnt to live with. But, in a disturbing trend, this has started giving trouble, even at times when it shouldn’t.

Cerebral Noise

An Yellow Anatomy

Time: 4:00am.
Place: A humid room, deep inside the chasms of a resting campus.
Music: “I’m not ready to make nice”
State: Lying in bed, having stayed awake all night, trying to get emacs to do an C-x M-c M-butterfly.

With about two hours left till tomorrow officially begins, I’ve decided to write a post that has been long overdue. Actually, there’s nothing to ‘write’ here, it is just a macro photograph I had shot sometime back. If someone has any idea what flower this is, tell me. I’m clueless.

The flower is actually quite small. To put things in perspective, the photograph below is of the same flower, with a bee.

Those who are still wondering what ‘C-x M-c M-butterfly’ is supposed to do, see this XKCD post: Real Programmers.

A Countryside, desat

“Nathakollai”, shouted the conductor as the bus ground to a stop. Clutching the tripod on one hand and the backpack on the other, he hastened to get down, relieved that the journey was over. The bus had made an unbearable din, creaking and clanking as it had made its slow long journey from the local town’s bus depot, and it had a damp smell about it, something that could have been a mix of two-year-old brake oil, dung and rotting grains.

As the bus took off behind a black cloud of dust and diesel smoke, he looked around the place. Lots of things had changed in the few years since his last visit. The ‘bus-stop’ was no longer the friendly shelter of bamboo sticks and palm leaves. It had been replaced by a tasteless brick structure, with half-torn posters stuck all over the place. Of the petty shops by its side, he recognized the tea-shop and the one selling sweetmeat. The others seemed to be recent additions. Tearing his eyes off them, he proceeded to cross the road.

The air smelled of grains and moss, and the constant hum of the breeze ruffling over the paddy fields was sedating. Surprisingly, the monsoon skies were clear, with cumulus clouds scattered over the horizon. His destination was a small village, about 3km off this road. Smiling, as he stepped onto the narrow run-down path, he thought, “It might not be so bad after all.”

It was one of those stretches again. A couple of weeks where you fall prey to the hazards of vacationing at home. Weeks where you start wearing an unceasing blank expression, as if you wake up every morning and get clubbed on your head thrice to erase any traces of reason. On beautiful Wednesday mornings, people find you asking skeptically “Huh! Today is Sunday, I thought. Right ? … No?? Oh ok.”

And, some day, a wake up call does arrive. For me it did, yesterday. To cut a long story short, within the next hour, I had packed and was on my way to my ancestral village, about 80 km from Chennai. The ‘why’ was simple. Photography.

With enough experience in taking such short tours, I knew I had to restrict and plan what I wanted to shoot. I decided that I’d do a few landscape shots on and near a lake (dried up, in recent summers). In the morning, it appeared as though it might rain. But, it didn’t, though it did provide a starkly clouded sky.

I produce a few of the photographs here.

These photographs are tone-mapped HDRs, a technique that I recently picked up. Here, I take multiple exposures of the same scene, in order to reproduce its full dynamic range. This allows me to capture the clouds accurately, while still keeping the foreground bright. I’m nowhere near perfecting this, but am becoming better with every shot.

And, of course, these are post-processed, to bring out the right feel in them. Rather than being merely representing how the scene was, what they do is convey how I saw them.

Shooting in villages, and shooting anywhere else are two very different deals. For one, everyone recognizes you here. The moment you set foot within a few hundred meters of the village, most people know that so-and-so of such-and-such’s house has come visiting from Chennai. Every soul that passes you wants to inquire the usual when-did-you-come and how-are-you-and-hows-everyone-back-home. Little children keep following you all over the place, trying to take a curious peek at the LCD screen.

And for another, people, who don’t know you, look at your tripod, and implicitly assume that you’re some official surveying the land for some construction or something. Every other guy I met at the fields gave me a forbidding what-are-you-gonna-do-with-my-land look. Explaining took more effort than just running away.

Sometime, late in the afternoon, I made an attempt to climb a rocky hillock that was part of a series dotting the banks of the lake. It was then that I realized how tough it was. It reminded me of an article I saw in the Tîyènaar Journal de l’escalades, tomorrow’s edition (translated).

Ahem. Anyways, I did climb it. And the view was well worth the effort. After a few shots here and there, I had just the enough time to finish this stitch, before light started failing. This one is long. You’d have to scroll quite a bit.

Epilogue: He did return home, in a single piece, at 11 in the night. Everything seemed fine except that he walked with a slight limp and had an incurable itch on his right palm.

Hello World!

The first drop fell.

It was a hot summer night in June, and this marked the end of the relentlessly hot and dry days that the city of Chennai had gotten used to enduring.

Maybe it was the intoxicating smell that filled the air as the rain quenched the hard summer-dry ground. Or maybe it was that the whole world seemed to glow in an exquisite saturation of colors as the rain washed away the layers of dust, rendering the houses and the trees in the colony sparkling clean. Or maybe it was the raw happiness that he felt as he soaked in the pouring rain, visibility down to mere meters, nothing bothering him as he roamed down the muddy roads, humming meaningless verses in his favorite tune. Or maybe it was one of the hundreds of other small things. Whatever it was, rain made him euphoric and he always found a reason not to do anything else when it rained.

But today, he was sealed up inside his thick-curtained bedroom. The air conditioner was growling as it relentlessly struggled to keep the room at a formidable 25°C. To mask out this continuous rumble, he had his earphones plugged in, the Octavarium blaring in his ears, as he squinted and typed into his computer, oblivious to the weather outside. The only way he could have known was if he looked at the weather widget on his desktop, which clearly indicated it was ‘rainy’ in Chennai, with a ‘thunderstorm’ in the offing. But he never did.

It rained harder and harder into the night. And then it happened. With a clap of thunder, the power went off. The room was plunged into darkness and the only source of light left was the computer screen. Cursing the Electricity Board for the umpteenth time this week, he commenced the now-accustomed ritual of saving his work and shutting down his computer. As he pulled his earphones off, the room was thrown into an almost eerie silence, and he became distinctly aware of the continuous battering of the rain outside.

Suddenly ecstatic, he rushed outside leaving the computer to take care of itself. He regretted not having noticed it any earlier. As it always did, just the sight and smell of it drove everything else out of his mind. Fighting the urge to wander in the streets in this untimely hour of the night, he just sat there, curled up in a chair, watching it rain.

…

A slight tap on his shoulder woke him up. He had dozed off. It was his dad, who had woken up to find him missing from the room. It had been almost an hour since he had come outside. It was still raining, and he hadn’t realized that the power had come back. He returned to his room, and switched the computer back on. But, he was in no mood to code. He wanted to do something else.

For long, he had had the hope of starting to write again, on a blog this time, probably. The kickoff never seemed to happen. The prospect of starting a blog brought with it a tirade of uncertain questions. What will he name it? What will he write about? Blogger or WordPress? White or Black? Two-column or three-column? And so on.

But tonight, none of these seemed to bother him. Everything he did seemed plainly right. He registered on WordPress.com, created a blog, named it, and paused. There were two simple words in his mind for the first post. Maybe, these words were too clichéd. But he didn’t care. To him, being a programmer, it seemed completely natural. And he did write a two-word post. He was a blogger now.

Hello world !

After this seemingly valiant attempt, he glanced at the clock. It was 2 in the night. Stifling a yawn, he C-x C-c ‘ed for the night.