Last night I attended IU music school's rendition of Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto. I came away relatively unimpressed. The last time I saw Rigoletto was at the Cambridge Corn Exchange at Cambridge. It was by Ellen Kent and The Chisinau National Opera in collaboration with The Ukranian National Opera of Odessa.

I am not quiet sure what was missing. My memories of the performance at Cambridge were that it was bolder, a lot more heart rending and passionate. The humilation of Countess Ceprano, Count Ceprano's curse, Rigoletto's reaction all set the stage for the rest of the story to unfold elegantly... the whole atmosphere they setup was so much more lively. At IU I felt that they missed something in the beginning and everything else felt watered down as a consequence.

That said, there was some good talent at IU. Also the stage, props and costumes were so much grander that what they had at Cambridge. I bit the bullet and bought center orchestra season tickets to the opra at IU. The next one is Susannah.

I have been seeing this guy outside my apartment for the past 2 years now. Every once in a while I see him dart under the bushes or wait apprehensively to see what I would do. So the other day when I saw him looking rather relaxed on the grass, I decided to shoot him.

Canon 350D, Canon 70-300 4-5.6 IS at 300mm (35mm equivalent is 641mm!!), exposure 1/250, f/5.6, ISO 1600, handheld.

Btw, he is not just any rabbit, he has a name - Jack.

This is an antique shop in a little west of the Bloomington town center. I have never really seen this store open - it has been closed everytime I passed by. I have wondered about this building every time I have passed by. Its a bit of a spooky building and I was wondering if I might be able to hold our weekly Programming Languages group meetings in there, the building would lend a nice ambience to our usual topics - dependand types, syntactic abstraction, denotational semantics and such.

This is also one of my first 30 sec exposure shots. It was taken with my 350D at 10mm (Canon 10-22mm) , f/8.0, ISO 400 and exposure time 30secs. I didnt have a tripod on me that I would like to use (I really need to get another tripod, one that can support the weight of my camera and which is a ball-head instead of the maddening mutli-directional adjustment thing), so I had to set the camera on the ground with the lens facing slightly upwards. Also it was so dark when I was taking the shot that the autofocus completely failed and I could not tell if the structure was in focus or not using the manual focus. The view-finder on a Rebel XT leaves a lot to be desired.

For a long time now, I have been taking pictures without knowing the details behind many things. Of late I have been looking at some photography books to better understand the technicalities and boy, has it been fun!

Same settings as the previous shot, but with -1/3 stop exposure bias.

For a while now there is a fly living in my apartment. I dont know how it got in there - I usually keep the windows closed (and even otherwise they have screens on them). Anyway, I was cooking the other day and there comes this fly zooming into the kitchen. Thats when I saw it first. I was making pasta, nothing too funny.

I dont quiet know what to do about it. Its one of those fast ones with a not-easy-to-ignore buzzing sound. And it just wont still, it insists on flying around. I have tried, unsuccessfully, to swat at it and such. I am not sure what to do ... spraying it with something like my deo doesnt feel like a nice thing to do. Also, I dont see how it can possibly find its way out.

I finally found somethng that gives me some peace, I can shut it in the bathroom - it zooms in there to annoy me when I go in. I let it out when I go in and then try trap it back in there again. Lets see how long this game continues.

Srikanth Chunduri visited me this weekend. The last time we met was in Hyd 3 years back. These days  Srikanth is up to living the life of a fast paced New Yorker in the financial district. He introduced me to some music from XLRI... enjoy.

If you don't understand Hindi, I would advice that you don't go about singing this without having checked the meaning of the lyrics with a friend. Enough said.

Here is another piece, which I would rather not embed on my blog:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_KT3sMR4CY

Enjoy.

After what should have been a brief hiatus that turned into a 4+ month vacation in India, Pooja returns to the land of McDonalds and "What's up?".

Pooja is not going to be Bloomington anymore - she is done with old IU - she is going to be at Seattle, working with the software company commonly known as Microsoft (again). With one small difference this time - Pooj is going to be a dev!

I just finished reading Mirza Muhammed Hadi Ruswa's 1905 Urdu novel "Umrao Jan Ada" as translated by the grand old man of Delhi, Kushwant Singh. What a terrible book!

Umrao Jan is based on the life of a courtesan in old Lucknow who went by the name of Umrao Jan. The book traces her life as narrated by her to Mirza Ruswa. In the process it gives you a glimpse into the life and times of the glory days of Lucknow and surrounding parts from the 1840s to the early 1900s.

The inside of the dust jacket says:

Old Lucknow is now but a dream, but this work preserves for posterity the full flavor of that golden age in the history of the city, which comes to life in the pages of this book.

We enter the palaces of wealthy nawabs, the luxurious abodes of cultured courtesans, and the hideouts of colourful vagabonds. The courtesans - out immediate concern - were on the whole well-read and exceedingly proficient in the arts of dancing and singing.

In the pages of this charming book, we find pieced together an exquisite civilization that will never recur, and warm human emotions that are eternal.

While this is all true, what is captured is not particularly beautiful. This is a book that seems to be a poor presentation of someone's (rather eventful) life. To its credit, I can say that it exists and so the story isnt lost. The book is littered with attempts at poetic verse that is, in comparison with some of the poetry that I have been hit by in recent days, just painful. (I guess you are set up for disappointment once you have developed a taste for the likes of Ghalib and Dylan.) The book also seemed to lack focus in some ways, unimportant characters held unnecessarily long conversations about unnecessary things. Lots of shallow moralizing.

In many ways Umrao Jan Ada has parallels with Geisha. Many similarities.

I havent seen the movie Umrao Jan, but I would expect it to be a far more pleasent experience than the book. A story about being "Lucknawi" truly has to be told in visuals with lots of flair and charm. There is not one, but two Umrao Jaan movies. The first one, the 1981 version, with Rekha as Umrao.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083248/

The second, a glitzy 2006 rendition, with Aishwarya Rai as Umrao.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0485522/

I expect these to be better than the book - can't be too hard to manage that.
Enough said.

I walk into the Computer Science department today morning and I couldn't help notice little containers randomly placed on tables. I had a class on Computational Complexity and as usual I was running a little late so I decided to investigate later.

I walk into class, nod my usual apology to the lecturer and sit down. There on my table was one of them. Then I looked around and there was one of these on every table! Whats happening here?

They are little containers with unmarked white pills in them. Hmm... unmarked white pills? There is no text on the containers saying what the pills might be about. Strange. The only text on them says "JUST BE" in largish red letters on a white label under which there is a url in small font. Aaah.... the whole department was exposed to this stuff. And what a lot of victims they are, they are computer scientists - they hardly ever notice what they are eating. I would not have noticed myself had it not been for my temporary heightened sense of precense I acheive out of being late from time to time.

So what can this be? What sort of tablets would someone label "JUST BE"? A halucinogen? Some new form of crack? Birth control pills? After i went over all the usual possibilities, I started to panic. What if this is one of the secret government test thingies? Maybe a a neural inhibitor? or better a yet, a thought tranfer or a mind control pill? Then it struck me that this reminded me a lot of something I saw on the X-files many years back called "PURITY CONTROL"... JUST BE - PURITY CONTROL ... muuaaahhhaaa...

What sort of agency would expose the department? Maybe the whole campus to these? I decided to pocket one of these to examine it in detail later for clues. As I was doing so, I noticed the url - the url was for a cs department webpage for "WIC". I have heard that name before.. they did it! The "Women In Computing". The WIC exposed the department to unmarked white pills, which many of us would unsuspectingly eat. Why would the WIC want to do that? And what could be in those tablets? Come to think of it I dont know what the WIC really do... they are an organisation of some sort, yes (in most cases their membership is based on some marginal excuses). Why? Why?

This general general thought caused my mind to think about some WIC members. Aah.. well, lets skip that bit for a public blog shall we? And why has there been so much care taken to disguise these tablets to look like common mint? What would happen to me if I were to eat one? I decide to risk it all and try it. After all better take the risks here in the precense of people than to accidentally eat one one when I am alone at home with these tabs.

I flip the container over to try one and then I see this -

What? It expires today? Also it looks like it has been ripped open.. someone has eaten one of these! Something happened here because the victim is missing!

Then the sense and the safety in all of this becomes clear to me. It is a feminism thing.. and these tablet things are most likely just mint or mind control pills or something safe like that after all. And they were there as a show of good will. :) Some small details seem to have been missed, in this case the expiry date... details. After all who cares about details?

All this brought my Complexity lecture to an end. I guess I will have to find another muse for another day.