Shredding documents... wait..

So you thought that the document you shredded is gone forever. The secrets it contained will no longer burden you. Maybe you need a reality check. Have a look at this.

http://www.unshredder.com/

An old woman at Matheran

Lately, I have found myself becoming insensitive to my surroundings. Perhaps its the drain on mental energy making a career or perhaps its the subconscious Indian aspiration to disassociate oneself from aam junta. Whenever I look over the pictures I take, I feel them to be too touristy. They look like pictures taken by someone who has no time to pause and appreciate the surroundings for what they are. Along with this has crept in a general intolerance and suspicion of new people I meet, which might seem as normal behaviour for some.

But I have always enjoyed taking some time out and trying to see life from different perspectives. So when I was jolted out of my cocoon a few days ago by this old woman, I felt guilty.

I saw her as I was walking on the narrow guage railway track at Matheran. She sat there at the base of an advertising board, many of which have cropped up along the track, ruining the natural charm of the line and lining the pockets of the railway officers. She looked curiously at the tourists and I thought of her as some local woman waiting for her daughter in law to collect firewood. Her eyes darted from tourist to tourist. I zoomed on to her from my camera as she made a good picture. Exploitative photography.. we like to see poor people and then sigh and mutter that something has to be done and then go our way. While I was trying to get an angle on her, she called out to me and asked whether she could carry my bag. Immediately I dismissed her telling myself that I am a true trekker and would not allow anybody to carry my bag for me. As I walked away she pleaded to let her carry my bag and that she had nobody in this world.


I did not know how to react. The tone of the voice was so genuine, I was scared to even look back at her. I did nothing, just walked away but her voice kept haunting me. As I downloaded the pictures from my camera, I saw her picture and that look that did not betray her loneliness.

Is this how it is to be poor, old and lonely? What inner strength, what motivation drives her? I wished I had stopped and taken some time to understand her. But I was busy... busy returning home... yeah.

Sonavle Caves Mini Documentary

One more place I had visited in winter, the Sonavle Caves near Dhasai on the route to Vaishakhare via Mhasa. These are a set of 14 caves in a great state and taken care of by the villagers. This video was shot in the biggest of the caves. I took a group of 4 boys from the village of Sonavle to show me the way. Check out more pictures on my Flickr page.

Hal Caves Mini Documentary

Went to Hal Caves in December on bike. This is a single cave, more than 5 centuries old, hardly known to people and in a state of utter disrepair. This was the little documentation video that I shot there.

A Byte of Python

After a lot of help manuals and O'Reilly books this is the book that I have begun to like, as I learn Python. Titled 'A Byte of Python' it is written by a guy called Swaroop CH who works for Adobe.

http://www.swaroopch.com/projects/#anc-abop

Written in the way you would normally take notes, and with nice working examples, it is easy to understand and remember stuff in the book.

Have a look.

Number Stations

It began with me getting curious about those funny random word sites that mess up google searches so often. These sites usually chinese in origin have nothing in them but random words. Even the htm file names are random words.

eg
vintage american family baby scale 30 lbs pounds limit vintage...
45x74 winchester model 1890 62a slide action .22 extractor
primitive ...... height 10 x width 7 speedo fs2pro men's
completed cross stitch mallard duck audi ...

Jumping from one page to another led me to this page which talks about "Number Stations" . If you have listened to shortwave radio, you must have come across these stations which have some person just reciting and repeating a sequence of words or numbers. I had never paid attention to it, but its amazing how deep the rabbit hole goes. At the very basic level these are supposedly government sponsored stations which communicate with spies.
Found this amazing BBC radio documentary on that topic. Download it from this page. Just 6 mb, its worth it. Do a search in Wikipedia for Number Stations for further info.

WiFi @ Home

The glamour of lounging on the sofa or bed or anywhere in the house and browsing the net on the laptop seemed so inviting. I also needed a semipermanent connection between the desktop and the laptop as my USB drive network (copy to USB drive - take USB drive to the laptop - paste into laptop) was getting a little tiresome. Then there is internet sharing. And most important of all, multiplayer games :). All this is now possible. I got a wireless router installed at home (Thanks again to Sachin) and the fun has started. Now I can also chat with my wife through yahoo messenger. Ahh!! reminds me of those pre marriage days. Anybody for a LAN party?