Slumdog Millionaire – A Review

With a lot of hype created, we saw this movie this weekend. The tone of my review would have been entirely different if Danny Boyle had not shown India with such disgusting manner.  I can’t deny that he has shown truth, but there was no necessity to picturize and highlight India in that crude way. He shows how beggars are made from street kids, how they steal footwears and other stuffs from tourist places. My point is, there was no relevance for such scenes in context of the story at all. On the other hand there is no single positive feature shown on our society. I felt as if, this guy’s objective was to show dark face of our country and he had knitted the story around it.

Observe the following situation and dialog sequence:

A tourist (American) comes to visit Dhobi ghat. By the time drives escorts them back some mischief kids would have stolen the tyres and car driver finds on kid and beats him horribly. The crying kid begs in front of foreign tourist saying this is “True India” and tourist says now we show how True Americans behave and gives him $ 100 bill. What the heck.

This being directed by a Hollywood director and gathered such a hype would be watched by many foreign nationals. Why should they convey such an image to all of them. There is no passiveness in the movie at all. Also our kids and society also lose confidence and lose whatever pride we are having on the nation.

TNT – A Book Review

The Next Ticket, is a not-yet-released book. I am feeling proud to write a review on this book as it is authored by my good friend Sridhar Machani.

The hero goes for a foreign trip without a destination and the whole story gets revealed in a nice manner. Story takes a twist suddenly and the pace becomes little faster and hero actually goes into complex maze of many people and many cities. He finds handful of opportunities to get out of it, but for some reasons (which Sridhar needs to explain) he goes into it again and again.

Last few pages are of novel run very fast, it could have been little slower. The novel is written in the first person and the narration of minute details really given a punch to the reader

Sridhar has taken as challenge and to complete the book with tight schedule and its really an achievement. He is also having plans to have iterative approach in building next few versions of the book. I heartily congratulate him and wish him all the best for publishing TNT

Workflow for Borders and watermarks

Pre-Requisites:

You need to understand the basics of Actions in Photoshop (PS). Please go through the following blog post for the same

Creating a Photoshop Action

...Are you in the mood for some Action? I’m talking Photoshop Actions :) They are the perfect solution to handle tasks with one click. An Action is a recording of several Photoshop operations and commands. Once the Action is created, one click is all it takes and the task will be executed. It’s very powerful, can save you heaps of time and it’s ac...

Step 1:

Create a new Action Set of your own and create a new action within it.

Step 2: 

Record following steps in your new Action. I have named it as “Watermark_Karthik”

Step 3:

Increase the canvas by 5px width and 5px height with color as Black. Increase all sides

(Find Canvas Size from Menu -> Image -> Canvas Size)

Step 4:

Picasa Content

Increase the canvas by 5% width and 5% height with color as White. Increase all sides

Step 5:

Increase the canvas by 5% height with color as White. Increase only bottom part. We can add text here.

Step 6:

Increase the canvas by 10px width and 10px height with color as Black. Increase all sides. This would serve as final border of the image.

Step 7:

Step 8:

Select background layer and merge visible

Step 9:

The final Action should show something as below:

Step 10:

We can re-use this Action as many times as needed by click on Action tool bar (Alt + F9)

Step 11:

We can also batch edit images by selecting

 

Hope this tutorial helps you to create the border and a water mark

Selected Shots from Sakaleshpur trip

Trip to Sakaleshpur-Chikmagalur

The plan:

It was during Anil's Marriage that we had initial discussion of going out somewhere during Christmas vacation. Initially we thought our family, Sushma's family and Srinand's family would make it. We thought Anil can not come as new couple would have planned for their honey moon. Due to unfortunate circumstances, it so happened that new couple could not make honey moon trip. On the other hand Srinand's family could not make it sue to new born. So it was more solid during second week of Dec that We both, Sush-Gautam and Aruna-Anil would be the team

More planning:

We initially had plans to make it somewhere in Chikmagalur or near by Shimoga region. Most of us did not want heavy adventures but loved to enjoy the nature. After a day of research we found coffee valley Home Stay near Sakaleshpur. I bought most of the members buy-in and thought of booking for 2 days. It was turning out to be little expensive and that's the time I realized that we could expand the trip to somewhere else as well restricting Coffee Valley stay for 1 day. Initially it was told that per person per day it would be Rs. 2000/-. Then they reduced a bit and within our planned budget. I booked for one day and planned Kemmannugundi for day 2.

The next we regarding vehicle. Gautam arranged his brother's Bolero four wheel drive for the trip and we decided self driving.

The schedule:

As trip was little tight, we decided to leave very early in the morning like, at around 5AM and reach Coffee Valley Estate at around 11 AM. On the way we visited Manjurabad fort and Bhimeshvara falls, near Sakaleshpur, . At the estate had lunch and rested till evening. Visited Sun Set spot which is very near to the estate and had Camp Fire and played some games like Dumb-Chardes, Adarsha Dampathigalu etc. Had dinner and went to bed. Most highlighted part of the day was "Food" and Host Mrs&Mr.Manjuth's hospitality. We just loved the place.

Host also appointed Chidananda, Chidu as we called him for all our comforts. Next day we all woke up at around 8 AM and had hot bath. Finished tasty breakfast and started towards visiting all beautiful places near by, guided by Chidu. We visited an old temple of Lord Bhairaweshwara and a peaceful lake nearby, where there were hundreds of hungry fishes. We fed them with some Mandakki. Captured hundreds of snaps and moved towards an unnamed waterfalls.

Spent couple of hours in the falls and enjoyed a lot and captured some stunning pics. Went back to estate for yet another tasty meals, which was actually not in the package. We were so impressed by the food, and told the hosts to make it for us and we would pay extra for the same. We checked-out after a series of Couple-Shots and moved towards Chikmagalur. Reached there by evening and rested for the day. We hesitantly stayed in average hotel called Raja Mahal in I.G road. It was not so clean place. But it was ok to spend a night. Most funny thing was their eye-catching multi-colored rooms. :)

Next day was again a hectic day. We visited Here-magalur Sri Rama temple. Priested by famous orator Sri. Heremagalur Kannan. We spent a lot of with him and enjoyed the stay there. Then we started towards Kemmannu Gundi. We decided to directly go to the Hebbe Falls. It was extra-ordinary drive on the rocky mountains to reach the leg of the falls. We started very late from there and reached Bangalore at late night by 1:30 AM

 

Photos:

Enjoy some of the photos of the trip:

Sunflower field on the way

 

From Sakaleshpur 08

From Sakaleshpur 08

 

Manjurabad Fort

 

From Sakaleshpur 08

 

 

From Sakaleshpur2 08

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Coffee Valley Estate:

 

From Sakaleshpur2 08

 

From Sakaleshpur 08

From Sakaleshpur 08

 

 

Falls near Hanbal

From Sakaleshpur2 08

 

Hebbe Falls @Kemmannugundi

From Sakaleshpur2 08

 

Link for entire Album1 and Album2