“Suicide Girl” to die for

Alternative community/pin-up site Suicide Girls features a blog and photo collection from a U.K.-based desi named “India” (NSFW). She’s an aspiring mathematician, and daydreams about numbers:

FANTASY: to solve one of the clay institutes seven prize math problems (http://www.claymath.org/millennium/)…

First Navi Rawat, and now “India.” When did math become the new black? One thing’s for sure — she shouldn’t have any trouble finding an algorithmically-inclined South Asian suitor. Oh, and for the record, I was on Suicide Girls in order to read a scintillating interview with the always-hilarious David Cross.

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Verizon billboards say the darndest things

Verizon: A small jar of chutney costs more than a 10-minute call to New Delhi.     Verizon: A ticket to a Bollywood movie costs more than a 20-minute call to New Delhi.

Spotted the billboards pictured above while driving around in Culver City, Calif. Their location is peculiar, because the area doesn’t have a lot of South Asians, as far as I know. The first one is located near an exit for the 10, which is a prime spot. You’ll find the second one when driving east on Venice Blvd., but it is easy to miss. There might be more out there, so if you spot one, please photograph it, and send it our way.

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If I had a thousand words

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Indian photographer Arko Datta has won the prestigious 2004 World Press Photo Award for his picture of this Indian woman genuflecting in absolute sorrow at the death of a relative killed in the Asian tsunami. The Voice of America reports:

The picture, taken by Reuters photographer Arko Datta, shows a woman lying on sandy ground with her hands turned toward the sky. The hand of a dead relative is visible nearby.

The photo, taken in Cuddalore in India’s Tamil Nadu state two days after the December 26 tsunami, was one of nearly 70,000 pictures submitted by professional photographers from 123 countries.

One of the judges, Kathy Ryan from The New York Times called the image graphic, historic and starkly emotional.

Mr. Datta will receive the distinguished award, along with nearly $13,000, in a special ceremony in Amsterdam in April.

I am drawn to the edge of the picture but dare not seek to uncover what lies beyond. It is as if the left edge represents the divide between this world and the next. From our vantage point it seems we have been thrust upon the scene to either speak some words of comfort to this woman or administer last rights to the dead.

But know that by whom this entire body is pervaded, is indestructible. No one is able to cause the destruction of the imperishable soul. –Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 2 verse 17

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Riding the Delhi metro

I rode the Delhi metro the week it opened its first underground route:

Extra-wide cars, fully automated driverless trains, all-electronic fare gates with magnetic farecards and cool magnetic tokens, overhead electric wires that are safer than a third rail, floor-through layout so you can walk from one end to the other without opening doors… this subway system has the finest in Indian, err, South Korean tech. The subway feels and sounds like the D.C. metro. It’s faster and wider than Boston’s, newer and more luxurious than New York’s.

Check out the photos.

Jetting to Bangalore

Jet Airways, the leading private airline in India, is far more luxurious than American ones: brand-new Airbus jets, hot face towels, nimbu pani and watermelon juice, coffee candies, sumptuous red and orange linen napkins bound in velvet rope, a choice of North or South Indian meals (ever had hot idli sambar and utappam on an airplane?), and a never-ending stream of tea and coffee. And all this on short-haul domestic routes rather the overseas ones served by Singapore and Virgin.

The Indian government will now allow Jet and Air Sahara to fly international routes, although it continues to shelter the lucrative Middle Eastern routes from competition. The airlines are presumably on their own for buying landing slots.

Indian airports are also in dire need of investment. On a recent trip, I could get wireless Internet access at the Delhi and Bangalore airports. However, they otherwise still resemble small regional airports in the U.S.: open-air gates, buses instead of jetways and a vanishingly small distance from gate to parking lot. They’re like the old terminal at San Jose before the tech bubble.

But with an astonishing 20% annual growth in air traffic, India just signed off on a plan to upgrade 80 airports throughout the country, including brand-new airports for Bangalore and Hyderabad. They’re partying like it’s 1999.

And in the tech-heavy cities, it pretty much is. Driving through Bangalore, I saw buildings that looked exactly like U.S. tech campuses, though smaller. Intel, Dell, Oracle, Accenture and Macromedia buildings abound; on one corner, with a shock of recognition, I came face-to-face with a company started by a friend. I couldn’t help but feel late to the party. With the number of South Indian programmers already working at Oracle, why not hire ’em straight from the motherland 🙂

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Raghubir Singh photo exhibition

The Sepia International photo gallery in Manhattan (how apropos) is hosting a Raghubir Singh retrospective through Dec. 30. Singh, an Indian photographer who worked in brilliant color, did for the humble Ambassador what Austin Powers did for the Mini.

“Unlike people in the West, Indians have always intuitively seen and controlled colour… My artistic sense was shaped early by the culture of the Rajputs of Rajasthan.”… it was the dazzling colours of his native state, its hawelis… clothes… and sand dunes that impressed and inspired the budding artist.

Singh eventually settled in the U.S. and was awarded one of India’s highest civilian awards, the Padma Shri, for his photography in 1983. He passed away in 1999.

Our own Seshu has more.

Prince2Priest

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This is something deep from my dusty archives. At Ohio University, where I studied visual communications for a year, we were asked to illustrate a concept. I took the legend behind the Buddha and his transformation from stately prince to the high priest of a new ideology – perhaps even a religion – as my concept. Given that Buddhist art is already so beautifully, how do you go about illustrating that?

I found an Indian ornament lying around in my apartment; a puppet of a man wearing a sparkling turban riding on a legless horse. I used his face alone and intentionally lit him in the background to appear overbearing, ominous and perhaps even violent. Notice the direction of the light. It’s from below. Ever see this technique in a horror flick?

Several years back, my mother sent me a handpainted scroll from Bhutan depicting the Buddha. If you can believe it, the six Buddhas in the bottom are all from that same image. Ideally there should be eight of them to symbolize the eight-fold path in Buddhist theology, but I couldn’t get them all to fit (this time).

The images were shot on film, scanned at a high resolution and then brought into Photoshop where there was quite a bit of manipulating (something I wouldn’t ever do to an editorial image). Each of the Buddhas were sent through a bunch of Photoshop filters. Each filter tweaks the image to a specification that I was happy to see on my screen. I really wasn’t sure what they would look like before I got started and I was pleasantly surprised by what the results looked like in the end.

The exercise was a grand departure from what I usually do – wedding photojournalism. It was really a time to experiment and have fun. I am not really sure I have conveyed the principal premise of the image clearly. Let’s just call this a work in progress, shall we?