Jaipur Literature Festival was a wonderful-wonderful experience! And Jaipur is incredible!
That’s it. I am not going to write a lengthy, tweets-like post on it. This time around, I am going to say it all through pictures, without much text (Damn, I have not even captioned them!).
I have uploaded all the photographs on Picasa. I wanted to put them on Flickr, but the upload capacity per month on my deliciously free account is just too less. However, I have uploaded some on Flickr, too.
Albums: Jaipur Literature Festival 2010 (642 pictures) and Jaipur (412 pictures), which includes photographs of the city, Hawa Mahal, Birla Mandir, Jantar Mantar, City Palace, Zoological Garden, and Govind Devji temple.
Camera: FUJIFILM FinePix S2000HD
Please enjoy the photographs of Jaipur Literature Festival, 2010 and Jaipur on Picasa. Also, some of them on Flickr.
…15X optical zoom, approx. 5.7X digital zoom, HDTV-compatible, and a lot more.
As part of a bunch of resolutions for 2010, When I wrote myself to “Get a nice camera that can click things at a resolution higher than 2 megapixels…” in this post, I think I meant FUJIFILM FinePix S2000HD. Whoa, and I got it. Thanks, eBay India, for a discount of 1000 INR. Super deals. Super safe. Really!
Finally, I got a ticket to watch Avatar when one of the two 3-D theaters was out of its technical problems, though the other was still having problems with seat availability. Watching a 3-D movie is painful if you are already wearing a pair of corrective glasses to clearly see your 2-D world and you get another one for a 3-D adventure, I learned. Watching it through those blurred-with-hundreds-of-divine-Indian-touches 3-D-wear is even more painful and irritating, if I were to dismiss the nasal pain of the first problem as minor. I do not know if there is a Ray-Ban in 3-D glasses, but I strongly wish for one. Then there was something even more painful that I have left for a pair of brackets to cry aloud in the second paragraph. And then, what the hell, the 20th Century Fox logo came really close to me and kissed my nose! Hah.
Above all, I liked the 3-D experience for it was my first 3-D movie. A good movie to enter the 3-D world because I knew that this one was unlike any other contemporary 3-D movies. I liked the director James Cameron’s imagination of Pandora—its deviantART-style surroundings that could be cut into thousands of desktop wallpapers, the magical-looking bioluminescent flora and other living organisms who seemed to have come out of a sparkling blue, deep sea to live in a jungle for a change, and the 10-foot, blue-skinned, well-built natives called Na’vi [There was one Na’vi sitting just in front of me who made me literally jump out of seat every now and then! He was not yet trained to speak, or at least understand, English, it seemed, when he refused to bow his head down or aside when I asked him to. As if I had asked him to cut it off. That was when I shared sympathies with Chandrahas Choudhury’s Arzee the Dwarf.].
One of the piths of the movie was that the aliens of this movie left a sort of non-alien impression on the audience, at least on me. Not only they looked less alien, but also behaved more like humans in many ways. It seems that the director wanted to establish a connection (somewhat like the ‘bond’ shown in the movie) between the Na’vi and the audience. The experience was more about the 3-D effects, the animation, special effects, and yes, the victory of good over evil. Then, there are underlying messages of keeping peace between countries back home. For example, the theory of bonding between the people and other living organisms; the war between the army of the evil corporation and the Na’vi.
For me, the exciting moments in the movie were those when the Na’vi were fighting with the predators or the army from the earth. However, the utter sophistication of the labs and research centre was a bit boring. The dragons and the floating mountains did not excite me much because I had already seen them in the trailer, I suppose. Also because they were not something new or fascinating to me. On seeing the floating mountains, those guys in the helicopter were, by the way, truly excited as if they had not been shown a ‘trailer’ or they did really go to some Pandora somewhere. I very much liked the helicopters that looked like some distant, machine-like species of flies.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of critics are unhappy with the story of the movie. They are right, in a way, but I do not think the strength of this movie lies in its story, though it is good in my views. Science-fiction or fantasy cinema of such grandeur does not necessarily need a strong story to keep its viewers interested and give a worthy experience for their money, I think. The story is not very complicated or new. Rather it is simple and straightforward, maybe old-fashioned or cliché, and works just fine. While watching Avatar, I had these moments of “aha!” appreciating the director’s efforts. I think even the most intelligent critic in this world would have had, at least once, one or more of such moments somewhere along the movie. I think I liked my first 3-D experience. In short, Avatar is beautiful, magical, and a visually fantastic masterpiece. A must-watch.
For you in the new year: Be happy. Be cool. Have fun.
This is what I wished everyone on Facebook for the new year, 2010. And I’m too in for it. Let’s see if I can be or not, can have or not.
The first day of the year was pretty good with exhibiting fatigue and inner joy on my face making me look and feel odd and weird. Ah, but I enjoyed. The day started with a ting-o reminder on my mobile at 12:00 while I was having fun with a bunch of friends at Xtreme Sports Bar, a good-bad-good experience that is not recommended for big celebrations. They do all the things deliberately, it seems. Right from an eye-catching, easy-for-brainless, but wrong spelling of their funny business to the promises they made and broke. Fucking looterein! The DJ was out of that apartment securitywalla’s room-sized place after spending 15 mintutes of the new day with us. Music, drinks, and food is what anyone would want, in such moments, but these Xtreme guys seemed to be unware about it, deliberately. Music stopped, drinks followed. As if the DJ and bartenders didn’t like the place as much as everyone else, except the manager and his bunch of idiots, did. So now the DJ square and the bartender rectangular were controlled by giant, black T-shirt wearing, stupid bouncers!
Then, there were problems with the food; vegetarian, to be specific. It was a skin and bones show. Not that they did not bring veg cooks and prepare veg food, but they did not want to serve veg. I still hate those fucking bouncers. After the DJ and bartenders, the owners flew away like midnight birds of the new year. Now, there were bouncers and cooks and some of their staff whose job was to carry stuffs from here to there and back, non-stop. Eventually, when most people left the dark floors, there were a bunch of guys like us who wanted a value-for-money celebration, or rather a revenge against their unfair practices. And now we were dealing with real idiots. And we were really good at that. So we got some rotis and one sabzi to eat followed by rice, but no daal. We almost took control over the black T-shirt giants, the cooks, and the staff. That was really fun. To make them do what we wanted. And so we got all of it back. Music, drinks, food, and glints of celebration on our sodium light faces.
The morning tea didn’t picture in the day because of a stretched out night of celebration and sleep. At noon, we all went to see 3 Idiots, again. And it was fun, again. In the evening, we strolled around in monster-sized KBR Park.
This year is special for me in terms of New Year resolutions for this is the first year into it. And here’s what I promised to myself:
◊ Read more, as Penguin Books says.
◊ Write more. Fiction, technical, nonsense. Whatever.
◊ Get a nice camera that can click things at a resolution higher than 2 megapixels. I’m almost sick of the mobile photography.
◊ Learn and change, wherever possible.
◊ Realize one of my secret dreams that I do not want to write about here. Sorry!
Hope we all have a good time.
By the way: Tom Torriglia at the National Association of Good Grammar is fighting for “twenty ten,” against “two thousand ten.” And I am totally with him on this—how all the years in the 21st century should be pronounced. This is what he puts forward:
The “20″ should have been pronounced “twenty” all along, he said, pointing out that every year in the 20th century was pronounced “nineteen something.”
” ‘Twenty’ follows ‘nineteen.’ ‘Two thousand’ does not follow ‘nineteen.’ It’s logical.”
You can read more about the debate here.
I would like to spend my life in an art house located on a commercial street. I like the best of both worlds.
