Ponto de Vista

This was taken in Delhi. I’ve seen images of gods adorning walls in public places all over India – a brilliant idea to stop our desi brethren from peeing just anywhere … though it’s now against the law.
However, this set of Hindu deities inside the elevator of an office block puzzled me. It was kinda cool to see the two doors whiz shut and the pictures appear  😉 Ok, yes, I’m still a kid 😉
Oh, and the song is the one in which Mr. Sami is beseeching god for a ‘lift’ (up, not a car ride): “Thodi si to lift kara de/ Dollar de ya pound de de/Cash de de, check bana de/Dirham-o-dinaar de de…”

When my brother and I were little, my mother decided we were using too much ‘bad language’ — we were calling each other ‘stupid’ and ‘moron’ — and to curb our tongues, she instituted a fine. We were to drop 25 paise into a gulak for adjectives like that, 50 paise for using sh!#. These colorful gulaks in Mazjid Moth, Dilli, reminded me of that failed behavioural modification experiment 😀
Were this gulak thing instituted in our house again, all of us would be contributing quite a bit — parents included! Hmm, maybe we could use the spoils to get some good PG-13 DVD’s … 😉

This is a Delhi photo – of course! I was nearly home when I looked to my left and to my right and found myself eye-to-eye with not one, but two Barbies. Most rickshaws have posters up of Bollywood stars. This was a first for me. In Mumbai though, last Thursday I was in a cab that the driver (also the owner) had furnished with a plush red and black, umm, carpet. It was on the seats, the ceiling, the flooring, and the dashboard. Then I noticed it was even on the inside panels of the doors. On further inspection and inquiry, I found out it really was the same furry fabric, only he’d had it laminated! How ingenious, no?

This is the “NICE beauty hair style” joint for “gents and kids” near Lady Shri Ram College for Women in Delhi. I passed this for a year and on my penultimate day in the city, I finally managed to get a decent shot of the signboard. My line of sight in the past has always gotten obscured by traffic … I can’t tell you how many blurred/blocked shots I’ve deleted. Anyway, this is still not the best photo, so I’ll help you read what the NICE beauty hair style place offers. If you’re a gents or a kids, you can get “FACIAL, BLEACH, MASSAZ & BODY MASSAZ” … lucky you! Nothing for the ladies, sadly. Sigh…. no massaz of any kind 🙁
Timings: 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. And you can get a paan when you’re done 🙂

Juicing is hard work. Last month, I went to Janakpuri for a work visit and exiting the I just loved these two little boys who were selling sugarcane juice  (replacing the shakharkandhi chaat of the winter) from this rotary machine which took all their strength. There were plenty of takers on that hot day — one of the first sweaty ones in Delhi’s so-called spring…
Their ice blocks are covered with jute sacks and the sugarcane stems
are then passed between the two grinding wheels. The result — a flattened stick of fibre, and sweet, sweet, sticky liquid sugar 😉

Last month, my trusty iBook crashed on me and I was near devastated. I had such a crap day that I really was in no mood to do anything but crawl into bed and cry over lost data. My parents, however, cajoled me into coming out to dinner with them on the promise that their friends would cheer me up with funny stories of their misspent youth. They lived up to their promise and I did feel better. But the highlight of the evening was seeing two sambar forage in the B course in the moonlight. Here’s one with shadow thrown on the gumbad behind. Blurry, but then my camera phone isn’t really made for nighttime shooting.