Man on the Tree

Usher

More of Usher

Canvasing

Canvasing from Mahesh Haridevan on Vimeo.

The beautiful batch of 2008 winter morning. There was a time when we had 11 of them.

Mahalaxmi to Goregaon

Mahalaxmi to Goregaon from Mahesh Haridevan on Vimeo.

The plight of many settlers from Rajasthan who migrate to Mumbai for a daily bread. This kid (protagonist i) earns his coins by playing the Rawanhathha, a traditional musical instrument, entertaining tourists and locals at the Gateway of India.

It was past 1 in the morning and he was almost asleep, but he kept playing. On one instance he sits and tries to take a rest when he dozes off onto the Gujarati man. The man asks the kid not to lean on him and get off. Thats when a blind man (protagonist ii) comes across the compartment begging for money. And as he closes in the kid, my camera battery gets over.

My idea of a chance video and building a story around it.

It is certainly New India, and very assuring.

Found(yr.2008) this near the gate of a Muncipal Industrial Estate in Worli. A very decent service offered by the insurance company. Neat.

The Hindi one below is very well written if you know how to read it. Adds to the polite sarcasm/irony/cold effort by the service providers.

And above all, a nice piece of copy writing. Benefits.

In Hindi


In English

Daimond Emporium

For the love of type, again. This shot I took in Worli, during my stint at &Then, Mumbai. Amazing type, and an amzing signage. Certainly its diamond.

 

The lost Usher

Since the past four odd months, 6 in the morning I get a nature call. Not mine but a street dog's, who almost owns the apartment I stay in. After the last guy in the apartment enters, the building gate is usually latched. And since I am the only one who stays in the ground floor, I have no option but to adhere to the growling wake up calls from the dog, whom I would name, 'Usher'. He sure has lots of stories to tell us.

But for now, I need to get back to work.

Kes, Bird of Prey

Continuing one of my childhood past times - bird watching (more or less the kites/eagles/hawks/vultures). Feel nostalgic. Back then, a heavy Russian binoculars borrowed from my cousin was all that I had. Now it is a Canon 350D.

The Brahminy Kite (Haliastur Indus) is a familiar bird of prey and is often mistaken to American national bird - Bald Eagle. In India it is considered as the contemporary representation of the mythical Garuda.

Vital statistics :
Medium (43-51cm), wings long broad rounded; tail short and rounded when fanned. Head, neck, breast white; rest of body bright chestnut; primaries tipped black; feet yellow.

Call : Described as a thin mewing scream kweeaa or kyeeer usually while soaring.

In flight : Long but broadly angled wings. Slow deep flapping.

World distribution : India through China to the Philippines and Australia.

Breeding : During mating season (November-December), Brahminy Kites perform aerial acrobatics. They mate on or near the nest. Keep an eye on the sky towards the end of the year.

They are very tolerant of humans. For more images, click here.

The Flop which was a Hit.

The 1968 Mexico City Olympics marked the international debut of Dick Fosbury and his celebrated "Fosbury flop," which would soon revolutionize high-jumping.

My 7th grade P.T (physical training) theory book had the description and the whole deal of how the flop has to be done and perfected, which I never did. I preferred the must safer scissors. Even in 1996, my school had no landing mat, it was sand. I did try it at home on my parent's king size bed few times. Which after a few unsuccessful flops developed some cracks. The bed I mean, I was lucky. Though Fosbury was considered the revolutionary, it was possible only because, by the time Dick Fosbury had come, the landing mat had just got there, with time it got thicker. I won't take off the credit from him none the less. He is a legend. He was the only one who was doing it then.

Forgot to tell.. my book also had illustrations, grabbing my eyes whenever I used to glance through. Will post them whenever I fish that book out.

phaaan tom limbs

one of the best ted talks i have ever come across.. and the most viewed by me self.

Evolution of Batman Symbol over the Years

I remember myself doing so many of them when I was a kid. I used to be crazy about Batman and his world, not jut his accessories. All my books used to have the symbol somewhere or the other. Atleast on the rear. I am not sure who made this video, but a nice example of branding, which has always evolved so much. I dont think any other superhero's symbol is as great as Batman's and which have kept on changing.

James Jarvis runs

Onwards from AKQA on Vimeo.

"I had become interested in the idea of characters that were less referential and more iconic and abstract. I particularly wanted to do something with a potato-headed stick-man that I had been drawing at that time.
The film was inspired by certain personal experiences in running – a favourite run over Blanchland moor in Northumberland, being attacked by a crow in Singapore – and also by the transcendent, almost psychedelic experience of the simple act of running.
Rather than a marketing project inititated by Nike, the film was something proposed and produced by myself, and as such I hope represents a much more equal collaboration with a brand."
James Jarvis

iron&wine

The Days Run Away

The Days Run Away, originally uploaded by Dill Pixels.

They are almost the last thing that you see on the screen. Check out for 200+ END titles on this flickr. Some of the best ones. My pick is Kubrick's 'Killer's Kiss', 'Dr. Strangelove' etc etc.. there are many... almost all are interesting.
Peace :)

'Night owls cleverer, richer than early birds' :P

Researchers have carried out the study and found that late risers tire less quickly than those who make a point of getting up at the crack of dawn, British newspaper the Daily Mail reported. :P

For the latest study, the researchers pitted morning larks against night owls in a task designed to measure their reaction and attention times.

During the experiment, the subjects got up and went to bed at their usual times, with the larks tending to turn in four hours earlier than the owls. Both did similarly well at the task shortly after getting up. But 10 later, it was the night owls that shone, being both quicker and alert at task.

Despite being awake for the same length of time, the larks felt sleepier, with scans showing that the parts of their brains linked to attention were less active.

“During the evening session, evening types were less sleepy and tended to perform faster than morning types,” Philippe Peigneux of the University of Liege in Belgium was quoted as saying.

Famous night owls include Charles Darwin, Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill, who regularly went to bed at 4am and rose late. Due to his sleeping patterns, he often hosted War Cabinet meetings in his bath.

It is thought that the division into larks and owls has its roots in evolution, with early risers in the Stone Age taking the initiative in food gathering, while owls stood guard late into the night.

The study has been published in the latest edition of the Science journal.

melody day

Recently came across the latest beautiful release from ~~~Caribou~~~. Rainbow full of melody. Always been a fan. And, right now I am also listening to Animal Collectives, Andrew Bird (latest discovery), Architecture in Helsinki and Cat Power. Cheers.

michael robinson: girl by firelight + candela latitudes

“Girl By Firelight” is a beautiful little glimpse into colour and motion by animator and filmmaker Michael Robinson, who says the piece is a “color study made entirely with light, entirely in camera. All motion of color elements were created solely with hand movements.”


candela latitudes from Michael Robinson on Vimeo.

dhakkalakkabhukkaa

zZz Running with the beast

WARNING:
SOME MAY FIND THE VIDEO DISTURBING
(wonder what the peta people would think about it)

&

Buckminster Fuller - Live Your Life as an Experiment

Manufacturing Consent

The classic Canadian documentary Manufacturing Consent based on the Noam Chomsky/Edward Herman book by the same name. Explores the the propaganda model of the media and the structure of power. A must see.

return of the lingo kid

i bow you

Role of Design Education in a prospering India: need for caution.

Indian economy is having a good time now. Much of the credit would go to the IT boom that India had in the recent times. Today, design as a new field has emerged as a consultancy job which is equally leading the way of the Indian economy, as engineering, medicine and recently IT had been successful in doing. But there is the other side of the coin too. Though it is not a big problem as of now, but down the line, there are two kinds of possible problems. One is brain drain. But this, as in the case of IT sector, may give Indian economy a boost. Second is saturation of quality and quantity of design education, service and thinking. But in the wake of globalization, this may be a remote possibility. It lies in the education system that Indian design fraternity follows. I would like to focus on this crucial aspect of design education in this article. In a recently held design conference in India, designers from all over the world shared their views on brand building and how to deal with the clients and being a successful designer. There were a few who focused their attention on design education, showed a healthy concern of young Indian designers losing their roots and aping the western way of design. But the people discussing these points were Dutch and the British. It’s not bad. But not inviting any Indian counterpart there to speak about the same is definitely bad. Its not that there has been no eminent design educator in these four decades of design education already been established in India. Education can be categorized into three different sectors. i) Academic or non-professional stream which includes, courses such as BA, MA, Bcom, Bsc, MSc, etc. ii) Professional or job oriented stream which includes courses such as B.Tech, MBBS, LLB, IT) Fine arts stream which has painting, sculpting, music, dance and theatre under it.Fields such as Architecture, Mass communication (including journalism), Design etc. fall under both the streams of fine arts and professional courses because they have both functional and aesthetic aspects involved in them. Design as a specialized field of learning is a product of the modern development of industrialization or mass production. Prof. Balaram in his book Thinking Design(1998) states that the industrial revolution changed the past methods of production and this led to the birth of architecture and design. Both architecture and design, together have changed the whole way of seeing things, combining both micro and macro views. Design existed even during early times. In traditional system of crafts, the knowledge, the investment, the goods, the products, design and manufacturing, everything is handled by the same person. Thus design is not a specialized field in this system. Artisans taught their crafts - carpentry, pottery, weaving etc to the next generation. Commodities were produced according to the need and the social structure of that particular society. Thus the quality and quantity of this education was naturally controlled. In modern system, you have different people to handle different sectors of the process. This is a result of large scale manufacturing. This lead to the emergence of design as a specialized skill separated from the linked aspects of manufacturing etc. In the modern system of education, you don’t have a hereditary occupation hence no hereditary learning and thus there is a scope of an occupational shift. Though these are some positive aspects of the modern system, there is one impending danger in it. It is the delinking of the job needs, from the educational planning.Design education has a great responsibility of not taking design profession to a point of saturation. Considered, every child is creative. The child must be creative in a certain field. Design boom happening in India should not make people believe that being in the design field will be the best for their child, this happened in the schools offering the knowledge. Eames in his report suggests maintaining the level and quality of education being imparted in the schools. Is the same being maintained? In view of all this, and after four plus decades since the first design school in India was established (keeping in mind the Eames report), a National Design policy has finally been given a green signal, in the aid of the design, designers and the society. As a final year design student, I now think, our predecessors did everything to come up with ways of dealing with the identity crisis design and designers had. Giving everything we would have wanted. Recognition, stardom status, and now a national design policy on our lap. We have nothing to do but learn the job and enter the market and sell the product which maintains/defines the best quality. We have been and the next generation of designers will definitely be brought up in a very cross cultural fashion, which should be made the best and most of without losing the grips on the reality and thus being a responsible designer and a human being.Annexure I Pupul Jayakars excerpts on The Eames report - on which NID was set up in 1961 The Eames report, a document familiar to most students of design in this country, unique in its insight, its demands for quality and the depth and width of its thinking. Commencing the report with the famous phrases of the Gita : ‘On man's right to work but never to the fruits thereof', the report sees the ‘change in India, a change in kind and not a change of degree'. Seeing the complexities of the revolution in communications that had struck India with terrific impact, ‘made more violent because of the nature of India's own complex situation, isolation and tradition', the report focuses on India's tradition and a philosophy that is familiar with the meaning of creative destruction and stresses the need to appraise and solve the problems of our times with tremendous service, dignity, and love'. ‘The search for form demands an investigation into values and qualities that Indians hold important to a good life', and that ‘there be close scrutiny of those elements that make up a standard of living'. Annexure II Excerpts from Eames’ report Security in India, lies in change and conscious selection and correction in relation to evolving needs. India stands to face the change with three great advantages : i) She has a tradition and a philosophy familiar with the meaning of creative destruction. ii) She need not make all the mistakes others have made in the transition. iii) Her immediate problems are well defined: food, shelter, distribution, population. guide Prof Nagaraj

function has an emotional impact

it has as a skin
it has a wink.

i love you

musalman

Perhaps the last remaining handwritten newspaper in the world


The Last Calligraphers from ilovetypography.com on Vimeo.

Art in War

The famous reconnaissance picture of Pak Army tank tracks in the sand around Longewala. The Pak Army T-59 MBTs were circling to avoid being hit by IAF Hunters and to raise dust to provide cover. This was taken from a PR Canberra flown by Wing Commander R.S. Benegal and now adorns the enclosure at the VIP entrance of Vayu Bhavan.

james victore on graphic design