picking cichorium

Long time no see

Two papers to write => time to vent.

1. DeviantArt has made changes to the website, so the RSS plugin is not working. Sorreys! Waiting for an update.
2. It has been a little more than 7 months since I left New York. Newness of India has faded, salad-less days and walk-less evenings are gnawing me for change.  It is time to indulge in new madness, so that the tenderness towards the land of warmth and color does not fade as well.

The ocean is rough, it rains every day, but the people are few. The annoying hippies-wanna-be, Israeli just-got-out-of-the-army dudes and screaming Eastern Europeans prefer to come only during high season, which makes Goa during monsoons an amazing vacation get away.
The gray sky and empty beaches bring about calmness. Busy worry gives way to introspection and soul searching. You sit in one of the few beach shacks with a warm belly of a Goa dog on your feet, and wonder, “Why, why, why?” All of the whys buzz around, and you spend the day watching the waves, thinking.

Outfit by GABA, Lakme Fashion Week, Mumbai, October 24, 2008.

I have been on the quest for the cool Indian designers since I landed in Hyderabad over three months ago. Fighting of the human calculators and living in the “small town” of four million people does not exactly aid my mission.

Finally, a finding happened last weekend at Anonym, one of Hyderabad’s few interesting clothing shops. Mild pastels, necessary minimum of detail and extreme attention to comfort singled out GABA from all of the other stuff in the store. Aneeth Arora and Chinar Farooqui, the makers of the brand, use earthy colors and natural fabrics. In the midst of “new” India, full of screaming billboards and modern concrete mosters, GABA offers comfort of the “old,” which is similar across the cultures. A GABA woman radiates warm assertiveness, quiet happiness and relaxing well-being. At the same time, she is stylish, and… cool.

haning around Charminar

I have no idea what mad person would rather chase after some Cournot Equilibrium than explore pretty things. This clearly makes me, to put it in mild terms, less than excellent profit-maximization-focused MBA student. There is nobody to hang out with during exams, which forces self-entertainment; thus, forth come such posts.

Charminar court

street madness can never be understood from a picture

I know that the color of the sunsets speaks volumes about pollution, but don’t know exactly what it is saying. I googled around, and, surprisingly, it looks like Hyderabad’s air is clean.

“In an exceptionally clear, unpolluted atmosphere, the colours of sunset are especially vivid. The Sun is bright yellow and the adjacent sky is shades of orange and yellow. As the Sun disappears below the horizon, the colours change gradually from orange to blue. Low-lying clouds continue to reflect the light of the Sun, even after it has vanished. Higher, thin cloud shows a tint of mauve, as the blue of the sky mingles with the red …” George Dissanaike writes in the New Scientist

 You can verify the pre-sunset colors observed in Hyderabad here. The pictures from this post are of the sky without the sun.