Saturday, October 22, 2011

/usr/games/fortune is a wonderful program. My $HOME/.profile file executes "/usr/games/fortune -a". Every time I open a terminal, it gives displays a nice little fortune. What it displayed this morning was especially interesting:

Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley's Lover has just been
reissued by the Grove Press, and this pictorial account of the
day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is full of considerable
interest to outdoor minded readers, as it contains many passages on
pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin,
and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper.
Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous
material in order to discover and savour those sidelights on the
management of a midland shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion
the book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller's "Practical Gamekeeping."
-- Ed Zern, "Field and Stream" (Nov. 1959)


Must have data packages for fortune:
fortunes-off : Offensive fortunes
fortune-spam : fortunes taken from SPAM messages

Monday, October 17, 2011

Commenting on one of the pics of a spider that I clicked, a dear friend asked what is it with me and with certain kinds of arthropods. Another dear friend commented that I am a bug, which is not far off the target. However, I think that arthropods, in-spite of their strong limbs and ability to fly, need some backing from me.
Photographing arthropods is fun. It is a very good pastime, and one can spend the entire day searching for insects, creeping up to them slowly, photographing them till Swift Tuttle hits Earth and never get bored. Part of the challenge lies in the fact that peering into a small display, one never realizes if one has nailed the insect or not, or is the insect's bottom in focus rather than the lovely eyes of the lady (which proves that eyes need not resemble a lake to be pretty, thereby shattering the box in which certain poets find themselves confined). Another part of the challenge is to creep up to them without disturbing them. Some insects are easier to creep up to, some are more difficult.
That being said, photographing insects is somewhat easier than other forms of photography. One doesn't have to think much about composition much; with such an interesting subject, any way a photo is clicked, it will always be appealing. Of course, masters in this art wouldn't agree with me, but I'm sure my readers will. They will also agree that the masters like Thomas Shahan get astounding results, and my results are nothing more than average in comparison to them, but nevertheless, the results I get are interesting enough. Photographing insects is also easier since they are much easier to find, there is more variety of insects on this planet than there are mammals or birds. Insects are much easier to approach than birds or other mammals, which makes insect photography an ideal candidate for amateurs like me. I would choose to leave the tigers and snow leopards to the pros.
The ubiquity of insects makes photographing them a real good pastime. The other day, I was waiting for a friend at the Hauz Khas metro station. My friend turned up half an hour late. I used the time to photograph a bug that was crawling on the granite wall at the sides of the staircase. The time waiting for him was well spent.
On a different note, macro photography enables me to look at things differently. a five millimeter spider can have eight legs, and four simple eyes. A dragonfly can have a pair of beautiful helmet-like compound eyes and a few simple eyes as well. A damselfly looks like a perfect Hollywood alien. The body of an ant is not smooth as it looks, but is full of hair. A mosquito has a very complex anatomy. Watching a bee grip a flower, and carry pollen in its pollen sack is exhilarating. In one week in my garden at home, I could spot five species of honeybees and bumble bees, one of them having blue bands. I spotted a species that looked like a bee but didn't have a sting, and later found out that the species is called a hoverfly. I educated myself about dragonflies, and spotted at least 6 different species of dragonflies (although I couldn't photograph all of them). I learnt about a species called a leafhopper. I found five kinds of caterpillars in my garden, and a greater number of species of butterfly.
Macro photography of insects really opens one's eyes to how beautiful nature can be, and how complex and beautiful each species is, even the tiniest ones. When one sees a cockroach creep out of the drain, it fills one with disgust. However, views can change, as my view changed after this photograph.
It is no wonder that Darwin was fascinated with beetles. If you still aren't convinced, I'll direct you to the master's photostream. If you still aren't convinced, you should watch these videos:







Saturday, October 08, 2011

Could Empson be pulling a practical joke on the entire literary theory community when he wrote his famed Seven Types of Ambiguity? Could it be that he wanted to be a bit of Benjamin Franklin himself?

Sopat Ali



Sopat Ali, 2011

Sopat Ali is the best mechanic in Shillong, and perhaps the best mechanic in the whole of Meghalaya. He can take a Premiere Padmini apart down to the last screw, and put it back together without the help of a manual. My dad's 31 year old Padmini is still going strong thanks to Sopat Ali.

Sopat is about seventy-five now, but hardly looks more than sixty. Sopat tells my father many stories, some of which my father told me yesterday which I will recount in this post.

Sopat Ali's father was a bartender in Pinewood Hotel when the British were still in India, but in his lifetime, he never tasted a drop of alcohol. His father would bring empty bottles of liquor home. Sopat and his brothers would collect the lees in those bottles, mix them all together, sell the concoction and buy chana-choor with that money.

When the British left, they gifted his father a considerable amount of land. Sopat's brothers are all well established today. However, Sopat lives in a ramshackle wood-cabin. Sopat was employed as a foreman in the French Motor Works Company. When the company went bankrupt, Sopat was left unemployed. If Sopat had, then, opened his own garage, he would have been a rich man now, but Sopat was not very street-smart.

Sopat has been associated with our family since 1958. My uncle owned a Dodge bus, a Fiat taxi and a personal Chevrolet car. Sopat was always the man to turn to if anything went wrong.

Sopat is a very innovative person. The best masons and mechanics are always very innovative. If he had a better education, I have no doubt he would have been the pride of any research laboratory in India.

Once, Sopat was driving Dhiren Dutta, a lawyer and a family friend, from Itanagar to Shillong in his Standard 10 car. There was a puncture, and the spare wasn't in good shape. Sopat unscrewed the tyre, took the tube out, filled the tyre with twigs, leaves, branches and any other vegetation he could find, and then screwed it back. He drove the car with the same tyre for fourteen more kilometers till he could find a place where the tube could be repaired.

Another time, the same Standard 10 ran out of Mobil oil in the highway, and a garage was nowhere to be found. Sopat bought a small amount of mustard oil, and used it instead of Mobil oil till he reached the next garage.

Sopat was driving the same Standard 10 to Silchar once. He hit a pot-hole and badly damaged the engine oil pump. Sopat quickly realized that the pump will not be able to push Mobil oil into the engine, and decided to drown the engine in Mobil oil. Luckily, he was carrying a large supply of engine oil; he poured four litres of mobil oil into the engine. This work-around was enough to allow the car to be driven to a workshop in Silchar. The mechanic in Silchar was amazed at the ingenuity of the man.

The governor of Assam had a Buick 12 cylinder car which broke down once, and was taken to the French Motor Works at Assam. The mechanics there tried to fix it in vain. Finally, Sopat was summoned from Shillong at midnight. Sopat quickly spotted that the wiring of the twelve cylinders was incorrect, and fixed it. Sopat was given a baksheesh of one thousand rupees for fixing it. The sum was a big amount in the 1960s.

A couple of years ago, one of dad's friends was frustrated with his Maruti Omni. He had taken it to the workshop multiple times. The mechanics at the workshop changed various components, but still, it would not start. He told Sopat about his problems. Sopat tried to switch the engine on and immediately realized that the problem was a broken and blocked oil filter. He took out the oil filter out and discarded it. The engine responded. Dad's friend drove the car to the Maruti workshop to replace the oil filter. The mechanics at the workshop started telling him that the car would not start because there was no oil filter. Of course, he didn't buy their cock and bull story, and told them that the engine started because the oil filter was taken out, and the real problem was a blocked oil filter which the mechanics at the workshop could not figure out.

Sopat is a very honest man, honest and simple. He has simple desires. Now and then a cheap shirt, now and then a shoe. He is totally loyal to my father, and would leave everything aside to come to my father's aid if anything went wrong with his car. Sopat Ali reminds me of the poem by Henry Wotton called The Character of a Happy Life.