Live

At the end of it all, we're all dead. Yet, we try to live our entire lives living every moment safely.

You're stuck in a 9-5 you loathe. It pays good money. So? How old are you? 22? 25? 30? Till when are you going to work? 55-60? And you think quitting and being jobless for a while is the worst thing you could do? Think again...

By the time you retire, having spent at most one month each year enjoying yourself by experiencing new things (maybe), and visiting hitherto unseen places on the planet (maybe), you'll realize what you've frittered away. The best 15-20 years of your life, when you're most able, most resilient physically, most self-dependent; lost in the fear of having lesser money than your peers in a year's time. How old are you again? Yeah, that's right.

Life comes once (at least to those of us who won't remember this life in another birth... if such a thing is possible). Live it. Ditch the job that you dread going to every Sunday evening. Take three months off. Take six months off. Hell, take a year off. Travel; explore the country; the planet. Find out what you love doing. Then figure out how to do it for the rest of your able existence.

Stop complaining. Starting now.

(Time for me to go think of doing that now. :P)

Life in the time of recession

Or so they say. It's been thrown around a lot, this word, in the last year or so. A lot of the news has been true, but with an equally big dose of fear-mongering at times. Yes, times have been harder than in the last few years, but it hasn't all been bleak. Yes, jobs have been lost, and so has money, but as with everything in life, it has had a silver lining as well. Maybe not for everyone out there, but certainly for a lot of folks. Well, how can losing a job, or not finding one be good for anyone, right? I believe it has been very helpful to a lot of people. Maybe they don't realize it right now, but sooner or later they will.

I have long believed that the human race (us) has been on a one-way road to self-destruction (ok, maybe not end-of-the-world stuff, but certainly not pretty either.) Firstly, there's a lot more of us today than there were two or three decades ago. The size of our planet hasn't grown, and neither have the natural resources available to us. In order to sustain ourselves, we've been locked in an endless struggle to produce more, in turn consuming more, wasting more. Not just that, we're competing with ourselves every single day. For food, jobs, space, and each other. Where we would earlier be satisfied with 'enough', we're locked in a daily battle to get more and more for ourselves, and for those with us.

So what does any of this have to do with the recession? Well, contrary to the mindless quest to earn more than our peers, the fact that there is comparatively lesser work available today than there was, say, a year ago, simply means that we (or at least those lucky enough) have more time. More time for us, for our families. More time to do what we really want to do, rather than a mundane 9-to-5 that was killing us anyway. Losing a job, or not finding one, or having to take less money every month, all of it means we've got more time to be with us. This sudden availability of extra time means we're free to do whatever it is that truly drives us. It could be writing stories, poems, or creating music, movies, photographs, or a thousand other things that could be creative, enterprising, novel, and a departure from the life we had in common with at least a million others.

We finally have a chance, albeit forcefully, to do what we've wanted to do. It's certainly not that such was not the case earlier, but now with a sudden dearth of places to work, people are being forced to break self-imposed rules, whether they were because of complacency, fear or anything else under the sun that they wanted to believe. Now is the time to think different. Everyone is unique, and if we channel our passion and desire to create whatever it is we want to, that energy can only push us forward on a better path. Face it, wouldn't you love to be doing something else other than wearing your work uniform and heading to your workplace every morning; just another drop in a sea of a million and more? Wouldn't you love to have your own identity, your own personal brand to showcase to the world? To put all your energy and devotion to create something that's driven by your innate talent, rather than putting up with something you'd rather have done in your past life, not this one?

That is the kind of opportunity that has always been available to all of us. Only now, with the kind of situation the world faces, people might be forced into something that they probably would've wanted to do in the very first place. And that is never a bad thing.

Colour (mis)management

I've been bitten by the photography bug for a few years now, and having owned a dSLR for a reasonable amount of time now, I've accumulated a few things that any photo-hobbyist would over the active course of their hobby. I have read quite a bit about color management and why it is essential to get it right if you're serious about your work, but being a salaried individual I never quite had the money to buy a monitor simply because I wanted better colours... until now.

Dell, as a lot of people are aware, keep giving discounts and special deals throughout the year. In April they had 10 days of special deals running. One one of those days, I decided to plonk some money for a monitor I had been eyeing for a while, the Dell Ultrasharp 2209WA. This is an e-IPS panel, and has had a very high percentage of people reviewing it favourably. For the price it is available for even without a discount, it is any hobbyist's best bang-for-the-buck option available in the market. To go along with it, I also bought an X-Rite i1 Display 2.

Before I plunged into calibration of my new monitor, I went through a reasonable amount of reviews and articles about calibration, colour spaces, etc. I was hoping it would help me nail the process in my first shot. Only, I didn't realize how accustomed I had become to my laptop's LCD (which is quite crummy, photography-wise). As soon as I had my monitor calibrated by the i1, I realized the reds and greens were too bright and saturated. Disappointed, but certain it was my fault, I proceeded to re-calibrate my monitor five more times over the next few days, each time with the same result. Exasperated and disappointed with the results I was consistently getting, I put my questions online on a few forums, hoping someone would be able to tell me what I was doing wrong. Unfortunately my posts disappeared into the deep abyss of old forum posts in less than a day, with barely one reply which wasn't as useful as I was hoping it would be. I had decided, enough was enough, and rather than letting my money go down the drain, I'd sell the monitor and calibrator to someone who was smarter than me and figure this out. However, having acquired a monitor, that too of the quality of this one at the price I paid for it, was something I couldn't convince myself to do so easily. So I decided to give this one last shot.

I deleted all the previous profiles created by the i1, and got the monitor into its native state. I then proceeded to adjust the brightness, contrast and colour levels on my own, with no point of reference, till the time the screen content looked the way I expected and wanted it to look. Despite that, I found that there was no way to get the super-bright greens down to manageable levels without messing up the gamma adjustment, which then tilted the balance of colour unfavourably towards green. So I settled for what I had, and used these settings for the next couple of days.

Today, after two days of manually setting the monitor, I ran the calibrator again. Post-calibration I now find that the monitor resembles the condition I had obtained manually, only a little more accurately. So does this mean I wasted money on the i1? I don't think so. I know that some time in the future I'll buy myself a good printer, and maybe a bigger monitor with a larger gamut than the 2209 (which covers only sRGB) . Having the i1 with me at that point in time will help me calibrate all my devices and help them play nice with each other. As far as the super-bright greens and reds go, I guess I've been using crummy LCDs for so long that the colours that I consider too bright or saturated were actually the ones that I never saw correctly earlier. Lesson learnt.

If you're considering buying a color calibrator for your monitor, I strongly advise you not to waste time thinking about it. Just get one. It will make a ton of difference to your work. even if it only personal work or fun. I can't say much about the cheaper hardware calibrators available in the market, but for sure the i1 is great, and comes with a very good software which is very simple to follow (although it keeps crashing my system... maybe it's because of Vista.) I've heard some really good things about the Spyder 3 Elite as well, and most people say it is at par or slightly better than the i1, so it's worth a look as well.

On and off... then on again

I first tasted the blogging waters back in 2005, when I had gained admission into my B-school, where I would spend the next two years of my life. I spent those first two blog posts cribbing about how much I hated having to study for two more years (after having endured, what felt at that time, four torturous years of engineering studies), and would certainly die before I finished my course.

As things turned out, though (and as it always happens), those two years were anything but what I had imagined them to be. In that time, I actually managed to make a lot of new friends, a few of whom now happen to be my close pals. It was a topsy-turvy journey, but I managed to get through it, hobbling, tripping, and mostly making an absolute idiot out of myself. Hell, I hardly studied at all during the last six months, and yet, here I stand today.

I'm sure there's a ton of people out there who've travelled on the same path that I am on right now. Being somewhere you don't want to be, and doing something that you never thought you would get into. Also, with certainty, in a position where others envy you for your situation, but only you who know what you're really going through right now, and it ain't pretty. I wonder what the way out of here is. 'Coz I've tried to get out of here for the last two years, and every time there seems to be a way out, it closes down at the last possible moment. I'm not even sure whether it's ever supposed to happen, or whether it's waiting for the right time.

(I seem to be noticing a pattern here... those first two blog posts I wrote were full of cribbing too. Hmmm, maybe I suffer from OCD when it comes to talking about my life.)

Anyway, so here I am today- 25.5 years old, with quite a few grays up there; with no idea where my life is headed; with quite a few things that I want to be (photographer, pilot, astronomer, astronaut, digital effects artist, traveller, auto journalist, race car driver, mountaineer, guitarist), with no real idea which direction I should take to get where I want to, and living a life others would love to have (without knowing the price I'm paying to have it.)

So there it is then. My first blog post in three years. Let's see where this goes. It's been a long road getting here, and the journey has just begun.

Wonder

As I sit here tonight, writing down my thoughts, I cannot help but wonder how small and insignificant we all are. The moment I try to visualize the vastness of the universe, it seems so strange that our everyday lives are riddled with innumerable events that hold absolutely no meaning in the larger scheme of things. No matter how hard I try, it is simply impossible to imagine how incredibly gigantic our universe is. We might as well be as big as quarks in the context of things.

Despite all of our knowledge to date, the question of whether we are alone in the universe has still not successfully been answered. Sure, we have proof that life is possible on other places, and that it may actually have existed there too. But is intelligent life, like us, out there? If they do exist, as I believe, then what are they like? Maybe these questions seem too common now, after all this time of being bombarded with false alarms of UFO sightings, documentaries, movies and television soaps using this idea at their core. But to me, this question still holds the same mystique as it did when I first thought about it.

Life changes everyday for every one of us. And each day we wish it would go the way we want it to. Maybe that is the secret of how we have managed to survive for so long. Despite our beliefs and wishes, we manage to adapt to change. And change is something that will never, itself, change.

I always wished I could float in space, and experience it first hand, without any barriers in between. That is not possible right now, but I wonder whether I will ever be able to make it happen. Because for me, that question is more important than anything else in my life. I feel like this universe belongs to me. And I need to know what it holds. I need to know it within my lifetime, and want to experience it live.