(Insert pun on the word "Hampi")

The Autumn of Isolation drives me at slightest opportunity towards ancient monuments and ruins. This may not be a bad thing. Turns out, an architect who doesn't draw is heading towards tragic irony. Thus, armed with sketchbook (for drawing on) and pens (for drawing with) and father (for drawing cash), I headed towards the ancient Vijayanagara  kingdom of Hampi, a World Heritage site and genuine Place of Desolate Beauty. 

I would show you the photos I took, but those lay happily in my Google account, so I'll show you my sketches instead. Due to the lucky misfortune of bringing almost-dry pens for sketching, I was forced to improvise, leading to colourful results. To maintain some semblance of Concept and Meaning, I used a different colour for each material finish - carved stone, brick and mortar and boulder - but don't let some Critic years down the line fool your grandkids about my Art; I ran out of ink, plain and simple.

Gopuram at Tiruvengalanatha Temple facing Mathanga Hill

Vitthala Temple Stone Chariot of Garuda

People tell me, "You shouldn't see everything in black and white", so here's my answer. Each one took about two hours to complete, so these are the grand total of my Sketches in Hampi series, but I'm willing to prostitute my services to interested parties. Once in a while. 

If you like reposting images, please tell people I drew them. Not just these ones, I'd like to take credit for everything, I'm a harmless megalomaniac.

Mewar Prem

(Sung to the tune of "Bulla ki Jaana" by Rabbi Shergill)

Author: Unknown

Two scoops of ice cream with cone
Two scoops of, ice cream with, cone (x2)

Two scoops of ice cream for-uh
Five rupees - now don't scream or-uh
Everyone will ask for more-uh

Simple cone, no stupid waffle,
Still you'll want to eat a jawful
Everything else will seem awful

All the ingredients are pure-uh
I don't need gimmicks to lure-uh
All my rivals are inse-cure-uh!

I'll serve you all on my own!

Two scoops of ice cream with cone
Two scoops of, ice cream with, cone (x2)

I don't serve just ice cream scoops-uh
When interest in ice cream droops-uh
I sell other dessert groups-uh

Badaam* shake for ten bucks, its-uh
Filled with almond-pista bits-uh
Still I manage some profits-uh

Solid or liquid treats-uh
If you're ever craving sweets-uh
You can find me on the stre-eets-uh!

I'll serve till my tyres are worn!

Two scoops of ice cream with cone
Two scoops of, ice cream with, cone (x2)

I'm not an early beginner
I arrive only post-dinner
I serve both saint and sinner
I serve losers, I serve winners
You broaden while I get thinner!

I'll serve you till I am gone!

Two scoops of ice cream with cone
Two scoops of, ice cream with, cone (x2)

Woah-oah-oah!

Two scoops of ice cream with cone
Two scoops of, ice cream with, cone (x4)

*Hindi: Almond

Comic Stripper 02

As in Comic Stripper 01, I often put composition of the elements over conveying the message - a strategy that (again) did not win me competitions, but all you admirers instead. Someone who knows me would think this was an unlikely topic for me to make a comic about, but that someone is sweet enough not to make too big a deal about it.

I wanna hold your chand!

To quote Juror #4 from the 1957 movie 12 Angry Men, "two things:" (yup, that's the quote)

• The focus was on symmetry in composition; I love comics where minor changes occur between panels to convey a story, especially when there are no speech bubbles. It requires a little extra focus on the viewer's part, kinda like the Slylock Fox 'Spot the 6 differences' puzzles, and is therefore more rewarding.*
• Though I prefer black and white comics, the red tablecloth adds the extra layer of meaning in the last panel - a cheap thrill for me and hopefully for you. Only a few artists can make a comic truly stunning in colour, so for now, I'll stick to monochrome.

It's when I took a test print of this strip that I felt the contrast between the lighter and darker shades of red should have been more, but everyone isn't born with that much foreskin. ("I said 'foresight'", "Oh, I thought you said 'foreskin'" etc)

*This does NOT mean I condone the 'talking heads' comics like Garfield where the panels are almost photocopies of each other, with only the text in the speech bubbles changed.

This Thesis is The Thesis

For those who came in late: In the early months of 2011, I was required to present a thesis on Architectural Design. My search for a topic started with a Resort in a hill station and ended in a Marine Park and Research Centre facility on the coast. At this stage, you're supposed to have an opinion on Architecture, and must have formed some sort of hypothesis (how I came to dislike that word!) that you would test in your Thesis. With some struggle, I decided my hypothesis would explore the generation of a form that would reflect the connection between Man and Sea, between recreation and research... (This is ArchiSpeak, or A.S. You've probably heard of it as B.S., but that is soooo 1990s, dahling)

Though I am a functionalist, this hypothesis steered me in the direction of form exploration, a painful journey, but with sweet enough fruit at the end. 

If you'd like to get a whiff, here's the link.

As with my slightly more painful Dissertation, just gimme a little credit if you use any part of it.

If the final form wasn't exciting enough for you, forgive me on two counts:

• I've never bothered about Form before, with the firm conviction that the Functions will generate the Form if they're in the right place
• The final design was done in less than a month, as a drastic jump from its previous avatar

Brought back from long absence, a haiku to mark the occasion:

Form follows Function

But with a slip of the tongue

Function follows Form

Mental note: Must haiku more.

The return of Uncanny!

Welcome back to another episode of Uncanny! Observe the following pieces of information. The first is from the Book of Revelations from the King James Bible. It's more recognisable as the opening to the song Number of the Beast by Iron Maiden ("Who?", you ask, as the universe slowly conspires to erase you from existence for that utterance). The second is a definition from Wikipedia, which is as good as authoritative nowadays. I've emboldened and underlined the keywords in each for all you lazy readers:

Therefore rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them. Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time. 

(Revelations 12:12)

Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six. 

(Revelations 13:18)

During the canonization process of the Roman Catholic Church, the Promoter of the Faith, popularly known as the Devil's advocate, was a canon lawyer appointed by Church authorities to argue against the canonization of the candidate. It was their job to take a skeptical view of the candidate's character, to look for holes in the evidence, to argue that any miracles attributed to the candidate were fraudulent, etc. The Devil's advocate opposed God's advocate, whose task is to make the argument in favor of canonization.

These are two pieces of information, with the common factor being the Devil, right? Well, now I know where the Beast lives - as expected, in New Delhi. (Scroll down, I'm not telling you next time, mouth-breather)

Lawcifer?

No points to me for poor photography, but you can't blame someone for not taking the time to set up a tripod at the gates of Christian Hell.

Maps are for Losers

There seems to be some sort of problem here. The followers of this blog haven't run riot in the streets of wherever they are demanding a new post from me. Sure, some have asked me when I'll post something new, but this lukewarm attitude doesn't sufficiently fan the flames of my humongous ego, but I'm so in love with every morsel I put down on this blog that I thought I'd post something anyway. This doesn't let you off the hook, by the way.

Last year, I discovered a site called edushi.com (EDIT: the site is now dead), that has created maps like Google of major  Chinese cities, but in a colourful, user-friendly, pixel art form. Now, I love maps, but unfortunately, you can only view each city at a certain zoom level, i.e. you can't zoom out and view the whole thing as a work of art. The ka-pow! combination of my joblessness and drive led me to Prnt Scrn the whole city of Shanghai in tiles and stitch it together. here is the result - 

'Coz you only use them when you're lost (Click for full resolution)

May not look like much, but that map took me more than an hour to make and has a full resolution of close to 7.1 MP! (Make an 'o' with your mouth and raise your eyebrows, we've already talked about your attitude) Sadly, my computer couldn't take the stress of stitching Beijing together, which would have been a treat with it's new stadia - perhaps another similarly inclined degenerate could step up to the task. 

Further browsing: Maps at baidu.com, the Chinese equivalent of Google.

It's hard to keep the cartophile geek tone out of this blog, but in my defense, I really suck at directions.

Sidbert by S.Achaya

In my opinion, you don't need to be in my studio to get this strip, but I guess some bits would be funnier if you were. My first attempt at digital colouring by the way, and I know you kinda like it.

Click here to view in a larger size

I just noticed I have the same initials as Scott Adams, creator of the popular office comic Dilbert, whose style I have blatantly ripped off for the strip above.

Mario, Aur Shrooms Par Koodio!

There is a peculiar manner of speech in some North Indian Hindi, where the verb is extended, making it simultaneously more expressive as well as more casual. The extension occurs by (it seems) combining the respectful and the casual forms of the verb. For example, the Hindi word for throw is "phenk". Requesting someone to throw respectfully, one would say "phenkiye", while casually one would say "phenko". BUT the common turn of phrase is "phenkiyo", or "phenkio" for brevity.

In 1981, a video game character called Jumpman made his debut in the arcade game Donkey Kong, and proved to be popular enough to have his own 8 bit video game two years later. The new game involved him and his younger brother battling creatures coming from the sewers below New York, with a a lot of "maar"(hit) and "kood"(jump). With Indians being such natural geniuses at 'computer stuff', its quite possible that quite a few game testers must have been Indian software engineering graduates, fresh out of the drug-induced seventies, and ready to take on the world. The involvement while testing the game must have led to a lot of vocalizations - shouts of "Koodiyo!" and "Mario!" (following the peculiar turn of speech mentioned above) - while their post-adolescent minds must have found it quite amusing to recommend that the power-ups for enhancing character abilities be based on shrooms (Hallucinogenic Psilocybin mushrooms).*

We decided to paint a wall in hostel, and the brick facade prompted us to think of a pixel-based composition - what better than a tribute to our shroom-munching, "Mario!"-shouting software engineering graduates of yesteryear? While me and the Dog designed it, it took the arrival of Osiris to start work on it, with a little help from the Monkey on the way - a regular carnival of freaks creating what Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore would call "a coughdrop in the throat of eternity".

No, not that Dog

* If you believed that cock-and-bull history of Mario, deduct 12000 and go to Jail. Do not pass Go, do not collect 200 units of your currency.

Fourth Way To The Third Gender

The court jester of yesteryear held an important position - using foolish antics, he could make fun and poke holes in the system. This position still exists in society for those willing to take it up at the risk of being made fun of. An important concept in the book (and movie) Fight Club is that "its only when we've lost everything that we're free to do anything". An important thing to lose is attachment to one's image - an important feature of Eastern ways-of-life. The jester was closer to enlightenment than the other schmucks in the feudal system.

Experiments with detachment resulted in a metal fan (me) singing a Backstreet Boys song (I Want It That Way) last year for the slowly dying music show organised by the slowly dying university music society; an even earlier example of detaching myself from my image would be the Bad Dancers' Club. This year, I targeted the unforgivably unoriginal fashion show organised by the generally unoriginal university fashion society. The aim was to create something which people would generally consider repulsive and uncomfortable for a show that is meant to produce items that are beautiful and comfortable. To create shock without outrage is a jester's modus operandi and the idea of a hijra sequence was born - the exact inception probably had something to do with a documentary I once saw, as well as an Occam's razor answer to the question 'What different thing can a guy wear for a fashion show?" Once the theme was decided, us like-minded (and big-balled) degenerates gathered together and produced a great showstopper, though that is aside from the point.

Fright Club?

My general disgust for the monotony of these societies gave birth to some memorable shows. Using myself as a channel for injecting the unexpected into these events served two purposes:

• Expressing my opinion without causing offence a la Jester, and
• Understanding the futility of preserving an image of self with respect to the environment; a highly personal and - dare I say it - spiritual development.

Again,

"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything"

Tyler Durden

Again.

Condescending Rant

For some reason, people who do not listen to the metal genre would like me to believe that the only reason they dislike this type of music is because of the death growl vocals, associated primarily with death metal and it's associated subgenres. I beg to differ, dear Fool.

From Death Metal,

"However, death growls are just as much an aesthetic to death metal as an instrument, particularly due to the percussive nature of this kind of singing; its harsh and very bad, brutal nature is in keeping with death metal's often dark and disturbing subject matter." (Sharpe-Young, 2008)

So people are trying to tell me that out of all the 'harsh' instruments, they have the musical sophistication to single one out for critique? Or are they unhappy because they can't understand the lyrics (poetic though they are in many cases), which would then have completely changed their attitude towards the genre, though all other instruments play the same thing? The voice is an instrument, Mouth-Breathers, and the fact that it is informed by the music means that it's actually following rules of rhythm, harmony, structure and texture integral to making something sound 'good'.

I'd like this band, except for that guy on the left

APPENDIX

Scene from Metal Has No Good PR

Layperson: What's so great about heavy metal?
Me: I just like the speed and power of sound created, I connect with it at some basic level... Layperson: Play a song for me, like a good song...
Me: Okay, here, check this one out, it's called 'Master's Apprentices' by a band called Opeth, they're from Sweden.
*Click*(Music starts playing) (I smile, layperson looks a little shocked like as if this speed and volume were not expected, when in fact it was. I pretend not to recognise that fact)
Layperson: (Hesitantly, smiling) It's damn loud, man! How do you listen to this? (Insert other appropriate clichés)
Me: (Smiling a little smugly) Wait for the vocals to start!
(Growling death metal vocals begin. Layperson makes a pitying smiling face at me, like as if I'm a star on the ground. Head shakes to indicate that this is the ONLY thing preventing her/him from becoming a metal fan)
Me: Okay, the next verse has the same riffs, so lemme just fast-forward to the next part.(Music is fast-forwarded to next part, chords change, but growling continues. Layperson continues pitying smile, increasingly annoying me)
Me: (Talking faster) Wait, after this part, it suddenly becomes slow. These guys are masters of this kind of transition, it happens so smoothly, it's amazing, just check it out...
(After four cycles, drumming becomes slow, no distortion on guitars)
Layperson: (Looking at me like I finally did something right) Wow, this is good. (insert other not entirely sincere clichés) The first part was - er - not my type, but this is cool, like Pink Floyd or something.
Me: Now check it out, the vocals become clean, no more growling.
(Clean vocals start, still accompanied by slow music. I look at layperson and make 'Huh? Huh?" kind of eyebrow movements)
Layperson: Wow, this is good, man. It sounds like *Generic soft rock band*. Have you heard their song *Generic soft rock song*?
Me: Nope. Check out this part.
Layperson: (After a few seconds of silence) Yeah, cool.
Me: Wait, wait, wait. Not that. There's a slow solo here, it's damn cool...
(Guitar solo)
Layperson: Hmmm...
Me: And now it gets fast again, they're damn good at this, merging the fast part with the slow one.
(Music speeds up, guitar distortion resumes, drums revert to double bass)
Layperson: Wow, okay, okay. How much longer is this song?
Me: About 3 minutes more, it's a ten and a half minute song.
Layperson: What? So long? Even 'Stairway To Heaven' is, like, some seven and a half minutes long... Led Zepp?
Me: Yeah, yeah, i know.

"History is written by the Victors"

Scene 1. Ayodhya. Royal palace. Around 500BCE.

Bharat: Arrey bhaiyya Ram! Aap dakshin me kya dekhe?

Ram: Dakshin me humne ajeeb log dekhe, bahut hairy the, poore badan pe baal hi baal! Aisa laga sab bandar hain vaha pe!

Bharat: Matlab sab bandar hai south India me?

Ram: Er... Haan! Sab bandar hai!

Bharat: Tab to unke poonchh bhi hue honge? Bandar ki tarah?

Ram: Haan, haan, kyon nahi, kyon nahi! Poonchh bhi the, ajeeb bandariya bhasha bhi thi, Hindi-vindi to pata hi nahi tha unhe, jab ki kuchh shatabdi me voh hamari rashtrabhasha banegi!

Bharat: Lekin Valmikiji keh rahe the ki Hindi keval ek official language banegi, baki 17 bhashaon ke saath! Ispe to Gujarat High Court ki ruling* bhi hogi, kuch dhai hazaar saalon me!

Ram: Oho! Bada ismart ban rahe hain aap to! Itna ismart the, to yeh kyun nahi pata tha ki saare south Indians bandar hai? Hah? Hmm?

Bharat: Ram jaane...

Ram: Exactly! Ab yuddh jeeta kaun? Hum, na? To hamari baat maaniye, iske baad dakshin ke bhaluon ke baare me bhi batana hai..."

Exeunt.

"I'll tell you all about it when I'm back"

*The Gujarat High Court, on 25 January 2010, observed "Normally, in India, majority of the people have accepted Hindi as a national language and many people speak Hindi and write in Devanagari script but there is nothing on record to suggest that any provision has been made or order issued declaring Hindi as a national language of the country."

Speech to text

I think I’m going crazy. I’ve begun talking to my computer. Revolutionary as it may seem, it is still quite a tedious task. It took me 15 minutes to type that previous sentence. Maybe it’s got something to do with my Indian accent or maybe it’s a devious plot to change my accent to an American one. In fact the moment I start talking with an American accent it picks up all my words perfectly. It’s kind of sad that I lose my individuality to my computer, my glorious Indian accent lost to the evil machinations of the western corporate world. Sad thing is my computer is learning from my accent, so the longer I speak with my American accent the harder it’s gonna be for it to learn my Indian accent. I guess I’m gonna stop now, ‘cause I’m feeling pretty pathetic staying awake at 5:30 AM talking to my computer in an alien accent.

Yup, that’s about it.