I love the way Kalyan has gone off to the wild and is hav­ing these great jun­gle adven­tures! Don’t miss his lat­est post and pic­tures about a tiger killing a deer.

Early Sat­ur­day morn­ing (I wish I could wake up so early on work days!!) we went for a drive towards Hoskote. Passed some lovely scenes on the way. There is a water body before you reach Hoskote, called Yela­ma­lappa tank, where we had spot­ted pel­i­cans when we had passed that way enroute to Chen­nai. On Sat­ur­day, we decided to go back there for a closer look.

Unfor­tu­nately, pel­i­cans (and most other birds) are painfully shy and this is the clos­est I could get!

Besides pel­i­cans, there were herons, comor­rants (small and large), swal­lows, kites and some I couldn’t iden­tify – birds of all shapes and sizes. A lovely place worth vis­it­ing if you like nature and birds.

You can view all the pic­tures here. I’ve added some more pic­tures to the Sun­sets and Sun­rises gallery. And the Maha­balipu­ram pic­tures are here. And the king­fisher, iguana, croc­o­diles and tur­tles are here. A big thanks to Madhu (once again) for installing this really cool image gallery, which I have been hav­ing great fun with. I shall def­i­nitely need some more disk space at the rate I’m going!

The Chennai-Cuddalore pic­tures taken dur­ing the Jan 14–16 week­end are also uploaded now.

In the evening, after French class, caught a play called Creeps at Ran­gashankara. It’s by a Ger­man play­wright, Lutz Hub­ner and is about a tele­vi­sion show by the same name, which is look­ing for a VJ. Three young girls come together for the audi­tion and then try and out scream, out act, and out play each other for the role – all for dif­fer­ent rea­sons. Unknown to them, they are actu­ally all being taken for a ride by the direc­tor. While the act­ing was pretty good, I think a lot of the play “got lost in trans­la­tion” (as Vaish termed it). It is, I sus­pect, an even stronger play in Ger­man. But it was a decent effort and worth a watch.

And for the cul­tur­ally inclined, there’s some more events com­ing up this week. A pho­tog­ra­phy exhi­bi­tion by the Indian Insti­tute of Sci­ence is on the 29th and 30th. On Jan 26th, there are 2 films that will be screened at the Kar­nataka Chi­tra Kala Parishad at 7.30 pm:
– CROSSING THE LINES: KASHMIR, PAKISTAN, INDIA (47 min­utes)
– INDIA AND PAKISTAN UNDER THE NUCLEAR SHADOW (32 minutes)

They are by Per­vez Hoodb­hoy, who has writ­ten and spo­ken exten­sively on
top­ics rang­ing from sci­ence in Islam to edu­ca­tion issues in Pak­istan and nuclear dis­ar­ma­ment. He’s also been a fac­ulty mem­ber at the Depart­ment of Physics, Quaid-e-Azam Uni­ver­sity, Islam­abad since 1973. Should def­i­nitely be worth a watch. If I can fin­ish all my revi­sions for my exams, I am hop­ing to head to the CKP in the evening.

Last time, the Lal­bagh Flower Show was held, I was just begin­ning to exper­i­ment with the SLR and had great fun click­ing pic­tures. The show is on again and will be going on the whole of this week.

My first install­ment of French exams on Sat­ur­day. Time to get back to the books and do some seri­ous revi­sion! Sigh, so many things to do. And it’s the end of Jan­u­ary already! Is it true that time flies faster when you get older? Heh!