I have moved to Posterous!

I have moved my blog to Posterous.Please visit me at http://shudh.posterous.com/

Remembering MJ: A Collage Competition

On Friday, 3rd July 2009 a collage competition was held in the memory of late icon Michael Jackson.As this competition was an intra-office event , not many people were able to enjoy the same.I have taken pictures of almost all the competing collages here (as I receive more entries I would update it) for you to visualize and to make it more interesting, I have given an option to vote (Digg – style) for the users to be the judge and to bring the most desrving collage to the top.At this point, I also feel that it would be just to bring to your notice that our collage-entry to this event is also displayed here (!)

I had to create two voting widgets below as PollsB  would not allow me to put more than five photos for voting in one widget.It would be helpful if you can vote on only one collage (although you have the option to vote twice in both the columns).But if you like more than one collage you may vote on both columns!You are encouraged to post a comment on why you have selected one collage over another.

For those participants who would like to see their collage here,please feel free to write (or post a comment)

Resurrecting the dying arts and artists of India

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better. Andre Gide (1869 - 1951)

This weekend I visited The Fine Arts Institute where an event was organized to promote Indian Arts & Artists.I was impressed by the fine artwork and the use of vibrant natural colours.I spoke to the Mural Painter from Wayanad, Kerala (a southern state of India).I came to know that Murals,one of India's ancient folk arts,is dying out from a lack of patrons and the initiative that are taken to protect both (The Art & The Artists) are "Too Little,Too Late!"

A few steps ahead from the Mural exhibition were the Gond Paintings,a tribal art from Madhya Pradesh (a state in middle India).I also spoke to the Gond artist who told me that each Gond painting is inspired by a folklore and he narrated to me the pictorial discourse of "Birth of river Narmada" through his painting.Although he was proud to show me the "Best Gond Painter Award" given to him by the Government but the sad undertone in his voice as a consequence of lack of business & patrons was palpable. Below is a visual representation of my experience.

View in Maps

This morning on my breakfast table when I read an article in supplement of The Economic Times which states that the buyers of Art/Paintings are more concerned about "who they are buying' rather than 'what they are buying!" I feel that our poor and genuine artists are losing out in this digital age of shameless self publicity with big media houses and investment bankers only promoting the self-proclaimed "celebrity artists" which left me with a bitter breakfast aftertaste. I believe that ,with you, WE can make a difference! I request you to spare two minutes of your busy schedule to fill the form here and enable me with your valuable suggestion so that WE can find a way to resurrect this dying art form.I would publish this survey result shortly and based on the result of this survey SurprisedCloud would sponsor the entire application development and deployment effort for this cause.
By the way there were other handicrafts on display in the exhibition. I have also uploaded this video for a complete virtual tour.

Know the difference in your Twitter contact list from within Google Reader

If you have been thinking of writing a small utility which does a difference in your follower list based on predefined Twitter Time Synchronization,there is a good news.
You don't have to write this application yourself.I reviewed it yesterday and I was fairly impressed by the results unlike Qwitter.

I followed the following steps:
1) Created an account with http://twitdiff.appspot.com/splash (Basically giving Twitter OAuth permissions)
2)Consumed the RSS feed after setup in Google Reader (reader.google.com), which is my general purpose web content reader.
3)This morning I opened Google Reader habitually & my twitdiff feed was also updated here