Tiffinbox

Brotherly Love

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Career development is one of those ephemeral things that unfortunately gets shoved off onto the back burner. Big mistake, especially if you are an artist. It ought to be a life-long pursuit. And, I am no fan of the “starving” artist syndrome. There really shouldn't be any excuses for that to happen to any of us.

If you are in Philadelphia, or 100 miles from the City of Brotherly Love, for example, check out: The Center For Emerging Visual Artists.

Seek out similar organizations within your own neighborhood or state that supports visual artists. And if you know of any, please email me so that I can add them to this web site.

Panned

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“A complex adult novel has been used as the pretext for a low-octane and glassy-eyed Bollywood romp, at a shorter length than usual and without balancing the romcom jollity with any of the genre's usual heartfelt and ingenuous moments of seriousness.”

And so says Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian in his scathing review of Gurinder Chadha's Bride and Prejudice.

Get Your Bangalore For Your Buck

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Citing the bottom line, Reuters is increasing its staff in the Southern Indian city of Bangalore from 350 to almost 1,500. They aren't all positions that journalists can fill, however. If you are a bean-counter, you may just be the ticket. But be aware that they are being flooded by qualified applicants. So, the competition is pretty fierce.

“But this is payback time for centuries of colonisation. Britain occupied India, imposed the English language and left the country significantly poorer, so that 200 years later it is cheaper to get Indians to compile our crosswords and review the new Dido album.”

Read the rest of John O'Farrell's tongue-in-cheek column in The Guardian.

Dive Into This Well

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How many of you have had this happen to you – you receive an email from someone who in all their exuberance to share their images with you will send you raw files that are 3 megabytes in size each and dimensionally beyond the confines of your monitor?

I get that a lot. I politely resize the images and send them back in the hope that they haven't already subjected other people (with, gasp, dial-up modems) to the same torture. I sure feel like I have saved the day; no cape required.

If you own a Macintosh (God bless you), there is a free program called ImageWell by XtraLean Software that you should consider downloading. ImageWell allows you to resize images, making it even possible for some of us geeks to upload them directly to a FTP server. Preset your choices, drop your large image into the top window and that's all there is to it. If you have a .Mac account, your image can be uploaded to the PICTURES folder on that server. The other cool thing about ImageWell is that you can watermark your images with a copyright symbol, your name or whatever else you want. Purists beware, ImageWell also comes with features that allow you to add funky borders to your images.

I recommend this powerful little program. And I did say it is free so what are you waiting for? For PC users, there are a ton of choices (but not as elegant as ImageWell, I am afraid). Write to me and perhaps I'll eek out a short list for those of you on the dark side.

Maximum Bombay

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The door bell rang a few minutes back. UPS had a package for me. The kind folks at Alfred A. Knopf had sent me a review copy of Suketu Mehta‘s new book – Maximum City. I can't wait to get into it.

Coincidentally, a few weeks ago, Penguin Books India, mailed me a copy of Bombay, meri jaan, writings on Mumbai. Edited by Jerry Pinto and Naresh Fernandes, the book contains short articles by the usual suspects: Pico Iyer, Salman Rushdie, V. S. Naipaul, Paul Theroux and Khuswant Singh. But it has a few surprises in Sunil Gavaskar and Duke Ellington.

I'll have a review of both books here as soon [Warning: I am one heckuva slow reader!]

On The Streets

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Street photography isn't easy, especially when you have to consider privacy laws and of course personal safety. Joerg Colberg's fine blog Conscientious is full of wonderful links to photographers working in this special genre of photography. He introduced me to a terrific site called In-Public that you should definitely check out.

There are only a few of us who can walk the walk and talk the talk. Are you one of them? If you shoot on the streets of your neighborhood or anywhere else, I want to hear from you. I have already introduced you to Robb Hill‘s fine work. But I know there are lots of other undiscovered photogs out there. If you work in South Asia, I want to know about you and I would love to see your work published here on Tiffinbox.

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