Yellow dew

For more photographs: http://www.flickr.com/photos/abeerarts/

Tree plantation drive

A few KritiKal-ites had volunteered for the tree plantation drive which was organized by a social organization named “Kalpavriksha” in Mayur Vihar phase 1 at Sahyog Apartment park on 20th September. All of us had to assemble at the Sahyog Apartments at 8am. Prachi had come all the way from Lajpat Nagar, Delhi. The remaining of us (Meetu, Rana, Madan and I) were in Noida from different sectors. Madan had come to my house in sector 15 at 7am from where we decided to walk till the venue. We had entered Mayur Vihar by 7:30 but it took us half an hour to locate where exactly was Sahyog Apartments. Even the rikshaw pullers had not heard the name. I called up Prof. Prabhakar Rao and he asked me to locate Supreme Apartments and the venue was just in front of it. To my relief, people did know Supreme Apartments and one man who was on his morning walk guided us well. Madan and I finally reached there by 8:10 am. Prachi and Pradipta had already reached there. Rana was on his way and Meetu had already notified us that she would be late since she had another meeting to attend in the morning. There were a couple of more people till then. Later many more kept joining us from time to time.

There were around 50 shrubs and trees which we planted together. It was a great experience. So many strange faces around and all of us working together for a good cause. Pradipta had hurt himself while digging and was bleeding but his enthusiasm had overpowered everything else. He applied the soil on the wound and just carried on with the job. A very old lady (70+) who was there for her morning walk kept asking us if she could help us in anyway. In-fact everyone around there seemed to be motivated by the sight of people planting trees all over, covered in mud and soil. It was funny how Prachi attended a phone call. She took out her handkerchief, wrapped it on her hands and then tried pulling out her cellphone from the pocket :) Everyone gathered after planting all the trees. I was really surprised to know it was 10:30. I never realized I had spent more than 2 hours there. Finally Professor Rao thanked everyone for turning up and we thanked him for giving us such an opportunity and also asked him to let us know of any such future events as well. Then we had a brief introduction session and then finally all of us dispersed.

Pradipta took leave and the remaining of us (Meetu, Prachi, Rana and I) headed for Guruvayurappan Temple. Its a beautiful temple maintained by the local Tamilians there. The actual motivation behind visiting the temple was the food stall outside the temple. All of us were hungry and we thought that its some kind of a “langar” where they were distributing “wada and dosa”. But Meetu, Prachi and Rana suggested that we first visit the temple and then eat something. So all of us went to the temple, prayed for a while and came out. The food stall was no “langar” but that did not deter us from attacking at the stall. All of us ate like we had not eaten in ages :) And the food was too good. Madan himself being a south indian testified that it was one of the best south indian food he had eaten in a long time.

It was a very tiring but a satisfying exercise for all of us. I finally reached home at 11:45 am, took a bath and slept till late afternoon. The experience was great, though I am not that good at words to express what it was like. I had a great time and I look forward to getting more such opportunities in future.

Change your point of view

Wrote this long back ...

Yet another day gone
As the same thoughts passed by,
Does HE even care for me ?
I had a thousand reasons to cry.

Walked past a noisy traffic,
Tired I was like hell !!
How long will I have to wait for the bus ?
I wish if some one could tell.

The bus did come and I pushed myself in.
Packed till the eyes could see
Just then I locked eyes with a man,
Smiling so broadly at me.

Was there really something so amusing ?
I was finding that gesture too rude ..
Was he laughing at my misery or had we ever met before ?
That's all a negative mind could conclude

"Ohh GOD !! was I going to curse this man ?"
As if the sky fell on my head !!
He had taught me an important lesson,
With not a single word said.

On one end there was me, STANDING
Frowning for having no seat.
And on the other end was this man, SEATED
Though to stand, he had no feet !!

There were a hundred new thoughts,
Now running through my mind.
How wrong I was to call HIM rude,
When actually to me, HE had been so kind.

With so much pain all around,
Yet people manage to smile.
Is there really a scope for complaints,
Even if I had to walk a mile ?

So next time on a rough day,
When life comes hard on you.
You'll still have plenty to smile about,
Just change your point of view.

~Piyush.

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batch watermarking using convert command in Linux

Imagemagick is a very handy tool in linux to do a whole lot of things with images like cropping, resizing, frames, borders, watermark, compositing multiple images, etc. And with an easy to understand command line interface, it becomes easier to write a small shell script which could process images in a batch mode. I keep taking a lot of snaps and I want all the images to be watermarked with "Abeer Arts" and a nice frame around the picture to add to its beauty. I had a software called "Batch Watermarker" in Windows but the executable got corrupted with some virus (Windows sucks !!!) and I had already accumulated a huge backlog of images to be watermarked. Then I switched to linux mode and did a little bit of searching on google for watermarking with imagemagick library and finally wrote a small shell script which makes a frame around the image and also puts a text watermark. Here is the script:

if test -d $1
then
  for f in $(ls $1 | grep .jpg)
  do
    echo $f
    convert $f -font Gentium-Regular -pointsize $2 -draw "gravity southeast fill black text -5,12 'Watermark text' fill white text 0,5 'Watermark text'" $f
    convert -mattecolor black -frame 15x15+5+5 $f $f
    convert +raise 30x30 $f $f
  done
fi

$1 -> first command line argument giving the directory location containing the images
$2 -> pointsize which defines the size of the watermark text over the image

I kept the name of the script "abeerify" ;) To run the script, copy the scipt to /usr/bin and change the permissions to 755. Then on command prompt type:

/> abeerify folderpath 65
where 65 is the font size for the watermark text.

The Qutub Minar

Went to Qutub Minar with relatives last weekend and badly missed my digital camera. The plan was made randomly and nothing was planned otherwise I would have definitely brought my camera along with me. Anyway, cellphone comes handy at such situations and I managed to click a few snaps. The reflection of minar in the glass could have been much better with the digital camera.