The Golden Whip

Okay, so we've heard of the Palm d'Or at the Cannes, the Golden Bear at the Berlin Filmfest, and our own practical shawl & Rs. 1 lakh, but this one is deliciously ironic and wickedly funny!

http://allafrica.com/stories/200711210423.html

Bloggers Plan Parallel Film Festival on Police Torture
Reporters sans Frontières (Paris)

PRESS RELEASE
21 November 2007
Posted to the web 21 November 2007

Egyptian bloggers have announced that, while the Cairo film festival is taking place from 27 November to 7 December, they will hold a parallel festival in which a "Golden Whip" will be awarded to the best video showing "controversial acts of torture allegedly committed by the security authorities."

How I wish our own Indian blogging community, though so technologically savvy, had embraced video blogs in a similar way! After all, when it comes to torture and official brutality, our national motto is:

___ में अपनी दम नहीं
पर हम कीसीसे कम नहीं Read more!

Crashing the disk

My external hard disk crashed last week. It had more than 200 downloaded movies, lots of music and a ton of scanned pix on it. Devastating, right? But I didn't lose my cool. I was sorely tempted to rave and rant about it. But all that I really wished I could have saved were the pictures.

It took me almost a year's worth of weekend scanning of endless old b&w negatives, many of them over 50 years old, and then carefully processing them to get visible images of the past. All that toil and trouble gone to waste!

Of course I still have the negatives, and if need be I will do the work all over again. But you know how it feels like.

I am trying to see if the hard disk can be salvaged, by taking it to professionals next week. Let's see what happens. Read more!