A Feeling called Mumbai

When I first came to Mumbai and did not know what to do, I discovered some yet-untapped aspects of my soul, and I came to realize - when you decide to do nothing, you just can't!

You see when I completed my hectic year back in KGP, I had my first 'Enough is enuff' moment, and said to myself 'I'm gonna do nothing but sleep for 15 hours and watch movies for the rest of the time.' Nevertheless I took with me various software pertaining to web-designing, photo editing and all those now-in-demand software, knowledge of which gives you an edge over others in matter of CVs. I had also taken tutorials of these software, feeling at the back of my head, these gigabytes are gonna be wasted and I'm gonna regret it.

For the first week, I did what I had promised, except for a small change. I watched movies for 15 hours and slept for the rest of the time. My affinity for the telly had waned and so had my affection for the newspaper. Now that second part was painfully a very not-proud-of-it fact. You see, I did not know until later that what I really aspired to be was a person of power - and to be a person of power in India (legally) you had one option - pass in the UPSC exams - and enjoy the rest of you life.

But passing UPSC exams were not as a piece o' cake as qualifying for IITs (not that I'm saying IITJEE is a piece of cake, a piece of molded bread would have been a better term). Chances were one in every ten thousand.

But I speak as if I'm about to give the exam tomorrow, or so I reasoned with my parents when they reprimanded me for not reading the news, when they spoke as if I was about to give the UPSC exams tomorrow. I furthur argued (nonchalantly to say the least) I had earned my time of zen and peace and I'm not gonna waste it.

I'm a prick.

How and when I started reading newspapers I don't know but I'm pretty sure it corresponded with the time that I realized what a prick I was.

Now in Mumbai, the magnanimous city that it is, when you read the Times Of India, you are faced with 4 different sets of paper each day-Times of India, Bombay Times, Mumbai Mirror, Economic Times. On Sundays you get another supplement called Times Life. It kinda made your day, reading these papers, in the context that you'd have to spend the whole day to get all the news and other stuff. At first I just skimmed over the main-pages, read the cartoon strips, and the editorial, as I used to when I was younger. But as the summer grew older, I started reading every page - world news, sports news, politics, Mumbai, Page 3 - nothing went unnoticed and unappreciated by my eyes. I discovered that there were at least three comic strips on any given day, at least two sets of movie reviews of the same current movies, and atleast two columns of any major news in the city - one in the main-paper and the second in Mumbai Mirror.

The elections had also happened recently, and I, infused with an hitherto-undiscovered curiosity-in-politics started following every detail, and when Congress won, leading to forming of a stable government, I appreciated it, rather than saying 'same old, same old.'

I also started reading internet news- my homepage became Google News and I came to know of news long before it reached the news-stands, of course that is the advantage of electronic media.

But when I foraged into another form of electronic media, I was impeded, and disappointed. The telly news channels were pathetic. One particular, India TV, was like a channel for reruns of reality shows with more detail and analysis than the shows themselves, a channel version of Page 3, and a channel devoted to Breaking 'news' - Ghost in South Carolina, Sai Baba saves a kid, Man cycling on water and all those impertinent captions that invited the gullible Indian mind. Seriously, where news came into the play was beyond me.

Although I discovered one channel that was terrific - Times Now, again from Times of India. Man, this was news analysis at its best. I remained hooked whenever I came across it on my not-so-frequent high-speed channel surfing.

Enough bragging about my new-found talent as a news-watcher (that's a talent isn't it?): had finished my cache of movies in the first few weeks and was faced with two solid months and no idea what to do.

It was then that I opened up a dusty folder named 'Study Material' (in my laptop), with a look of what-the-hell on my face ('study'?) and saw with wonder another folder Maya animation tutorials. I felt my mouth hang out open when I opened a pdf file sized 6 megabytes, which explained the many nuances of Maya animating software (Google it, gormless) and contained five step-by-step instructions to create five short films. I mean, this was the thing I was searching for - expletive instructions on how to make my own movie - without cast, crew, spot-boys or producers!

I opened the .exe file named 'Maya 8.5' and felt a familiar sense of unfamiliarity as I saw the various toolboxes and menu items pop up on my screen, but this feeling would be dispelled soon as I had the perfect tool of understanding, my very own '3D animation for dummies'!

I look forward to making my own movie - my very own Wall-E, Kung-Fu Panda!

YIPPEE!














(A spaceship I created using Maya 3D modeling)











(My amateur attempt at character animation and environment modeling, can you notice the camel balancing a ball, in front of a marble-textured stage, on a tiled floor and behind a pool of water?)














(My second ship, built with different methods...)












(My scene of a few planets, the scene of my Star Wars...Only thing I did was the textures...)