Durga Pooja

Went to Durga Pooja at Hayward today. Waded my way through a crowd of about 300 people, made some attempts at taking pictures and finally had a good lunch of the khichdi-bhog.

Independence Day

Went to the (American) Independence Day celebrations at Oakland. It is more like a day long picnic with large number of people, food, music and fireworks. I ate the food and photographed the rest.


The man with the knives is a juggler who was eating an apple and juggling two knives at the same time!

To begin with...

A few shots around Berkeley. Yes, the person in the last pic is Pondy.

Sleeping since Seattle

It has been a long time since anything last appeared here - had been busy. But before getting busy I managed to take a trip to Seattle on the pretext of attending STOC (Symposium on Theory Of Computing). This picture essentially says what (other than buildings) Seattle is all about

I definitely recommend the EMP (Experience Music Project) to anyone planning to visit Seattle. It is sort of a museum about the music (rock-n-roll, rock, jazz) history of the northwest. We were lucky to also find a special exhibit there featuring comparisons of impressionist art with modern art and photographic works. Here are some stereotypical and other pictures of Seattle, though I guess there is a lot of room for improvement :-)

'CLICK' is no longer NP-Hard

Big Sur

I celebrated the end of computer architecture hiking at the Julia Pfeiffer Burns state park about 150 miles (on road) to the south of Berkeley. The drive, with the ocean on one side of the road and hills on the other, is lovely. The hiking trails are even better.

The people...



the places...


and the end...

Holi hai!!

I know it's a little late to say that. But this refers to the Holi celebration at UC Berkeley today organized by the Indian Students' Association. The celebrations were postponed to today due to frequent rains in the past few weeks.

Feeling the effects of old age in grad life, devoid of company (I wish more C-BOT people were here) but still curious, I dragged my poor room-mate along to at least watch the event and take a few pictures. Though we didn't actually play, I managed a few snaps as people posed quite readily. My first attempt at photographing strangers was not so disastrous! :-)

Holi was being played with loud Hindi music and almost an equal amount of color and water as in India (i.e. if you did use color to play). Fooled around, clicked random shots and finally met with an interesting chap (last photo) who explained to us some connections between the Indian and Greek mythologies. Finally back home to a cup of homemade espresso - Mmm..!