iTelescope

It took close to 25 person-hours to get 15 people for lunch. During all this, I got a mail I’d like to share with you. If you are planning an outing with friends, Don’t let this happen to you! We were misled by Burrp on the venue, and landed uourselves at a silly place called Wazawan (naam pe mat jao, hume bhi dhoka de gaya!) somewhere on Military Road in Marol. But in no time we figured out that this wasn’t the place for us! No drinks & too cheap! So we moved to our all time favorite - Chakra and had a gala time!

Quorum: Prasad Gupte, Ivan Quadras, Sandeep Gokhale, Hemant Ubhe, Rohit Jham, Anand Natarajan, Shubhangi Billore, Shilpa Nair, Kanul Wadhwa, Prakash Konduru, Kunal Patel, Drup Desai, Sandeep Shenvi
Drop-outs: Neha Moghe, Vinit Reddy, Parwinder Singh, Sourav Ghosal & Jayesh.

Photos from the Annual Satyanarayan Pooja at Bhatnagar Terrace CHS, Goregaon (E). The pooja was performed by Mrs. & Mr. Umesh Gokarn (303)

Wishing fellow Indians a happy Republic day! Just checked out the new version of Mile Sur Mera Tumhara today: 2 x 8 min videos… huh! And not that exciting! Check out the new ‘Phir Mile Sur Mera Tumhara’: Part 1 | Part 2. Some immediate comments:

• All pure instrumental portions are fantastic: Rahman, Anousha Shankar, tabla, Sivamani, Jazz, …
• Great focus on renewable energy: Solar water heaters and aggregators in the background a couple of times
• S-E-L (Shankar-Eshan-Loy) are great towards the end of their part
• The old-age home (supposedly) & Kashmir parts are very sweet
• Old is Gold: Original music has been tampered too much. Preferred the older Punjabi & Bengali parts (Is Shaan saying send me ‘SMS’?)
• There seems to be no one besides movie stars in this…
• Amitabh Bachchan has been made to sound wierd; he should’ve only been asked to read out the lines
• A bit of over-acting from actors down-under
• No Value Add: The Lux couple, Sonu Nigam, Shahid, Ranbir (in pajamas), Karan Johar
• Salman, Deepika short of clothes
• First 14 mins were great, and then SRK arrives with his silly hand gestures  as if he’s going to jerk of the whole world by closing his fist Just compare it to Aamir’s part
• Thanks for paying homage to the military at the end

Notable comments from elsewhere:

• why to ruin the good memories with bad bollywood experimentation. It is like comparing SHOLAY with RGV KI AAG
• This “SUR” has become “BESUR” because of bollywood
• Seriously, half of the people in this video didn’t deserve to be there

(continue reading…)

Just uploaded the photos taken during the Maghi Ganesh Utsav 2010 at Nandgaon, Murud-Janjira. This festival is celebrated each year around January-end for which the entire Gupte-Chitnis family comes together at their family temple.

Thanks to Chibu (Pratik Gupte) for the excellent coverage of the event with his phone. If you have any pictures to share, pl email them to me at gupte.prasad+utsav2010@gmail.com

The turn-out this beyond all expectation. Apart from myself, Joe, Pranay, Rohan & Vivian, 5 others: Richard Menezes, Akshath Poojary, Jijo Mohan, Naved and Pranab Patel (towards the end) joined. Apart from Jijo & Naved, we were all in the same class in ninth grade.

My farewell saga that stretched over 2 days On Oct 31, Ivan & me had taken the group out for lunch at Jughead’s Pop-Tates in Powai. On Nov 2, my pals were all around me, ensuring a smooth exit. They are indebted me with gifts: a UDY perfume & big box of Celebrations (to celebrate my exit? or my new job?) Guys, I really want to thank each of you for making my stay & exit so much worth remembering. Check out this photo-gallery!

For the last decade, I have been scuffling to find a tool that will reduce the quality of several images at once. Before Picasa Web Albums was available, I used to manually reduce the quality of my scanned or digital images to meet two constraints: available server space and bandwidth (offered by a free host) I used evaluation versions of a couple of tools, that didn’t live too long. In this post I will explain how Picasa lets you compress several images at once so that they can be attached to email; also, creating a Gift CD - a great way to share pictures with so-called ‘computer illiterates’! (continue reading…)

Today, we celebrated the unofficial reunion of the IX-E class. Esteemed guests invited and present were me, Joe Matthew, Pranay Arora, Rohan Nagarmath, Vivian Fernandes, while Pranab Patel & Gaurav Samel ditched us. Puneet Arora and Vinayak Samant also graced the occassion, although they were gone by the time Pranay realized his 20 grand phone has a superb camera.

(continue reading…)

Here are some albums from the yester-years!

Pre-1985 Family Gallery12 pictures

1985-2000 Family Gallery42 pictures

My 1985-2000 Gallery27 pictures

We celebrated our pal & colleague Hemant Ubhe’s birthday on the evening of 28th May. We had called for Monginis’ brand new cake - a creamy blend of Black Forest & Dutch Truffle called Dutchland Forest. I know truffles are meant to be creamy & heavy, but this one lacks the flavour. I am a dark chocolate fan and to me, a lot of vanila screws up the chocolate. Try it once, but don’t expect value for money; it can never beat either of the parents in isolation.