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continued from the last post.

And when the teacher he admired the most hugged him and thanked him and everyone involved for the amazing performance, he realized he and his friends just made that day one of the most memorable days for all the teachers.

He loved dancing and he was pretty good at it but only his family knew that. His dad loved to watch him dance whenever there was a song on the Television. As he grew up the in-house shows stopped, but his love for dance never faded. Every time he listens to a dance number he closes his eyes and composes his own steps – he dances in his head, he does it even now.

It was their last year in school and everyone wanted it to be memorable. Two weeks before Teachers’ day when he said, “Let’s dance” everyone replied, “Yes, let’s do it”, even though none of them were good at dancing. They realized, dancing on Teacher’s day was the best chance they could have to make the last year memorable.

It was the same every year. An introduction speech, a group dance (which had a few guys, pretty much acting like props), a couple of songs by the school’s best singers, a skit (which had the same theme every year) and then the final dance by the famous all-girls group. Every time this group was on stage you could bet on your life that one of the songs was Dhola Re Dhole (from Devdas). They didn’t care what the song was, it was permutations and combinations of the same dance steps in every event – Inter-House competitions, Annual Day, Teachers’ Day. There was never a performance by an all-boys group in any event and these guys wanted to be the debutants.

He was a good dancer but not a very good choreographer. He had a hard time composing new steps, but had a bigger problem training his friends. And because of the time they had to, unwillingly, take help from their rivals. One of the girls introduced them to a guy who was a couple of years older. After looking at a few steps he suggested they realized he was the one who trained the girls group. He did not have any thing new to show and the last thing they wanted was to imitate the girls. They watched all the dance shows that were aired in those 4 days and came up with some steps to suit the songs.

They were scheduled to dance before the girls group. Everyone was looking forward to seeing them on stage. They promised to put on the best show ever and they made sure no one knew the songs they were dancing to, they wanted it to be a surprise. No sooner did they go on stage than the whistles and applause started. They started off with Everybody (Backstreet’s Back) and when the 2nd song (Gajuvaka pilla – one of the top tollywood songs during those days) started everyone went crazy. It was the first time anyone’s danced to a telugu ‘mass’ song at their school. The cheer got louder when ‘Kaho Naa Pyaar Hai’ started and they finished off with another telugu ‘mass’ song. It took more than 10mins for the cheering to stop. As soon as they stepped down from the stage, everyone ran towards them to congratulate their brilliant performance and when their teacher hugged them, they knew their effort paid off. It was the most memorable day of his life. There was total silence when the girls were dancing and when ever the girls from the audience tried to cheer them the guys shouted “Sssshhh!!”. And as everybody guessed the last song was Dhola Re Dhola!

Next post – ‘The part where he said “…I Love You” over the phone’

He’s been a dreamer since his early high school days. Back then he wanted to do a lot of things – be a professional dancer, become an artist, choreograph action sequences in movies, make a movie with lots of special effects, make an animation movie and many more crazy things. He never revealed his plans to anyone, not to his friends – for the fear of being ridiculed and he wanted to be sure about everything before he said anything to his parents. But he was never really sure. If only he had a relative who wasn’t an engineer or a doctor.

He loved movies as much as the next guy. Even though Tollywood/Bollywood movies looked artificial, overtly exaggerated and quite stupid, he enjoyed those 2 1/2 hrs. It wasn’t just the female actor(s) or the songs that made him watch all those movies. It was the way the male actor was portrayed in every film – heroic, ability and power to do anything. There was only one thing that was going on in his mind after every movie – he wanted to be a hero in his own little world – he wanted people to look upto him, he didn’t want to be just another guy in the crowd – he want to be more than just a blot.

Soon after he entered high school people started asking him “What do you want to become?”, “Any plans for your future?”. He wasn’t sure what to say. His answer was usually a simple i’m-not-sure smile, but as more people started asking similar questions he wanted to know what he should do atleast after high school. After a little ‘research’ (asking a couple of ‘wise’ friends) he found out that if he chose MPC in Intermediate he could go into any field (other than medicine) later. He was also told that ICSE Maths was easy compared to SSC so it might cause problems during Inter if he opted for MPC.

It was around the same time that people started talking about IITs and Ramaiah’s. He got sucked into that hype. He didn’t know what he had to do to be an artist or to be a movie maker and his friends seemed to have clear vision of their future – get into one of the elite institutes that coached students for Ramaiah’s entrance exam, get into Ramaiah and then into IIT. His motto at that time was ‘don’t blindly follow the crowd’, but then he unfortunately had to join one of those elite coaching centers, not to get into Ramaiah but to avoid any problems with Maths after high school. He joined a less famous institute which had classes twice a week.

That day was one the best days of his life. He never thought that doing something different, doing something for the first time would be so amazingly exciting. The cheers, the applause, the whistles made him feel like a hero for a few minutes. And when the teacher he admired the most hugged him and thanked him and everyone involved for the amazing…..

to be continued…

Srirang aka DJ Ranga wanted a good photo to put in his orkut profile and he asked me to photograph him holding a placard like a prisoner. These shots were taken in September.

I came across them today while searching for good photos to work on and I wanted to use one of them to do some photoshopping.

click on the thumbnails for a bigger image

Here’s the final image.

It’s been a long time since I’ve worked on photographs in Photoshop. I was going through all the photographs I shot using my Nokia N95 (which btw has an awesome 5MP camera) and found a few photos worth spending time on.

Here is one of the photos I shot in August on a cloudy day from the corridor outside my room in OBH.

click on the images to get the original sizes

I used this photo to do some modification in photoshop and this is what i ended up with.

If you have seen my earlier works in my Flickr account and if you knew a little bit about photoshop you would’ve noticed that most of my works involve a lot of brushes. I haven’t used any brushes for the above image, I’ve only manipulated the image and played around with the layer blending modes.

You can get the wide screen version of the original photograph here and the modified photograph here

Here’s another photograph I’ve taken on that day.

I’ve removed the sky from the original image and added clouds from another psd I got on the internet and did some image manipulation and played around with layers blending modes, similar to the earlier photo and ended up with this.

I’ve added two additional layer from another psd file to get the following effect.

Finally used a couple of ‘Cuts n Cracks’ brushes to get the torn canvas effect.

Check out my Flickr account for more photographs and Felicity wallpapers.

If anyone’s interested I’ll post about the different techniques used to get the above effects and also provide the PSDs.