Travel, Read, Conserve

“Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.” ― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye It is the end of May, in the virus plagued, abnormal and terrifying, 2020. We are getting used to the concept of American citizens dying in the hundreds every day, doctors and nurses pleading for us to stay home, media showing footage of overwhelmed hospitals and devastated families, and a failed leadership unable to provide any direction as the pandemic is raging wild. While we are already lost, there comes another breaking news, and this one, takes the country by storm. George Floyd becomes a household name, and the three words he said in his last moments become the pulse of the young and the old, and the nation unites in an unprecedented way! In my 22 years in the US, I have never seen a movement so strong, passions so high, and the march for justice so relentless. We watch the news, and as brown immigrants, relate somewhat ...

Ideate / Innovate Early on in March, when we had all collectively just started on this very unclear, confusing and scary journey, I was surprised and awed by people who had the presence and strength of mind to come up with some really useful ideas to make the situation a little better.  Mask making from non traditional materials, DIY alternatives to hand sanitizers, restaurants going take out only or altering their entire menu for their survival, brick and mortar book stores upgrading their models to offer free shipping or publishing list of #quarantinebooks online to retain their clientele are such wonderful and successful ideas that we would have thought impractical in the normal world.  Seemingly insignificant things like seeing posts from my culinary genius friends on how to use the neglected ingredients on the pantry shelf give me ideas to think creatively while menu planning. It broke the drudgery of daily cooking and put these ingredients to good use in a t...

Author : Ponti Date : 04/18/20 My collegiate education is in chemical engineering, and really, in any kind of engineering discipline one tends to spend a lot of time thinking about one specific concept: entropy. Simply put, entropy is a physical phenomenon that attempts to explain why things tend to fall into disorder. I italicize the word “things” because it is a word that is usually seen with dismay, as it provides little to no clarity or preciseness in spoken or written communication. In this case however, entropy quite literally has an effect on every thing in the universe. Entropy explains the reason why if one were to leave a glass of water outside in an open environment, the water will eventually evaporate given the temperature is above 0 C (32 F). One would naturally assume the underlying reason for the missing water to be evaporation, which is in a way correct. However, the reason why evaporation even occurred is because of entropy. The molecules of water in the glass whi...

The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses  by Eric Ries I will admit, this was a difficult book to stay focused on.  The subject is interesting but the presentation is a little dry. Agile being the word of the decade, all of us in the tech world are familiar with the basic concepts of the book - minimum viable product, constant iteration, and capturing the right metrics are critical for any successful product. In the first few chapters of the book , Eric Ries walks us through many examples of failed startups, and the principal reason for the failures were not understanding the customer's needs, attempting to solve a problem that does not exist or releasing a final product without iterative development to incorporate the customer's feedback.  All the anecdotes emphasize on the Build-Measure-Feedback loop to deliver a sustainable product. To persevere in the same direction or pivot to a new path ba...

Being from the Pacific Northwest , we are not new to whale-watching. We have done trips around the San Juan islands to see pods of Orca whales at a reasonable distance, even seen a gray whale resting on a shore on the Central Oregon coast. So we went in with a certain level of excitement to see the migratory humpback whales all the way down at Baja California but not with the expectation to be blown away. Boy, were we wrong about that! First things first - our captain and the two ladies-  marine biologist Barbara and photographer/guide Tania were absolutely awesome. They kept us safe, all the while regaling us with whale anecdotes and facts about the region and its geographical features. The close up views of the famous El Arco , Lovers beach and Land’s End with the colony of sea lions resting on the rocks were an added bonus.  The boat ride on the the beautiful turquoise Sea of Cortez was more or less smooth but as soon as we got onto Pacific waters, it w...

After a few months of training on charcoal and pastel drawing at the Seattle Visual Arts Studio , we started on our acrylics and watercolor journey. The prospect of being able to play with paint was exciting and daunting at the same time. I remember being all charged and ready to go paint colorful landscapes the first day, but I was really jumping ahead :) The first few lessons were spent on learning and really getting familiar with the color wheel, which sounds deceptively simple but in practice, is far from so. In our acrylic sessions, we used a limited color palette, and it was amazing to be able to create a very wide range of colors from just the three primary colors, and white, using a palette knife to control the portions of each color. For creating acrylic or watercolor paintings the basic techniques remain the same. We still started with creating several thumbnails to decide which composition we are most comfortable with to translate on to the canvas. The principal...

While painting a still life may be an organic, seamless, free flowing form of expression for the experienced artist; to an aspiring art student, it is the culmination of a sequence of steps for laying the foundation and building on top of it. I am trying to break down the process of creating a still life  painting into a few smaller steps, that have helped me immensely as a beginner. Setting the still life   This is done for us by Shruti Ghatak, our mentor and teacher, at the Seattle Visual Arts Studio . The thought that goes behind the setup and the meticulous arrangement makes it a pleasure and challenge at the same time to paint it. It determines the complexity of the painting by the number of objects used, the spatial relationship between those objects, the exact lighting on the setup that creates a very dramatic light & shade effect , folds added on a tablecloth so it creates the desired fluidity. Last but not the least, since we often use perishable objects s...