Well, yeah I’ve been either traveling or have been having writers block. Our monsoon shoot has finally come to an end and will be in Bangalore for a month or so with small travels here and there. This is the time to catch up on urban life, fix strained relationships and striking things off the todo list etc.

Sometime early last week, the Nilgiri tahr that we were hoping to film came down from the highlands. However the next day, a pack of wild dogs came and attacked the herd and all of them ran back up the hills. We were on our way when this happened, so when this happened, we just drove back to Bangalore. They have come down again it seems and mostly this will be our last chance to film them. Sandesh and Mandanna are already there and I’m leaving tomorrow morning to join them. I would have never guessed, goats would rule my…

Fuel to drive to Tamil Nadu : Rs 1400 Movie tickets : Rs 40 Watching ‘Shivaji – the Boss’ in a B-grade theater in coimbatore : Priceless What sucked was the fact that most people in the theater were family types and me and my friend prashanth were the only ones whistling and clapping for every one of Rajini’s killer dialogs. The movie itself was very racist and has been done with a poor taste. But then again its a Rajini movie and the dialogs totally rocked. “Panni kuttama varum, Singam single aa than varum”

Leopard from BR Hills (click on image for bigger version) After more than a year, I finally had an excellent sighting of a leopard and that too at my home forest of BR hills. We got there on saturday evening and got to see one for 20 min right outside the park. On sunday morning, we got a glimpse of this fellow on a tree on the morning safari. A very fruitful trip to BR hills.

It’s that time of the year. Really the only sensible tech event in this part of the world to look forward to.

As Sandesh puts it, We are in the land of the cloud goats. Lots of clouds but no goats. We really did not get the huge groups that we were hoping to get. We did manage to get a small group and the males were getting excited smelling the females urine, but that’s about it. Sometime now they gather in huge groups and then the fights break out between the males etc. We suspect we are early for this event (maybe because of delayed monsoons). Anyway we decided to move on and landed back in Valparai now. We have messengers…

Airtel for some reason is down in Munnar now and I had to fight with a cyber cafe guy for an hour to let me use the computer without an ID proof. He finally gave up the fight when I said he can read all the emails I’m sending out. Anyway will be offline the next 10 days and hopefully should come back with some handsome Nilgiri tahr photographs and footage.

The last few days have been crazy. Though I’ve been in town, had to take care of too many things that were on my plate. Looks like we are heading back this weekend to Munnar/Eravikulam to film the Nilgiri tahr. I really miss still photography. When you are out with a filming team, there is no place for still photography as you are busy either filming or assisting the person who is filming and the last thing you want is a still camera distracting the whole production team. I barely shot less than 4 GB worth of images in the…

SiCKO is probably the best documentary film I’ve ever seen. Michael Moore has managed to do a much better job than Fahrenheit 9/11 (which was mostly Bush bashing). Go download the movie from your favorite torrent site.

Sorry about not updating for such a long time. I got back from Valparai last sunday and been trying to catchup with a months worth of backlog. I’ve almost taken leave and on vacation in Bangalore now. The last trip was quite tough. Since we had gone back to film mostly frogs and rain etc, it meant filming in slushy conditions. We went back in search of the Purple frog again, but even after 10 days of searching we could not find it again. I guess they really go come out and go back into the ground in less than…