I am in the UK as part of my band, The Raghu Dixit Project‘s UK Tour and when here, I got myself a local SIM. After consulting with various people, I went for the ‘Talk Mobile’ Pay as you Go SIM that was offered by the ‘Carphone Warehouse’ which gave me the best combination of unlimited (restricted to 25MB a day) Internet and International calling (10p a minute to India).

The settings that came with the SIM directly to my phone were all wrong and I just couldn’t get 3G working at all! Infact, it got worse because the “technical team” (that solves any tech issue one has with products bought from Carphone Warehouse) had no idea what to do! and without using the Internet to search, I couldn’t tell how to activate Internet access on my phone! – A perfect Catch 22 situation.

After much snooping around, I found the settings hidden in the Talk Mobile UK site under phone settings – 3 pages in!

If you want to skip all that and just go ahead, here is what you need to do -

Head to your Nexus One’s settings, then click ‘Wireless & Networks“, then select ‘Mobile Networks‘ and then select ‘Access Point Names‘. There will, in all probability, be settings for the Vodafone network type that will certainly not work with a Nexus One.

Delete the access point and add a new access point with these details

Access Point Name – Talkmob PayG Int

APN Address – payg.talkmobile.co.uk

Thats it! you’re done! – Please refer to this page for details

Hope this helps someone!

——

I am not religious in the true sense of the word and it is my opinion that most people have their own definition of what ‘God’ means to them and how religious they are and there is no universal definition that fits all.

I am a catholic, I do believe in a God who is modern and understanding and evolving with the times. I believe in my definition of my God! I am also a believer in the good side of my religion, and that religion is inherently good. Its just been crowded in a lot of controversy and there are many things I wish were different. But at heart, my religion preaches tolerance, love and peace, all of which I believe are good and should be preached!

I cannot point to one specific incident in my life and say, “Here .. this is why I believe in God”, its just the way I have been brought up by my parents. In retrospect, there have been many things in my life which have just gone right and I seem to have a lot of things working for me in all aspects of my life! while most people would attribute that to pure luck and hard work, I’d like to believe that there is a little more than that at play!

-Gaurav

When he told me he was coming to Bangalore next with his friend Loik, it was a chance of a life time for me atleast! I have always loved graffiti writers and the crazy typography, the colours and designs that they seem to so easily put up using really HUGE walls as canvasses!

After interacting with him and looking at pictures of his previous work, I was really curious to see the process of it being done from scratch. After a quick call to Carlton of Opus, who just loved the thought of it!, we were set to put some colour on the white walls of Opus and to keep Ivan happy, we decided to paint the outside wall that faced the road!

Now Ivan is not your regular graffiti writer, and he is extremely versatile in his style and approach to graffiti. He tries to imbibe the culture of the place that he is writing in and also in many cases mess with people’s stereotype notion of graffiti! He does this by doing things that are completely unexpected of a graffiti writer! My favourite being a guy with an angry face saying “Cut your Hair and Get a job!”

The only guidelines that he had to follow when he was deciding what to paint on the walls here were that whatever he does should not have any reference to Sex, Religion or Politics because all 3 are topics that could easily raise the ire of various factions here and we did not really want the attention or for what was being done to get vandalized later!

So Ivan came up with the idea of an elephant on roller skates, blowing a musical note out of its trunk and a very typical Indian Lorry style writing that says “Blow Horn Please”. His sketch on paper got all of us excited about what the final print on the wall will be like! So off we set to get spray cans to get started.

That was the first hurdle we faced also! Indian spray cans are not meant for graffiti, we get spray cans here whose nozzles are meant to spray on large surfaces and meant to cover a wide area instead of focussed lines with which you can make designs. And the nozzles that they brought from France would not fit the Indian cans, so after much searching and no luck, we decided to give it a shot with the cans we could find itself. Ivan had thankfully carried some cans from France which he would use for the borders and so he was sure he could get something decent in place.

We started around noon knowing that the office going traffic would have subsided on the roads and Ivan started by drawing the general outline of what he wanted to do which was then refined into a final blueprint.

The next step was to cover the larger areas of the design with simple block colours and have a basic illustration ready for detailing and shading or as he calls it – “Adding Volume”.

This is when we started getting a sizeable crowd interested in what was happening there and who was painting and why? When we tried explaining to them that it was an artist from France who was here to just paint for the sake of his art. He din’t want money, was not endorsed, was not promoting any brand, but just painting! Art for Art’s Sake! People were just dumbfounded!

They could not believe that someone would come from a foreign country and paint on the walls here and expect nothing in return but the fact that people would see his painting and smile! But the people who did get it were either in awe or just very happy! We got a lot of Auto drivers who told us that it was a nice thing that this was art that everyone could see and there was no fee for it, we were paid visits by the cops who were also happy that there was nothing offensive being painted and it was smooth sailing all the way!

We stopped for the day after we got most of the painting in place and decided to come back the next day for the lettering and the rest of the details.

The 2nd day posed a new set of problems, the usual way lettering is done (when you want a clean hard line for the letters) for graffiti is freehand and if you don’t find the right cans, you take the stencil route. We decided to try creating a stencil with tape and then spraying inside that stencil and then removing the tape. But when we removed the first line of tape, it removed paint from the walls and some of the graffiti as well! This was something that was not expected and threw us off completely! So it was a LOT of fixing small areas and Ivan, being the perfectionist that he is, could not live with anything but the absolute perfect best!

So after a lot of hacks, we figured out the right pressure and the correct amount of tape and finally managed to get the lettering in place with the last bit of lettering done with a brush infact because it was just impossible to spray and get letters that fine!

After about 8 hours of graffiti writing, where about 4 of them were just because of the quality of the raw materials, we finally managed a brilliant piece of graffiti which I think is a first in Bangalore! Here it is to see for yourself and also the proud artist along with his work

A huge round of thanks to the folks at Opus who loved the idea and were brilliant hosts and helped in so many little things during the making of this work. From here on, to find Opus, go down Palace road till you see an elephant on the wall on the left side. See it, backtrack about 50 feet, and there it is!

Also, cheers to Ivan and Loik, true artists who do things from the heart and practice their art purely for art’s sake in today’s highly commercial world! I made two friends over the past weekend and will hold you to your promise of hosting me when I come to France!

]]> http://gauravvaz.com/art-for-arts-sake/feed/ 14 http://gauravvaz.com/the-importance-of-being-earnest/ http://gauravvaz.com/the-importance-of-being-earnest/#comments Sun, 11 Jan 2009 18:10:57 +0000 Gaurav http://gauravvaz.com/?p=190 A bunch of us turned up at Rangashankara earlier today and rather promptly I should say (Rangashankara inspires that in you!) to catch the Evam production ‘The Importance of being “Earnest”‘. There are very few things to do in Bangalore right now if you don’t want to go eat or go to the movies, atleast very few things you can do impromptu for sure and an afternoon watching a play was just too good a chance to pass up!

After getting our tickets sorted out by the lovely folks at ‘IndianStage‘, we headed to Rangashankara to a packed house which was treated to some nice theatre. Now for those of you who don’t know the play already, this is an Oscar Wilde comic love story with lots of mistaken identities, loads of madness, some great dialogue and an overall brilliant script.

Team Evam who put this together (In the picture above, pardon the quality, I did not have my camera with me and had to use my phone!) did a good job of it overall but I left the hall thinking it could be so much more! While it wasn’t something in particular that I can put my finger on and point out that was lacking, it was the overall production itself that could have been a notch higher.

Now I am not complaining at all about my time there! I totally enjoyed the play and I remember Shilpa and I sitting in the absolute last row in Rangashankara could follow all that was happening and also, were laughing out on many occasions. The actors themselves had great comic timing and ran through the play at a nice pace that was not hard to follow.

My grouse however, was that, at many times during the play, I remember catching myself thinking, they are just saying those lines out like they are at rehearsal! or rather a line check! when you say something naughty or mischevious, there wasn’t at times, the expression that goes with it. Also, there could be improvements made to the dance sequences in the beginning which I thought din’t come together quite well today, but it might just have been today!

In all, I would definitely recommend this to anyone. If you get a chance to watch the production, please do! Its totally worth it and as a fan of dialogue filled theatre, I certainly did not lose interest through the play. The script itself is brilliant and will thoroughly entertain you and the production does a good job of getting the story across.

I fully loved the character of Lady Bracknell, played by Shannon who I thought stood out during the whole show and would like to specially congratulate her for her performance.

I have the Nokia E71 and one of the most beautiful things about that phone is the “contacts search” feature where you just start typing the name of the contact you want to call on your QWERTY keypad and the contacts appear on screen filtered as you type. You don’t have to go into contacts and then start your search! In my mind this is a very small yet brilliant addition to an already nice phone.

Now a month back or so, I had managed to accidentally turn off this feature and the regular intuitive way that I thought one would go about turning such a feature back on was leading to dead ends! Searching for this Online din’t help either because I couldn’t find references to this problem – Maybe I was searching for the wrong thing!

The fix is very simple, and in retrospect, it is very intuitive as well, but only in retrospect! Atul found this out for me and saved me a lot of pain!

Once you type a character on screen when you are on the home screen, you click the upper left ‘Options‘ button and in there is the option to switch “Contact Search” ON or OFF. This option is not available in any other menu that I could find on the phone and it took a LOT of figuring out to stumble upon this.

I hope this helps someone else facing such a problem!

Now in most cases, this is some form of an advertising stunt and so I was half skeptical as I looked up to the watch and saw that it was the stroke of midnight! and then it dawned on me ..

So I did stand up and watch as some of India’s best voices sang the National Anthem and rang in our Independence day ..

Where the mind is without fear and the head held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening thought and action;
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Happy Independence Day! It may not mean much to you personally, but it is a BIG deal!

Seems like our friendly neighbourhood software company is either trying out new marketing tactics or is the victim of some interesting spam?

]]> http://gauravvaz.com/interesting-spam/feed/ 1 http://gauravvaz.com/the-craziest-time-of-my-life/ http://gauravvaz.com/the-craziest-time-of-my-life/#comments Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:01:04 +0000 Gaurav http://www.gauravvaz.com/blog/the-craziest-time-of-my-life/ The past few weeks and the next few to come have officially been the craziest times of my life! I have learnt so much its not even funny and everything just happened at the same time.

After the North East trip, I have come out a much stronger person and I must say my resolve to do something on my own has strengthened and I am determined to do something about it.

I am in Bombay this week, talking at the ‘Palm Expo’ and also as part of the Onstage Foundation! More about that later .. and there is a LOT more to come about that

Next week I travel to London for the finals of the International Young Music Entrepreneur award and that will be a whole new experience.

I am just making a note of things I should write about in detail and I will!

For now wish me luck .. on all fronts

I will update the blog with pics and stories in the time to come but this is a quick hello to let everyone know that I am alive and well and raring to go infact