Author: Ajmal

“swayed in” | fine art.

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a spontaneous piece that popped out of my head at this moment. Calling this “swayed in“

“Spontaneous Painting is painting intuitively without having an image or model to paint from, where the result comes from a spontaneous play with the paint, the colors, and texture. Most importantly, each brush or finger stroke comes from a direct response to an inner directive, not from an aesthetic standard.” [ source ]

The border of a mind studios is passionately excited in adopting it fervently on digital art frames. Exuberant vibe fuels the day amigos. Peace! God bless.

Kintsugi.

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I had written on this page about Kintsugi. It’s a very interesting Japanese concept. It’s widely used in art and pottery but what’s even more enthralling is its philosophic extension that’s often found to cognate with healing and history. In this concept, broken and repaired things are often regarded as much more beautiful. It’s often read in the context of Wabi-Sabi, which is basically “to explore the beauty in broken things or old things.” I have read a little book explaining this concept and I felt it was wide implications.

” Kintsugi (金継ぎ, “golden joinery”), also known as Kintsukuroi (金繕い, “golden repair”), is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum, a method similar to the maki-e technique. As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise. “

Barbara Bloom puts it this way: “When the Japanese mend broken objects they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold because they believe that when something’s suffered damage and has a history it becomes more beautiful“.

Omid Safi writes in his piece “Illuminating the Beauty in Our Broken Places“,

” We value success, wholeness. Unlike this Japanese art form, we don’t yet have a way of looking for what was once broken and has been healed and illuminated. How lovely would it be to find that a cracked and illuminated cup can be even more beautiful than a whole cup. How wise to realize that the broken hearts, illuminated and made whole, can be even lovelier.”

Vehicle blocking your way in UAE parking spaces/roads? Don’t worry. Have it removed in less than 15 minutes!

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I thought of sharing it here in case if this could help some of you in the UAE.

There can be situations when you’ve to go somewhere urgently and you find your car being blocked by some other vehicle parked in front of you. Normally in the UAE, people often have this practice of leaving their phone numbers on the car dashboard so that they can be called in case if we want the car to be removed. But yes, there can be instances when they have not left the phone number on the dashboard and you cannot take your vehicle out without the other person moving his / her car.

Although been in Dubai for a long time now, I was truly not aware of an awesome service that comes to our rescue in such circumstances. Dubai Police app, renowned for its smart features and ease of use has a very interesting feature that helps anyone in such a situation. It’s basically a service that can be used to alert vehicles obstructing traffic. It does great help to tackle motorists who block our way.

So this is the sequence. It’s very easy. It takes only 2 minutes to do this.

* Download Dubai Police application
* Authenticate. You can enter your phone number and they’ll send an OTP to verify.
* In the “traffic services” section, look for something like “obstructing traffic flow”
* Click on report obstructing traffic flow offense
* They’ll ask you to snap a picture & enter any information you’d like to.
When you take the snap, try your best to show the vehicle number and also demonstrate how it is clearly blocking your way.
* Send it to Dubai Police

Immediately Police will send an SMS to the car owner instructing to remove the car and they’ll give you a phone number to contact in case the vehicle is not removed in 15 minutes.  I have tried this from Sharjah and can confirm that it works. For instance, the below message is that I got after completing a report.

I personally had to travel urgently for a medical-related matter and found a car blocking my way. I checked on the dash and there was no number left on the dashboard so that I could call and ask the person to move his car. In this situation, I looked online on a workaround and found this solution. I would recommend all of you staying in UAE to have Dubai Police app installed as they have a lot of amazing smart services that’ll save you a lot of time. If you’re traveling for an emergency, this app is truly a Godsend. They can handle minor violations online and can even help you file a report for smaller accidents. I truly believe that these small things matter a lot for citizens and residents and would be conducive to having a great experience and simply have them so happy interacting with government services and the UAE government’s smart services are truly remarkable & way ahead of time in these aspects.

traffic blur | recollecting ‘sonder’.

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Last year, we talked about sonder.

sonder n. “The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.”

While returning from work, I recollected “sonder” when I gazed at the traffic blur. So, this would be sort of a moving image version of the earlier post. Traffic time-lapses are one of my favourite ones to capture. It figurately connotes the dynamism of life.

anamnesis.

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/ˌanəmˈniːsɪs/. The title of this post is from the late 16th-century Greek word anamnēsis related to ‘remembrance’.

Clouds and sunset light playing a symphony of art in a winter evening at Sharjah, UAE. November 2019.

“A lot can happen in a year. People die. You outgrow old friends and get tired of mundane jobs. New careers come. New friends find your soul. But no matter what, you grow, you lose your mind a bit and most importantly you get a little wiser. Your circle gets smaller because you get stricter with your energy and time, If you are really lucky, you’ll find love inside yourself, inside of friends and family, and just maybe the universe will bless you with a lover that laughs at your really lame jokes.” .S. Mcnutt

Netta shared this recently and it resonates well. Regardless of where we belong and what we do, it’s worth to have a reminiscence of what changed in one year. Need not be always the specific things mentioned in the above quote. It can be anything and could be even related to how you respond to situations, your thought process, the way you plan things, the priorities you weight in on, people you engage and rely on, the general attitude towards events, etc. For me, personally, I believe it has been by and large about stepping back and striving to be more thoughtful in my responses, not to be too impulsive in general terms, making time for building this site by putting in more content and sharing writings, trying to be more positive, being diplomatic and to have a cohesive spirit of togetherness in responses, setting compassionate boundaries, and an earnest attempt to be more professional and objective in my professional assignments. This may be, also one of the years where some personalities whom I admire for their creative pursuit and passion had the biggest influence in me in terms of the time I spent and also the actions they actuate in all that I do. It was also the year when Genie’s cove was set up with Netta by my side, slowly building our little space and being truly grateful for the we-time. Let’s see what next year turns out to be, God willing.

Story de’ aquatics.

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I’m a hobbyist aquarist and used to maintain and curate fish bowls many years back. In the first fish bowls, I started with plastic accessories and pebbles. Over time, I started to move on to planted setups. Nowadays I personally prefer natural components in the aquarium system. Below is a photograph from 2014. This is one of the first planted fish bowls I had built from scratch right from the sand to the plants and nice little goldfish in there.

When I used to do it in the past, I didn’t use to read or watch extensively on this art and used to have trial and error ways of building things up. I didn’t for example, had nutrients added to the sand base and didn’t read or care much about the environments required for certain types of plants.

I would like to thank MD Fishtanks for re-kindling the curiosity and inquisitiveness back in me for planted aquariums and explore aquascaping. The way he has done videos elucidating simple concepts and just the sheer art of doing it really impressed me. Ideas fueled desire and it further triggered actions and here we are with a new tank setup.
The below tank is what we have now. I did not build it. It was built by a different person and I would like to try and learn aquascaping with this setup. The fish in there is a half-moon betta. It’s a variant of a siamese fighter fish. They normally stay alone and is not compatible with other big fishes around as it might attack them. The set up has mechanical water filters (non-chemical) and some natural wood and some rocks for plant growth.

As I write this, some plants have started to have black patches on their leaves and are probably rotting. I need to find out the reasons and explore remedial measures. It’s a pretty long learning process and I would like to try to post some updates in the future.

As of now, the primary focus is to have the below:
– Understand chlorine removal from tap water and identify good less obtrusive chemicals for the same with least effect to flora and fauna.
– Understanding the importance of feeding CO2 for plants externally, preferably using a cylinder or any other external source.
– Have wood and stones re-arranged and reconfigured to have more room for fishes.
– Explore the option of putting in some guppy fishes or some neon tetra fishes.

God bless! Have you tried aquascaping techniques? Feel free to share your thoughts.

the golden lamp.

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Roman Payne famously told that sunrise is the most precious gold to be found on earth. It’s a luxury that every one of us can peek at regardless of where we are or who we are. Sunrise lighting is a miraculous golden lamp that can be used to paint anything to ecstasy. If we place mountains also in this frame, what you get is pure visual bliss. We had this short stop on the way to Wadi Al Helo from the Sharjah mainland in the UAE. Travelling and riding just before sunrise through the mountain footways would uncloak some of the best visual memories and awesomeness you’ve ever had.

“Life. This morning the sun made me adore it. It had, behind the dripping pine trees, the oriental brightness, orange and crimson, of a living being, a rose and an apple, in the physical and ideal fusion of a true and daily paradise.”
― Juan Ramón Jiménez, Time and Space: A Poetic Autobiography

“HEARTWORK
” Each day is born with a sunrise
and ends in a sunset, the same way we
open our eyes to see the light,
and close them to hear the dark.
You have no control over
how your story begins or ends.
But by now, you should know that
all things have an ending.
Every spark returns to darkness.
Every sound returns to silence.
And every flower returns to sleep
with the earth.
The journey of the sun
and the moon is predictable.
But yours,
is your ultimate
ART.”
― Suzy Kassem

“With a bound, the sun of a molten fiery red cam above the horizon, and immediately thousands of little birds sang out for joy, and a soft chorus of mysterious, glad murmurs came forth from the earth; the low whispering wind left its hiding-place among the clefts and hollows of the hills, and wandered among the rustling herbs and trees, waking the flower-buds to the life of another day.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth

Google Photos – Geeky Uses!

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Google Photos definitely is an industry game-changer. Over the past few years, it has completely revolutionized the way in which people organize and curate their photo archives. Powered by world-class artificial intelligence and neural networks, Google photos take photo organization and curation to the next level and also allows an option for unlimited storage of photos. As many of you might be aware, we can search for specific items or entities *within* a pool of photographs and you can get quick results. You can combine the searches with a lot of other keywords like familiar faces, location or other metrics. Different people use it tailored to their requirements. You can use it in a novice fashion or you can even delve into the depth of the system to use several features.
I’m sharing three uses of Google photos that are often unused by many.

Tapping the potential of Google Lens.

Using Google lens to identify and copy text in a photograph.  As their website puts it, it is basically “searching what you see”. Google Lens is an image recognition technology developed by Google, designed to bring up relevant information related to objects it identifies using visual analysis based on a neural network. [ Link ]
The below screenshots are for some demonstration:
When you open the image and click on the magnifying lens icon in Google Lens, it’ll read through the image and find possible correlations depending on the context. For example, in the first image below, we have a beautiful bougainvillea flower and when we tap on it with google lens, it provides some contextual information and provides details about it. In the second image, when we click on the photograph of a car, it recognizes the model of the car and shows some relevant information. That’s really helpful.

Similarly, we can copy text from an image file containing text content. For instance, please see the below image. It has text in it and Google photos can be used to copy text from that image and you can even translate it right away. How cool is that!


You can read more here.

Untapping AI searching capabilities
Using AI algorithms and neural networks, Google can find what you’re looking for.

Eric Griffith writes for PCMag :

Try some searches in Google Photos, using terms common and obscure. Google’s auto-tagging of images is pretty amazing, beyond just the face recognition (which I found could ID people in photos even if they’re in the background). For example, a search of the term “dog” got just about every image I could conceive of with my pups in the pics—even some with just a pup statue or paw. I didn’t tag any of those pics with “dog” or “statue,” by the way: Google just knows. Location searches are also easy with geo-tagging, making it easy to find, say, all your vacation pictures at once.

Using Google Photos to embed images in blogs or websites.
Inherently, by design, Google doesn’t explicitly advertise itself as an image host service for blogs and websites. Considering that the entire repository of our photographs are archived at Google photos, it makes a nice photo host. Labnol has released a nice little tool to embed Google photo images into blogs and websites. Once you copy-paste the public link from the image, paste it into the website of the tool and it’ll generate an embed code that you can put on your blog or site.

incremental fruition

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I happened to read this share from Netta recently. We can easily relate instances wherein *boredom* sets in and sabotages a goal we had. This can often permeate for short term or even long term plans.

“The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom. We get bored with habits because they stop delighting us. The outcome becomes expected. And as our habits become ordinary, we start derailing our progress to seek novelty. Perhaps this is why we get caught up in a never-ending cycle, jumping from one workout to the next, one diet to the next, one business idea to the next. As soon as we experience the slightest dip in motivation, we begin seeking a new strategy—even if the old one was still working. As Machiavelli noted, “Men desire novelty to such an extent that those who are doing well wish for a change as much as those who are doing badly.”
– James Clear, “Atomic habits”


Setting a goal or a vision often gets accompanied by an action roadmap that includes small incremental achievable actions that count on to gradually achieve the vision or goal we had in our minds. My experiences and intuitions have induced me not to be stagnant at any stage and always be proactive and positive with incremental steps towards a goal set. Of course, we go through slips that are human by nature. It’s often in these small cumulative steps that we often stumble and fail in walking towards a dream or purpose. While writing this, I recollect an interesting conversation that I had listened to sometime in 2016, between Walt Mossberg and Jeff Bezos wherein Jeff mentioned his keenness to be  “stubborn on the vision, but flexible on the details“. Maintaining enthusiasm towards the end of a long term project or objective is paramount. What is more interesting is that it is in these small gradational steps or stages wherein the passion for working towards a dream is to be invigorated. Seeds of boredom often enfeeble these small steps that we embark on and gradually jeopardize the goal. That’s probably the reason why the single most important thing in working towards a vision is to systematically and consistently maintain the enthusiasm throughout. Within the bounds of our inherently humane weaknesses, when someone gets through, that’s how greatness sprouts. Dreams are often lost in the details. In fact, details and path embarked are cardinal in major fulfillments. May passion and fervor fuel your hopes and aspirations. God bless friends! : )

 

Membranes of Memories.

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When we go somewhere, between all the rush and the hustle and bustle are those sweet little moments in time that’d be chiseled in our memories. I and Netta traveled to Al’ Ain and Ghubaiba (old city of Dubai) and I thought to extract some memorable frames into a short moving picture.

Music by Canadian Singer Dawud Wharnsby.

“The Remnants
We carry small membranes of memories
Within us
As do trees, flowers, stones,
All life force around us

Fragments of memories
Engraved in chips of iron, copper, silver…
Interlaced in the workings of men
Intertwined into the streets, buildings
The networks around us

Pathways between ages
Each carrying their
Remnants of the past”

― Maria Lehtman, The Dreaming Doors: Through the Soul Gateways