Post Processing!

One of the most dreaded tasks in our job description as Proprietor-Designer-Employee at Urban Pari is post-processing our brilliant photographs and for a novice like me, it's a bit of a headache. Suddenly, I am required to know all about Photoshop and I need to pay for it! But, I like Open Source and GIMP does what I need just as well as Photoshop. I am a software engineer (till recently) who has never worked on GUI or anything visual on the job. At the most, I've drawn flow charts and diagrams to illustrate how it is 'supposed' to work and the rest is all hidden behind code. Learning is seldom fun when you don't know where to start. But, it turns out I like the visual aspect of this task and I can put some of my programming skills to use when the tasks are repeatable.

You know what keeps me going while I spend long, late hours on the photographs?

• The beauty of the model in the photograph. She is usually our friend. She is way too kind to us. She looks lovely in person but the camera sees more.
• The magnificence of the saree which has a life of its own. Sometimes, it looks like the soft breeze, the ebbing of water, etc.
• The magic created by both of them, model and saree.
• The music that plays in the background, on my headphone.

Hope you like our photographs and we hope that we are continuously improving in the quality of our  product representation. We have a brilliant photographer, by the way. :) He meets our expectation and goes beyond it.

Never judge a person ...

It's true what they say, "Never judge a person by their looks". You think you don't judge people that way, until you meet someone who totally surprises you.


A few days ago, me and my friends (business women who inspired me to become an entrepreneur) set out to meet a guy, Mark, from a company that specializes in Social Marketing. Mark had contacted me about an application that could enable e-commerce for Urban Pari and I decided to give this a hearing. I was looking forward to the meeting and I was also going to make a day out of it with my two friends. Business mixed with some pleasure.


Mark gave us directions to his office, which took us here and there, before we finally landed outside a three-story building facing a huge dump site. There was no elevator to take us to the second floor and we din't know what his company was called. But, aided by Mark's voice on the phone, we took the stairs to the second floor. We were met by Mark at the stair case.


Mark was a young guy dressed casually in a shirt and trouser. He looked like most IT employees I'd met. He was friendly and led us quickly to a conference room, one more floor up. This office was full of unoccupied cubicles and looked liked a start-up that hadn't started up. My friends looked at me and I grinned and shrugged as if to say, "I don't know what's going to happen. I just got you to meet someone who said he had a great application that could make you a millionaire." We settled down at the conference room and let him start talking about himself and his company.


He said, "I am the CEO of the company and I'll be walking you through what our company is about".
I said, "What?".
He said, "I am the CEO".
I said, "CEO?".
He said, "Yes, mam."


I smirked (inwardly) at that and decided to listen to him. He spoke with confidence and wasted no time in telling us about his company and what they did. After a while, my friend asked him, "What else do you do?" and he said, "I'm a college drop-out and this is what I do." She didn't really mean to ask him what else he did on his spare time. But, only meant to ask him what else his company did. But, that was his quick and secure response. Anyway, we were pleasantly surprised because we had listened to him for only a few minutes and he sounded confident, experienced and nothing at all like a hustler or a drop-out. I asked him, "How old are you? You look young." He said, "I'm 20 years old". I said, "Congratulations to you". And I meant it.

Mark is not his real name but I'm calling him that because he may be another Mark Zuckerberg (Founder & CEO of Facebook) who started young but made it big with his ideas. We were enraptured while Mark spoke about his company's accomplishments and what they were capable of doing for businesses like us. He is the first under-age CEO I have met and I am delighted to have met him. All of us are.


So, I'm writing this blog to share this meeting with you and to remind myself to 'never judge a book by its cover'.


Mark & Mark, way to go!