S Anand

I got the film rolls developed from Fotango. You can see my photos on Yahoo.

Sheer laziness kept me in bed till 9:30AM. Then I got dressed, and logged on to the computer, only to be greeted with “I’ve set the clock an hour behind, because it’s Daylight Saving Time. Check if it’s OK.” or something like that. Neat! I truly got an extra hour. I mean, I actually did something useful. So I told Ashwin (an exchange student from UCLA) that I’d gained an hour of life.

Ashwin: “But then, you’ll lose it when the time changes back…”

Me: “No, because I’ll be in India by then.”

Ashwin: “Hmm…. something wrong there.”

Me: “And I can do this for ever — just spending winters in London!”

Took us a while to figure out that we’d be losing time when we were on the flight. But neither of us seemed to mind.

There’s a gale warning. Now, the weather’s cold enough as it is. Wonder what a gale’s going to do to it.

The gale caused all kinds of trouble to the underground trains. When I got on at Newbury Park, there was an announcement that trains would be running slow today because there were trees on the track. It wasn’t too far after that accident, and the British Rail was running slowly as it is. Looked like the underground would match it. Then there was another delay — signal confusion this time.

But the cake was when they stopped the train because there was a ‘suspicious looking package on the track’. Now, I can’t imagine what brave soul decided to inspect it, before reporting after two minutes that it was ‘no longer suspicious’, but even less, what could have been in there.

The train problem wasn’t local to London. Carlos (another exchange student) was on the ferry from Calais to Dover, and the ferry was rocking worse than a plane in the middle of a big storm. Of course, people threw up on the boat more than the boat threw them up. By the time they reached Dover, the port was closed, and Carlos was stuck at Dover for 14 hours (with barely any food). He ended up a little late to class, unshaven. Apparantly the gale toll was pretty high.

But with all these heady issues, my time in the train was spent observing a character quite unconcerned with these proceedings. A 2-year old blonde boy (blue-eyed) was sitting next to his mother, reading a copy of the Metro (the local newspaper). I say “reading” because that’s exactly what it looked like he was doing. It was on his lap, and he seemed to be staring at it intently. From where I was sitting, I could read the headlines: “Oil Profits Soar to 10-year High”. Future oil-magnate, perhaps. A few seconds later, he lifted the paper carefully, turned a few pages (no kidding — he actually flipped them), came back to the front page, stared at one corner, and started biting it.

Now, that looked like a much more normal thing for a kid of his age to do. It wasn’t until I got off that I noticed what was on that corner of the page.

“Spice Girls Toast Their Ninth No. 1”

The gale caused all kinds of trouble to the underground trains. When I got on at Newbury Park, there was an announcement that trains would be running slow today because there were trees on the track. It wasn’t too far after that accident, and the British Rail was running slowly as it is. Looked like the underground would match it. Then there was another delay — signal confusion this time.

But the cake was when they stopped the train because there was a ‘suspicious looking package on the track’. Now, I can’t imagine what brave soul decided to inspect it, before reporting after two minutes that it was ‘no longer suspicious’, but even less, what could have been in there.

The train problem wasn’t local to London. Carlos (another exchange student) was on the ferry from Calais to Dover, and the ferry was rocking worse than a plane in the middle of a big storm. Of course, people threw up on the boat more than the boat threw them up. By the time they reached Dover, the port was closed, and Carlos was stuck at Dover for 14 hours (with barely any food). He ended up a little late to class, unshaven. Apparantly the gale toll was pretty high.

But with all these heady issues, my time in the train was spent observing a character quite unconcerned with these proceedings. A 2-year old blonde boy (blue-eyed) was sitting next to his mother, reading a copy of the Metro (the local newspaper). I say “reading” because that’s exactly what it looked like he was doing. It was on his lap, and he seemed to be staring at it intently. From where I was sitting, I could read the headlines: “Oil Profits Soar to 10-year High”. Future oil-magnate, perhaps. A few seconds later, he lifted the paper carefully, turned a few pages (no kidding — he actually flipped them), came back to the front page, stared at one corner, and started biting it.

Now, that looked like a much more normal thing for a kid of his age to do. It wasn’t until I got off that I noticed what was on that corner of the page.

“Spice Girls Toast Their Ninth No. 1”

It was a rather busy week. Nothing much happened. I realized that I’d been roaming around too much, and that it was time to get to some assignments. Not that much work was done. Understandable, since most of my time was spent reading movie scripts — notably The World is Not Enough.

Diwali was not at all bad, considering that most of it was spent away from home. After spending 10 hours in front of the computer, I walked home from the Ilford station, when I was greeted with a BANG! It was with pure delight that I turned around, just in time to see a rocket exploding. It took me 45 minutes to walk home that night, watching as I was all the sights in the sky. Never, even in India, have I seen such lovely firework displays. The noise was probably a BIT subdued, but I wouldn’t even be sure of that. The place even smelt like home! I did hear the comment that “Indians have to bring noise pollution even here, do they?” Sure. We make ourselves at home. We lit a lamp, and that was about it for Diwali.

There this site called Fotango that develops films for free and posts them online. I sent 4 rolls to them. The deal is that, you put all these rolls in an envelope, and mail it to them (postage is prepaid). After 3-4 days, the develop your film, mail the negatives to you, and put up the snaps online on their site. So how do they make money? Well, if you print out any snaps, they charge you. But they’re also in the process of building online communities and all that. Well, sounds good, but my bet is still on Yahoo!