Karl Gude

Damn! As I was about to publish this to the web a friggin LIZARD dropped onto my chest from the ceiling and scared the living shaving cream outta me! He has the WHOLE room to drop in on and he chooses the tiny area that I’M occupying. I’ve always heard that geckos had a terrific sense of humor… I thought it was a spider, so I squeeled like a child and nearly destroyed my laptop when I blasted it across the bed with my knees. It wasn’t, thank God, of the arachnid persuasion, but I now have a lizard somewhere in my sheets!

This is what the little bugger looks like (click to enlarge).

I just got to Delhi from Bangalore and I’m staying in one of those wonderful, colonial-era hotels built by the British before the Indians gained independence in 1947. It’s simple and elegant and has a nostalgic, old-world romantic feel, the kind of place you would expect to see Humphrey Bogart strolling through the lobby with Sydney Greenstreet. Oddly enough, in the beautiful, wide-open stairwell that spirals up the hotel’s five floors there is a very large, candid photo of the entire cast of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, Burl ives…) all standing on a staircase, but, after a close comparison, not the one I was standing on.

India is a land of many contrasts…

Taj Ambassador hotel

I have two whitewashed rooms. My ceilings are over ten feet tall with fans and the floors are hardwood. The trim, closets and drawers are dark, varnished wood and there are lots of little nooks where lizards can jump out at you for laughs. The colorful tile terrace overlooks palm trees and an old, oval pool. It has air conditioning, too. The heat is oppressive outside.

If you’re interested, here are the graphics we produced in Bangalore in 1 1/2 days. The subject I chose was global warming to tie in with the environmental news of the G8 summit and its strong India/China focus. Some graphics are obviously not finished. Some were thankfully not finished. And some should be finished and published. There are five photos, most of me (they’re for my boys back home!)

It seems that not too many women do information graphics in India. In 2004, I had only one woman out of 32 participants in my India workshops and in my first workshop this time around there weren’t any, although the participants agreed that women were beginning to dominate newsrooms in general all over India as designers, editors and reporters. They speculated that women aren’t into graphics because they’re “not into technology as men are.” I start with a new group tomorrow.