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A very happy Dussehra to all of you. Dussehra in Jabalpur as you know from my previous posts, is celebrated in a grand manner with streets crowded to make four wheelers unfeasible to ride, lots of things to buy and a general festive essence in the atmosphere.

Following are some pictures from select places from unaccountable numbers of places Durga Pooja happens all over the city. I wasn’t home this time but thanks to internet we are always connected.

Westland

Type 2 Khamaria

Image Courtesy: Devashish Mukerji, Jabalpur

Cantt. Board

City Bengali Club

DB Club Entrance Pendal

DB Club

Q Type Khamaria

Prem Nagar Kalibari

Tagore Colony

Image Courtesy: Aakriti Ghosh, Jabalpur

Other than that, I have been working on this drawing and I want to share it with you. Durga the invincible, the goddess of power:

Only the sketch:

Simple and Easy Ray Tracer

This is possibly one of the simplest ray tracer, written not to technically achieve anything, but to understand the basic theory. This code is minimal, written in C, uses just the algorithms needed to trace, very less pointers usage, and no use of any external libraries other than ones which come packaged with Gcc by default. The code implements the following lighting models: ambient, diffuse, specular, hard shadows, reflections and one sided refractions. Please find the download link after a sample output, it is shared with the most relaxed license.

DOWNLOAD [ZIP] [16KB]

This was done for a one day workshop at BITS Pilani Hyderabad Campus few days ago (for their technical fest ATMOS). The challenge was to teach introduction to computer graphics and the basic theory of ray tracer, in one day, to a wide range of undergraduate students who may not be coming from a computer science background. I hope the students gained something and found it interesting.

Our team: Adi Shayan, Sneha Venkatraman, Yash Agrawal, Shiben Bhattacharjee, Naveen Kumar, Nitish Tripathi

Durga Pooja, Jabalpur, 2011

I am going to show you around how Jabalpur looks during the festive time of Dussehra. You might remember a similar post I posted two years back, and here it is again. This time I got a bit more.

As discussed before, Jabalpur’s Dussehra is craziness. Madhya Pradesh is quite possibly the only state which contains a perfect mix of people from every region in India. From that it derives that a lot of Bengali people are here as well to celebrate Dussehra. However that is only half the reason. Bengali or not, Dussehra is celebrated by every Hindu as well as Sikh over here.

Pandal created by one of the Punjabi celebrations

This does not comes from statistics so I could be wrong but after Kolkata, Jabalpur’s Dussehra is considered biggest.

One very important reason could be that Jabalpur’s a city considered blessed by certain Goddesses, all of whom according to Indian mythology originate from the single Goddess, Parvati. And Dussehra is a celebrated for one of the avatars of Parvati: Durga.

Each of these statues that you see are easily more than 10 feet tall, no questions asked. However, they are made completely green and are light, around just 6 people can lift it.

There are fairs that spread across some of the famous religious locations

and the prices at which you can buy some toys are unbelievable. Not the best finishing which is well acceptable at those rates.

Its probably not visible but that’s a decently big hill and it is decorated with lights. They are showing a small play automated with levers and gears. This is really common here, these plays are shown every half and hour or something at some select places. Half a mile of the road is blocked because everyone wants to see the play.

It is actually quite unique that I am seeing the celebrations at exactly the same streets and corners since as many years as my age.

The amount of detail in the artwork is commendable. If you can see, apart from the statue of the Goddess attacking the monsters, the decoration around involves two women playing a trumpet. There is more if you look closely, people probably skim through all that.

This is a famous location where ever year a very expensive pandal is decorated. There are around 100 small statues around the pandal telling the story of Krishna’s Childhood apart from the very well carved Durga’s statue.