Cafe Pics - A photo a day...

This is my email address: mandana@gmail.com

If you'd like to know more read on, although the paragraph you just read is really the essence of this page.

Some of my pictures are available on my photoblog, and here you can find some of the photos I've taken for BBC over time, as long as they are still available on their web site.

Master Zoufonoon
Persian music in 1385 (2006) at a glance
Kiosk concert
Dastan Ensemble concert
Mamak Khadem concert
Mohsen Namjoo and Kiosk concert
Shams ensemble concert

I was six years old when my sister was born, and I being the oldest felt that it was time for me to be a grown up.  I had to start doing "important" and "serious" things.  These are some of the jobs I was seriously considering before my ninth grade:

- Becoming an astronaut
- Being a writer
- Discovering the mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle
- Archeology (not to dig out pots and plates, but to discover a few more pyramids in Egypt)
- Becoming a scientist!

Now let's see...  I'm not working at NASA, my name is not exactly on the list of NY Times bestseller authors, no new pyramid has been discovered within the last 15 years (at least I have not reported any), and I have never been asked to fly to Stockholm, Sweden to receive a certain prize (I have to admit, I have never been nominated either), you might think that I'm not taking my life as serious as I used to get in school days.  But make no mistake!  Right now I'm on the path of becoming one of the most famous mythologists of the world, one who knows the Western mythology, Eastern mythology, anything in between, and even Extraterrestrial mythology if need be.  The only problem is that I have not been able to convince anybody to pay me for it (yet).

Anyhow, back to the old days...  I studied applied mathematics in computer science at Tehran University.  I would usually get the top score in programming courses.  However, not going to Sharif University (You have to be Iranian, or be a Stanford or MIT affiliate to know the reputation) saved me from becoming a geek.  Probably another reason for not becoming geek was that I started reading books very early on, and again being the "grown up" I could not read anything less than Dostoevsky when I was in junior high.  Well, ok.  I was in love with the French Jules Verne before I turn to Russia, but that was my fourth grade - hardly even a teen.

After my Dostoevsky (read masochism and the virtue of pain) period I moved on to Emile Zola, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Simone de Beauvoir, only to realize that I know very little about the writers of my own country.  That was how I rediscovered Akhavan and Shamlou of Persian poets, Beizaee of playwrights, and Doulat-Abadi of novelists.  But when I could not finish the five volume masterpiece "Kalidar", which is exactly what happened when I tried reading Marcel Proust's five volume masterpiece "In Search of Lost Time", I sort of gave up on reading native literature and got back to translations and world literature.  So I continued with Milan Kundera, Jostein Gaarder, Paulo Coelho, and last but not least Joseph Campbell, whom I'll be spending a lot more time with...

So if by now you have not been able to figure out that things that I like have nothing to do with each other, let me help you get there a little bit faster by telling you the jobs that I have actually taken over time:

- Teaching math
- Accounting
- Advertisement design
- Set design for cinema and TV (out of town projects were pretty fun)
- Newspaper layout design (where I found my best friends)
- Web and multimedia design
- Graphics design for mobile and phone applications
- Photography

Hmmm...  I guess there is some hope after all.  Aside from the math related things, maybe one can see a pattern of visual art and design :-)