Skip to main content

Adith rules and the impossible passport size photo of a baby


Since Adith pretty much dictates my life these days, I changed the color and template of this blog to a shiny baby blue :). Hope you all dont object.

It has been a fleeting three weeks since Adith's birth and I have not found the time to document these past few weeks. I am back at work this week. Isnt it a cruel world where the mother gets 6 months maternity leave and the dad gets one measly week. Anyway, I managed to go to work one day and then worked from home the next four days. This in order to ease the transition for the family is what I told my manager. But it was really to ease my transition to the daily grind :).

Adith received his SSN today and this meant that we could apply for his passport. 2 passport size pictures, application form and Adith's birth certificate are all that are required. We drag the baby to the local Kinkos only to find out that they dont take passport pics of babies - too hard they say!! Take the baby to a professional studio was the recommended advice. It is bad enough that one has to pay something like $20 for a couple of passport size photos - going to a studio is likely to cost much much more. How can these guys get away with charging us these big bucks for a couple of snaps? They dont give us the negatives since these are digital pictures anyway (and they dont give you the JPEG file either). The bane of the free market economy is that one can charge what ever he/she wants as long as there is still a demand for the product - is there no sense of morality in businesses these days?. I hope that with the advent of cheap digital cameras and digital printers, more and more people will make their own passport size photos and put an end to this daylight robbery (okay - i am done with my rant on passport size photos).

Long story short, I made my own passport size photo of Adith. Oh, before I forget, the passport photo instructions mention that the distance from the chin to the top of the head must be between 1 inch and 1 & 3/8 inch. What they mean to say is that the distance from the chin to the top of the head must be between 2.5 cm and 3.5 cm (now isnt that something you can measure using a normal ruler :)). Score 1 for the metric system.

Comments

Unknown said…
Just happen to find your blog.
Agree 100%, for tech savvy people it does feel being ripped off when you pay so much $$ when you could possibly do it your self at home. I have printed fairly good passport pictures using the tutorial below.

Enjoy !!
Arindam.

http://www.dpchallenge.com/tutorial.php?TUTORIAL_ID=22
September 8, 2008 at 2:59 PM
Unknown said…
Hi Ramanan,

Followed the link to your blog from your email :)

You too can get looong paternitry leave if you can survive labor pains ;) Try it next time :D

BTW, for most folk here 6 months maternity leave is almost unheard of (You have to be really lucky to get that kind of a leave...umm, why do I think I know one lucky Mom??). US is known to have the worst maternity benefits amongst the developed countries. Other developed countires provide 1-3 years of job protected leaves for new moms!

BTW, loved reading thru your blog...will definately keep coming back!

Divya
P.S. Good job on the passport pic. Did they accept it?
P.P.S. Loved the innocence on Adith's face!!
September 23, 2008 at 5:56 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Om Shanti Om ...

Wow - It is Nov 17th already and it has been 16 days since my last post ... what hectic lives we lead - no wonder we all sooner or later succumb to some stress related disorder. But morbid thoughts aside, here is my "detailed" Om Shanti Om experience. Kutti (those on a need to know basis know who I am referring to) and wife called us to go catch the Om Shanti Om flick at my brother's deserted theater - (begin footnote) it appears some of the local mainstream cinema halls have stumbled on the fact that screening Bollywood movies is a sure way of generating copious quantities of moolah given the zillion or so well-heeled fanatic Bollywood fans in the bay area but this is a topic best left for another blog (end footnote). Anyway, the rotund and 24 weeks pregnant mrs and I made our way to the "deserted" theatre 10 minutes before the agreed upon time. Turns out that the zillion fanatic Bollywood fans also decide that this was the movie to see on a Friday night at ou...
4 comments
Read more

Baby names - trials and tribulations ...

A certain world traveling friend of mine requested my thoughts on pre and post fatherhood. Since I am still in the pre-fatherhood phase, I shall enlighten my friend with some words of wisdom as someone who is actively making all the wrong choices and the right mistakes :) Choosing baby names can be an interesting experience. First time parents-to-be like yours truly and the wonderfully rotund mrs are often perplexed with the myriad choices for baby names. Now throw in the rigors of Indian names and you are looking at several zillion permutations and combinations that is likely to cause the parents-to-be run screaming for the exits. Thanks to my mother, I am blessed with a _long_ name. While it does inconvenience me from time to time, I have always looked upon my long name as a blessing since it pretty much guaranteed that I will never suffer from identity theft or fraud. One look at my name and most people just give up :). So given that the baby will have at least one long name (the f...
4 comments
Read more

The glorious four day weekend ..

It is day three in the four day weekend and it has been a fun filled three days so far. On Thanksgiving day, we partook in a vegetarian thanksgiving potluck feast with some old German friends, and some new German friends and family (brother and his wife). A fabulous thick and creamy pumpkin soup was followed by a piece of a very traditional German quiche. This was accompanied by some potatoes, spinach and feta cheese all stuffed inside a red bell pepper. And this was just the German part of the course. For the Indian part of the thanksgiving feast, we brought two curries (malai mattar panner and aloo dumwale) while the brother prepared the vegetable pulao and raitha. Entertainment was provided by the three German kids who enthralled the guests with their diction and language skills (and eating skills :)). Day two started with some general house cleaning and a round of tasks for the resident handy-man (yours truly). This of course led to the mandatory Home Depot visits and the purchase ...
3 comments
Read more