Digging for Meaning

The Green Eyed Fish Once, there was a small fish. For him, the pond was big. He swam with wild abandon. getting lost was not a concern for him, but an adventure. he knew he could get by with a little help from his friends. On one such joy ride about water, he experience massive waves carrying him away without his consent. He was scared and confused. What had suddenly happened to this placid and serene lake? He asked as much to an elder saffron crab, by the edge of water. The crab pointed to a long floating creature. It had two arms moving forward and backward, thrusting water backwards which had caused the ripples that caught our fish by surprise. The rest of the body was amazingly still, except for its derrière, which bobbled a bit from time to time. It was a curious creature; it refused to swim below the water. He wondered how it survived outside of water all this while. Our lil fish was enamoured by it. To his astonishment though, at the bank another figure with four limbs...

i feel like robbing something beautiful. a life maybe. steal all the beauty, put my copyright and bury it in my 36 GBs of namelessness. lets start with some beautiful flowers in all their blue, green and red splendour. the colors are not all too bright and I won't let you play with its simple beauty on photoshop to tweak its contrast and hues. They are beautiful as they are. They are alive. They don't need your definitions. Let me rob you of the pleasure of seeing the flowers in their magnificient colors in punishment of your expectations transgressions. hmm.. even after stealing its colors, the flower shines with its grace. sublime curves. maybe in my beauty jihad, i should make them wear hijabs and throw black paint over this plate. but I can only stand still, and admire its grace. grace can never be kept hidden.

Eggs! fried. and as our canteen wallah guy Subhash puts it.. 'Palti maar ke'. Divine. :D Well, i am poorer for the lack of MICA mess now. But that doesnt mean, I am going to give up on a dream of everyday sumptuous breakfast. well, even if I were to make my own breakfast, where would i arrange the greens, the portable fan, spacious airy verandah and fellow revelers of a leisurely breakfast? The single most important thing that bothers me in my current stint at mumbai is breakfast. its not loneliness, its not commutes, its not crowds, it not absence of winter (but, what the duck! how can a place have no seasons :( i want winter! ), its BREAKFAST. or the lack of it. Double fried eggs come in my dreams. dreams of past breakfast. The one on goa beach a year ago. while the rest of my friends were still zonked out, i stole away on our rented Activa to a beach nearby to a Portuguesey named restaurant with open patio facing the beach. the wind would suddenly pick up at time and snatch...

Right now my whole being feels like a pastiche of a million poetries. thoughts have melted into curving, dripping, flowing ideas. i close my eyes and it feels like i am dancing.. moving with the breeze... waltzing with dry leaves. levitated. light. i am listening to Il postino's soundtrack which has neruda's poetry. and its making me yearn to read some kundera all over again. maybe, i will read laughable loves once more. its worth it at any rate. sleep, i have found a substitute for you. good night.

life escapes if you run after it. our destiny is nothing but to wait. a lesson fell through after having lived a quarter century worth of life. a quarter century. feels like a lot, when u say that. but doesn't really when i ask myself. a quarter century spent without any respect or regard to act of waiting. always, kicked it out of the way. or if the wait became far too imposing to avoid, i would recede back into a cocoon made of some other time and space. but even escapes become boring. waiting caught up with me. there is no escaping it. i await. i think, god is a waiter after all. he waits upon us to serve us life lessons. he waits until we appreciate the act of waiting. he holds our life until we calm down from our frenzy. and then hands the reins back to us when we can handle it, that is when the mirage of control is lifted and calm consumes you. i now understand, so to say, why have i had this desire to work as a waiter since quite a few years. it was freedom i thought earlier...

recipe for a saturday night. 7 -8 replays of 'adagio for strings' by samuel barber. 2-3 replays of 'moonlight adagio' by beethoven. 1-2 replays of 'gloomy sunday' by rezso seress'. + reading binge of pablo neruda's love sonnets or Baudelaire's 'Flowers of evil' + port wine. (completely optional. might even be redundant). ____ its like a high. i better not get addicted to this.

just heard samuel barber's 'adagio for strings '. and put it on loop. i had heard it earlier, maybe as OST of some movie or generally in my playlist at shuffle. but today it made me pause and listen to it alone. its so bloody beautiful! it flies. leave me alone.. let me dissolve in these sounds.. as it flies over cities, times, people; let me too experience the colors of the world mixing in a rain. the true fresh colors left after the rain cleared the greys and false shiny ones. The adagio is like the first rays of the sun... going around the world... liberating it from darkness. 'adagio for strings' is the smell of wet soil. it is open spaces. it is so universal. it has that sublime quality of beethoven's 'moonlight adagio'. funny, because barber was more a brahms and bach guy. its one of those pieces with strenght in them.. strength to lift a soul up by the sheer beauty of music. you want to submit to it at times of hardship knowing that it resurrect ...

Perhaps, the single most important force that shaped my life is my impatience and greed for newness. i loved playing synthesizer. i joined classes to learn it when i was in 5th standard. the day I learnt 'papa kehte hai' i was riding my bicycle wildly with joy and hands in the air. no handlebars. triumph. I saw triumph in the fact that quickly i was able to find melodies of any song on keyboards within minutes. then the quest became to play faster songs. then it went to learn classical notations and ragas. (i never paused then to master my fingers, to control, to hold, to pause, to get that exact timing. i was much too impatient.) and that was my undoing. I saw this vast reserve of yet unknown music. the book of notations that my teacher had, was quite expensive. and i wanted all of the notation sheets in it. so i set about writing those notations in my notebook. that took away a month or so. and then my teacher didnt have to teach me, so she kept on supplying me with notation...

just saw this ted talk about photography . Edward Burtynsky took photographs depicting oil's expansive role in our societal regression. few things to be noted here. exhibition.. he chose large scale format. medium as imposing and striking as the content. content.. the right politics. content/idea comes first. photograph/execution/medium comes later. so often than not, this is what happens. with digital photography, you take gazillion pics and then decide later on, while photoshopping it, what should the pic mean. its appalling as it has crept into professional and serious art photography too. a good photographer manages to restrict the meaning of what he wants to say, while he is bloody clicking the pic. though, one may get away with 'artistic expressions' and altered motives somewhere else... but that somewhere else has become ubiquitous and concrete motives have gone into margins. well, i am culprit of 'lending meaning' to existing frame as well. ya well, hazards...

just saw this talk on TED. Its the usual evangelical white man's talk to other white men about the need for understanding a people as a people rather than a 'problem' or a 'situation'. its about the 'shadow city' as he calls the slums in developing world. its an interesting talk and an earnest attempt in the right direction. However, in their politics to humanize, they tend to absolve the other forces at work. earlier in his talk, he talks how these shadow cities are expanding and more and more people are trooping in, without questioning why is that the case. he talks of how the shadow cities lack basic amenities of life but all these cities are built on hope and freedom. true, but what is making the people uproot themselves culturally, socially, materially and move to inhuman filth-holes in hope of what? while everyone should be able to enjoy his rights, at the same time he need not be elsewhere, far from his home to enjoy those rights and freedom. compou...

Werner Herzog. i see his work and unfailingly its such an inspiration. firstly, he is a student of life. the way the camera stays, moves and even the way narrative is constructed, its as it were his humble attempt at understanding and empathising with a people rather than simply capturing and sensationalizing a certain emotion; like most others do. Without trying to compare myself to him - i am too small a cretin, yet, to do that - i would like to share an experience i had while watching his movie. a particular scene in his movie 'wheel of time' was so similar to one i had shot in mumbai of three children sitting by road. it was eery. and uplifting at the same time. i was touched :P and he goes around the world and stares at people with open eyes and asks questions! his movie have been based in peru , antarctic , india, tibet, australia , africa .. ! and whats more, his politics is at the right place. his questions are humane. maybe its aborigines' struggle for recogniti...

after a long long time, i spent a whole day at home. fragmented thoughts... letting them be. to do list, letting it be. well, truth be told, the day was spent in hope and plan of spending it elsewhere too.. but that hope and plan existed in that uncertain plain which you know is only an illusion, a dim possibility, and that uncertainty is what gives our existence that vibrating energy. u keep on attempting to change course of time, but someone else has already shaped it in concrete for you. time. time is like water, i said.. it ever flows. some one said 'bull shit' to this. then i said.. 'time is bullshit, ever present and infinite'. :P and then we missed ek chaalis ki last local. that was yesterday's time. today's time was moody and stuck to my skin a tad too intimately. it stretched with my yawns, it lingered on my open eyes staring with me the ceiling and the spider web in corner. and when i wished my time to be somewhere else, it simply deserted me... i w...

every day, an hour before sleep is due ego deserts me. and i am left lying on the bed curled up with unsure thumbs and fingers twiddling with the cellphone. the day after, ego wakes up with cocky erasure of memory of ever having felt needy. ego! you beast! you deserter! stay true or let alone. what good is an undulating pride. what good is an undulating faith.

tea. 1. sitting in cafe desert rain, sipping on that apricot tea on a lovely afternoon. with the spoon i swerve the warm concoction. the little apricot pieces play waltz with tea leaves in it. its cold, but sun's rays stream in through the wide open windows. there's a bunch of local kids sitting around, being cool, chilling. some one is playing a guitar. i am 'mainland' indian, so not many people are interested in me. But my companion is french, so she receives warm smiles. She is eating her favourite cookie. i must admit, its quite something. But I prefer sipping on some more varieties of teas before devouring those cookies. Someone just came in having trekked the stok-kangri. we shake hands and swap stories. we laugh at our different accents - german, marathi, english, french - and ensuing miscommunication. 2. A 12 km stretch to a remote village in ladakh wasn't really a road. but no one told us. with the trusty pulsar, we trudged on steep slopes, dangerous ...

Round at the curb towards my home in amboli in andheri, is a little plastic tent on the pavement against a co-operative housing soc.'s wall. (to go ahead to my place, i have to chose to walk either by a huge overflowing dumpster on one side of road, or a roadside orgy of shit. well, usually i time right at the moment to walk in the middle of the road through that distance. ) the place has plastic strewn all over by the tent. the family, it seems, is in the business of sorting out the different kinds of plastics that are dumped. 3 yr olds, 30 yr olds, 60 yr old family members are usually busy separating bottles from plastic bags from plastic objects from... the odd thing is the tenants keep on changing every 2 months while the tent remains the same. i guess. well, i have been here 6 months, and seen 3 families. well, anyways, the object of this post is something else. it concerns the current tenants. it apparently is a family of a couple with more than handful kids and a few elders....

confront. please. i don't get it. why are we so politically correct all the time? why don't we ask questions? why aren't we curious about others? (in a way that allows you to grow, not as a means of cheap thrills) why do we avoid uncomfortable question like plague? why has all of a sudden 'feelings' become the most sacred and fragile existentional truth? fuck! poke it, knead it, let it hurt it.. u will be better off, believe me. avoiding confrontation with others still is understandable, though its not healthy; avoiding confrontation with one self is suicide of your self image. if there has to be only one person whom you can be totally truthful, try and be it yourself please. you can't afford a disconnect. you have been hurt. you need some sympathy. having had some, get fuckin' over it and poke yourself as to what got you into this shit hole. don't get addicted to sympathy. there is no other thing as obscene as someone begging/stealing sympathy/attentio...

Mumbai. city of dreams. city of refugees. the camp city of private soldiers, who paste dreams made by private soldiers who came before them on their foreheads, and forge ahead. they maime, rape, throw at the city, extract returns in hope of enriching their real home; never knowing that mumbai won't let you leave you this soon having used her. they had removed their humanity like old clothes on the border of the city. they enter naked into the jungle. grimy serpents run on her back incessantly. little pesky soldiers pull up their sleeves, ball up the fists and fight to get inside the serpent. the door, that is always open seems like evanescent port to untold riches, to them. the ever open door, indeed is a port. a port through which the human transforms into a wild hog who just got untethered. once inside, they again transform into guilt ridden, gaze avoiding crabs. walking sideways. its only after getting out of the serpents, do they inhale some air, not fresh, but air nevertheless...

i am the little air particles jostling, fighting to be breathed in by you. breathe in, silence every cell of my body taught with anticipation. darkness and questions groping for the past to bludgeon open the future. breathe out, sight of your smile bellows me upwards in bliss. i dance and i sing and i land gently on your skin. caressed flooded with love we are blind to time finding eternity of bliss in a moment. for a moment to dissolve into another for the life on a roll forever i am the little air particles.

Dear TV, you suck! well not you exactly - what with flat screens and awesome contrast and sound.. the miracle of moving picture - but what you show through you. its not just the inanity being reinforced and the vulgar being deified, but also countless many little things that is turning my fellow media addicts into little rats/rabbits (depending on your favorite chapter of alice in wonderland); seemingly in coma while in front of your glittering rectangular self. due to you, my left hand thumb has got a weird disease which makes it go click click in infinite loops on the remote control. well, in part my fraternity is to blame as well for your demise. but hey, we are earning our bread and trying to be happy while at it. we have right to both. sorry to strangulate you and the viewer in the process though. besides we only give what the viewer wants. its another matter that the viewer doesn't always know what he needs and what all this communication will do to him/her in the long run. p...

my tavel to gokarna 2 weekends back, was fraught with long distances, delays and switch overs. the travel was made amusing thanks to jean paul sartre. well, amusing isn't the right word. hmm, can't put what i felt in a word. may be a para would help.. :P His book 'intimacy' is very truely a very up-close study of us. us humans. our relationships. our emotions. by the time i read the third story, i actually was feeling a weird sensation... a mixture of hints of suffocation, paranoia and languid stillness. the kind of feeling one has when after having slept 14 hours continuously and being awake half wishing to be in dream, staring at the ceiling, one becomes so comfortable in the sheets that the idea of slightest movement is repelled by body itself. you can't will to lift your arms. the body in its languor decidedly becomes heavy. sartre's words become the sheet on which we are lying. it knows us well. very well. in the little confines of the self, the sheet gets ...

i want to swing a sturdy long iron club (golf). swing with wild abandon, sending the ball the farthest it can go. i feel like driving the club on railway platforms waiting for the train... full bodied swing, 300 degrees; while crossing bridge hurtling the ball in air above the stalled traffic; on terrace sending the ball beyond all the visible buildings; office corridors sending the ball smashing through the window out in sunlight. vast open greens and utter freedom. wind and sand. golf is such a queer combination of freedom and precision. and i can afford neither.

i want to scream your name out loud loud as i can be to feel it rolling out of my tounge to feel it leaving my throat dry my face twitching with anticipation that my shout may be heard by you that with every subsequent shout you come closer until i need to shout no more whisper no more until the breaths intertwine and its noise is all we can hear

Since a few days, i had imposed a self-censor. I wouldn't use the adjectives 'beautiful' and 'kickass' (to be forever on a quest for beauty is not normal. i must taste some normality too once in a while); and i would try not to be introspective all the time. (trying not to be so 'full of myself' all the time, there's the whole world out there that needn't be reflected onto me..) but how else could I describe Jeanette Winterson's 'written on the body' but delectably 'beautiful' and what else can one do but reflect when confronted with such poetic mirror to our hearts. its one of those literary pieces which you want to hold unto yourself like your lover, for its beauty and for its truthfulness. I read half the book the day I bought it. and then tried to resume it the next day on local train. Now local trains are a many things, but definitely not a temple to beauty and truth. And this book deserves nothing less. It deserves to be re...

while walking back home today evening, i walked past a middle aged person. everything was normal about him. not too fat, not thin. slightly greying hair. he was wearing a sky blue shirt and dark blue pant. the sleeve folded once, presumably right after stepping out of office. He was walking sprightly. He was visibly very happy. he had a white handkerchief in his hand, which instinctively often went to cover his mouth. He was censoring his smile. The effervescent smile bubbling out of him, he wished to rein. his happiness sought expression. his sense of normal social conduct didn't allow for such excesses. His whole body was stiffening with happiness, as if in revolt to the censor. his gait's rhythm had broken. the personal human is caged by the social animal.

As a photographer, i work towards being a good voyeur. photographs as true portraits of the story. i try not to edit the pic far too much. I hate it when some photographers increase the contrast indiscriminately. there should be a politics to your actions. taking an arbitrary photograph of a poor person and then with increased contrast and sly cropping, trying to make the image say things it does not. its not honest. i had lately begun to appreciate video for this more. video with the evidence of continuity makes it a little more difficult for manhandling the story of the images. For the last 2 years since i started learning photography, I have categorically avoided taking portraits of people: picture of people posing, and picture of people voyeuristically. The problem with the pose: Pose reeks with obscene pre occupation with oneself - or from a wider view - with self importance of the homo posers. With digital photography, now any person who is moderately well to do, will have thousa...

our love was a bastard child you were strong and held your earlier one to your bosom with strength of mountains the merry little one you wish could have remained in womb never to come out. you refuse to kill it and wish to keep it away the bastard has a soul too it would rather die than be orphaned let it crawl back into you and dissolve in your heart it will be reborn on the new day of someone else.

i tell myself that i covet you a disease that can be undone. but my symptoms make me fear of something terminal of love requited in uncertain measures and of love in spite. of possibility that had been erased but for the intertwined lives. another flower must bloom on the grave of our memories i must die and be born again.

music's ability to displace time and our proactive attempts at shape shifting the day. was listening to habib koite. some of his songs just make you feel the dusty warm afternoons. the golden sun - the sweat charmer. the dusty roads and relaxed market place after the morning's hustle bustle. sitting on a chair under shade. but would i ever listen to Habib Koite or ali farka toure in the afternoons in the office? hell no. at that time i absolutely need some morning songs. stomach heavy with lunch, is forcing eyelids to shut. you need some very upbeat happy songs. its as if we are trying to expand mornings until evenings. and then sudden nights where one either parties hard or crashes to bed. crashes.. no afternoons but those of sunday's. but even then all life of the week is supposed to spring out in celebration of that sparse freedom of time. so how can you let go afternoons to 'waste'? it makes one feel guilty. evenings and mornings. thats all we know now.

whats the big deal with it. potaato poteto. granted, at times they are the key differentiators- the key to confoundedly crowded language. granted, the accent tells of the person a richer story than words themselves. but i hate it when people use pronunciation nitpicking to show some body down. its so wanting in intelligence. so wannabe. its like in a failing argument blurting out nasty ungentlemanly accusations. why must you turn all your interactions into a race of some sorts to superiority modeled on conformity to some alien trait? it reeks of deep insecurity about one's own identity. apart from an english professor or a call center operator, who else needs to exhibit a constant conformity to the wren n martins? unfortunately, english is the language of the upwardly mobile. but why should this mobility make you hasten towards erasing your rough edges, your identity? like scared rabbits, one is always nervously aware of what the others are hearing of your utterance. its unnatural ...

india is a free country. we are free to conform. 1. Khar Road Railway station - 10-15 women are squatting on the platform. curiously all are carrying exactly similar bags. grey squarish bags with black straps. quite fashionable actually in that abstract expensive way. i thought bulk deals only happened in MICA. 2. Santacruz Railway Station - strangely many men are wearing the dirty bronze colored full sleeves shirt. the shirt uniformly not tucked in. the cuffs linked. Surreal. 3. popeye - i don't get this at all... all of a sudden the market is flooded with shirts with popeye pictures.. t-shirts, collared shirts.. they are un-escapable. go to colaba's narrow galli fashion streets, all stalls will have a popeye T. which company is dumping all these popeyes on mumbai's youth? why popeye? 4. grown men in half pajamas and full sleeved untucked plain shirts. so many people adhering to this code. the color of shirt is usually light.. cream or version thereabout. these are mostl...

mark rothko, Sharmila irom, baudelaire, mclluhan, beethoven, milan kudhera, rob dougan, Fransisco Danconio, Muse, Bjork, Raza, Duchemp, Banksy, Doris Lessing... creators. some forgotten. some lost in the fog of memory. some fictional. all alive. their breath, their thoughts, their actions, their stories shape our lives. Like falling from clouds, leaving indistinct erasable marks on them. we are. its people like these who piece us together, breath in us the life that strides confident on grounds concrete made of the fertile compost of once dead forefathers. thank you for letting me walk. i owe my life to you.

listen to this track.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tpE33fNMaw&feature=related turn down lights. switch off everything around you. sit in a corner. preferably with friends at the tail end of a party. drinks would be good, but are wholly unnecessary. close your eyes. and just listen. muse has this enigmatic energy about every single track of theirs. but blackout stands out for its ethereal calmness that masks the contained energy within. the lingering vocals hold you and take you with it to a world different from here and now.I love muse's music. it in a way questions and then celebrates our existence. the music has fatality to it. the music struggles and fights the inner commotions and eventually rises supreme over every other thought. Another musician whose music is shaped with forces of fatality and virility in celebration of our existence is Rob Dougan. listen to his ' one and the same ' track from album 'furious angels'. or the more famous and one of the ...

I usually seek creativity in form, innovation at structural/conceptual level. So, though i appreciate content, its usually the medium that attracts me more. Thats perhaps the reason these days I am heavily into digging for good installations. I have mentioned my love for work of Olafur eliasson earlier. But then we come across works which are simple and yet so profoundly creative. Yesterday, I saw Anuradha Thakur's exhibit at Jehangir Art Gallery. The first bias set in due to her choice of theme. She has depicted adivasis and their cultures through her work, something which I am keenly interested in appreciating. What really attracts you to her work is her choice of colours. The colors are so natural to indian sensibilities and yet its as if its a new discovery. I haven't seen use of these colors and combination thereof in recent art works. to get an idea of these colors, take out crayons from your sons/daughters/nephew's color boxes and start mixing. Apart from division of...

Mohammad Idris is sitting next to me on bus ride to andheri station. i know his name cause i read it on a paper that he took out from his pocket. He unwinded the folds and held it in both his hands. All this while he was munching on tobacco with certain relish. He was holding the page tightly, crumpling it at its edges. He was gazing at it intently, though his eyes did not move. they were vaguely fixed somewhere on the paper. His face, was a shadow of his nonchalant resignation; which contrasted with his still resolute body. he reminded me of John Galt. The paper in his hand was a bad photocopy (or 'xerox' to be more precise) of a paper which obviously was some kind of official paper. On it was written that the citizen of India Mr. Mohammad Idris with so and so passport no. has been appointed as Machine operator in so & so company in Mauritius. The permit is for 1 year.

i came across a video about the number stations, essentially a broadcast of seemingly random numbers or words being monotonously spoken. About 7-8 years back, in the night while supposedly preparing of an exam the next day, fiddling with the radio on my stereo, (used to love listening to foreign stations on short wave. different music, different programmes.. i even got to listen to a russian elvis presley) i had stumbled on similiar gibberish. the feeling of stumbling onto something utterly incomprehensible but of some obvious consequence is awesome. i can't forget this one instance as well. this was a time when i was heavily into astro physics, Carl Sagan , marcia bartusiak , SETI , drake equation , wow signal and what not.. here i am researching in free time about life outside our planet n shit, and lo and behold you hear stream of possibly encrypted data. btw, at that time with a group of friends we were trying to build an interferometer.. so that should give you a perspective. ...

its 6: 50 AM now. its raining pet animals outside. already had a failed attempt at tea with far too much water, and nearly not enough milk. lets not talk about tea and sugar and proportions thereof. i am proportionally challenged. what to do? what needs be done is, to take hold of the umbrella... pry it open. open the door and out of it. presently pleasantly wading through sheets of undulating water. walk through the narrow gully in my neighbourhood of slums. strategically place umbrella so that the water streaming down the plastic/vinyl or corrugated n rusted sheets don't bathe you. on the road to the left, i see a battered auto rickshaw split open. I walk ahead, buy 'the indian express' and sit down at the local tea stall in an august company of folks. two of them working at the stall. one a middle aged man with rouded eyes and round face and a rotund belly. he is preparing garam garam bhujiya! :D :D :D (hot pakoras, if u will.. ) the other a older guy in half pants si...

are they inter-dependent? by sanitisation, for the argument here, i mean actual physical cleanliness, though the metaphorical equivalent will hold just as good. sanitisation essentially reduces the input to our senses. smells suffers the most. i have written about it somewhere in this blog.. essentially, we are sanitizing smells the most, while polluting sight with proliferation of glowing rectangles (TV, laptop, computer). also, suffering is the sense of touch with touch getting eroticised and societally frowned upon. and well, memories are made of our experiences with our senses. here too, visual memory is so prevalent with photographs and videos and what not. when arundhati roy reminisces about the smell of steel railings in a bus on the conductor's hand in her book 'god of small things', it came as such a fresh insight to me, i was bowled over by the genius of the writer. with the western onslaught, why has india managed its survival of its societal memories, whereas th...