...And the type writer was bare and broken!
After that ?
I could see him, looking at her, from the corner of the stretched room with a view :
"Loneliness is often so tidy and neatly arranged in a relationship that any other sound of foot steps, seems like a giant bear eating the swimming salmons, trying to escape ..."
Bombay you will be told that the only Indian word as a city is understood in the West. Other Indian metropolises like Calcutta, Madras and Delhi are like oversized villages.
It is true that Bombay has many more high-rise buildings than any other Indian city: when you approach it by the sea it looks like a miniature New York.
It has other things to justify its city status: it is congested, it has traffic jams at all hours of the day, it is highly polluted and many parts of it stink.
But mostly what makes Bombay stand apart is its huge swarms of yellows bellying horns and invocating the aroma of the Arabian Tales...
"No man at all can be living forever, and we must be satisfied" - Maurya, Riders To The Sea.
I don't think there's anything on this planet that more trumpets life that the sunflower. For me that's because of the reason behind its name.Not because it looks like the sun but because it follows the sun.
During the course of the day, the head tracks the journey of the sun across the sky and help the metaphorphosis coming true.
A metamorphosis of a young washerman becoming a Sunflower!
The thing about Bombay or Mumbai is you go five yards and all of human existence is revealed. It's an incredible cavalcade of life, and I love that.
I love that scent of buzzing human movements and it so much reminds me of the Bees. I can fairly imagine Bombay as The Queen and us acting like bees tending the time as a beehive. We are all moving and at times this movement becomes the metaphor of Stillness.
And maybe if you're staying in Bombay you would have observed that how the city has beautifully carved herself into frames. Frames of life! A life full of renewed life force extinguishing every night and springing up yet again each morning.
Such display of continuous deaths and births are rarely seen in any cities I have ever lived in. Maybe Newyork is such I am being told. But I am sure the waves and textures of human colours are unmatched and unique from everywhere.
And the most remarkable part is the huge mellowed heart of the city.She places the grotesque and the ugly next to the refined and subtle and yet it creates a Rhythm. Her indomitable spirit and desire to exist supercedes every lil' imperfections she carries.
Dhobi Ghat (Mahalaxmi Dhobi Ghat) is a well known open air laundromat in Mumbai, India.The washers, locally known as Dhobis, work in the open to wash the clothes from Mumbai's hotels and hospitals.
I was always fascinated with the stories of Dhobi Ghat and more so seeing the film with the same title.
It was just 6.30 am in the morning and the scent of Dhobi Ghat with chlorine, dim light, half clad men beating the clothes in a rhythm with splashes of water wrenching the blue's out, was enough to produce a music that could only match with Billy Joel in his saxophone.
I was standing there quietly and watching the clock taking me back to somewhere in between the 60's to 70's.There was this humming sound of the drier, in distant, giving it a feeling of Time Machine. I could feel some curious eyes trying to catch my glance but they were too busy to clean all the mirths of the city than watching me through my lens.
I could see tons of shirts and trousers shedding their blackness and getting whiter. I was thinking how men have learnt to clean the dirts and whiten their lives at the expense of other fellow men.
I was wondering where do all these dirts that are getting cleaned travels to? Does these travels to the inside, within the darkest corners of the city ? How will the city clean itself?
I think too much! Let me watch the Blue's for now...
"La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas."
("The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.")
- Charles Baudelaire.
Cities were always like people, showing their varying personalities to the traveler. Depending on the city and on the traveler, there might begin a mutual love, or dislike, friendship, or enmity.
Where one city will rise a certain individual to glory, it will destroy another who is not suited to its personality. Only through travel can we know where we belong or not, where we are loved and where we are rejected.
नमस्तेशरण्येशिवेसानुकम्पे,
नमस्तेजगद्व्यापिकेविश्वरूपे।
नमस्तेजगद्वन्द्यपादारविन्दे,
नमस्तेजगत्तारिणित्राहिदुर्गे॥१॥
"She the refuge, peaceful and merciful undoubtedly,
She pervades over all, is universal form certainly,
Her lotus feet worshipped by universe – all Glory,
On your appeal “Protect me Durga” saves entirely..."
Durga,The Goddess, epitomises the strength of a Woman and the one who saves the Humanity from all the crimes and savages and restores peace and order in the Universal being of Life.
And ironic is the fact that our Goddess whom we celebrate is now in a perennial threat.Threat of existence! From the very same society and civilisation whom She had been urged and prayed to protect.
The dichotomy of the society is that it celebrates Her as a Supreme Celestial Being and on the other hand kills Her human form in the foetus.Rape Her dignity.Plunder Her as a loot.
When will the Durgas breathing alive will be celebrated as Women and not as Celestial Being ? When will we stop violence against them ? When will we start accepting Them as our Comrade at Arms and give back their dues ?
Durgas don't need our patronage and prayers.They need us to live them alone and decide their own destiny. And when we learn to do that I am sure the celebrations will begin and we as a Human race will have another chance to exist...
The most beautiful and ugly journeys do not ends.They continue much after you think, you're through.
It's just like love. Ceaseless!
It's also like a fly. Buzzing!
So where to begin this story ? Okay let's begin with the shadows I was carrying all through this journey until I was exhausted and had no where to hide.
Shadows of those forlorn untidy unkept letters I had written in love. At least I took it as love. I was so sure of it that I was already designing the new house in my drawing book. I was writing off all my past debts of memories.
Until one evening I know that I was always alone and all through I was talking to those beautiful shadows in my dreams.
And then I had no where to go. The walls were becoming unbearable with its contempt .The bed was agonisingly white and pale. Everyone started behaving strangely as if it was only my fault to imagine that I was in love.
And I ran. Ran away as far as possible until I reached in front of the flowing Alakananda river and the tall, rather very tall Himalayas.
And then ? Blame Kafka for writing "Metamorphosis".
What makes me Travel? What do I try to see when i Travel? These are all the questions often asked in so many ways and in so many manners to me.
I usually don't like to answer them. I try to show what I see and how I feel but at times I realize that my silence through which I try to speak is half understood.
I travel to see me. Peculiar right? Indeed I often find myself boring and unintelligent in front of a well manicured mirrors in my home. They usually go on chattering the same verbs.
And then a fresh round of air makes me freer from my growing stomach and receding hairline. I travel to find me growing into an exciting homosapien, ignorant to all the best possible presets being applied on my selfies in Instagram.
I become freer from my narcissus tendencies and start looking around for a story. For a story I am unaware of. For a story I will never have to pay a price. For a story that will not yell back at me.
I travel to get soaked in rains, dusted in the muddy air and watch the humans moving endlessly ( at least they would like to believe that ) within the ceaseless singularity of Time.
I Travel to see a drama that will never happen. A piece of history which is so insignificant that none will care for. Peacefully watching the cat crossing the windows, a man chewing the tobacco as if having a sex, an old colonial story of the trams coming to a halt.
Talking about that did I mention that over here in this image I saw General Dyer crying his heart out to this native Indian man and complaining how he will miss riding the Trams!
Yes the bells are ringing. Go and have a ride on these soon to be extinct species of transport from The City of Joy - Calcutta.
Oh, do let me know if Doninique La Pierre would shed some tears hearing the news...
You asked me once - Do I love talking to you ? Yes!I love to talk to you in my own silence and burn within, in an unknown purifying desire.
I keep listening to your deep warm raven like eyes. And as I immerse in your fairy tales, I go down deeper. Deeper from where there's no return.
A sort of Fantasy.Fantasy of being with you in silence and getting lost in your waves of touches....
I fear if I telephone you and listen to your voice, then I might be losing you and your fantasy and come back to a reality - a reality that you're lost and gone!
By the way do you remember the Folk Tales we used to read, during those wet, lusty rains?
"You’ve mentioned a couple of times that Italo Calvino is one of your most beloved writers. In The Adventure of a Photographer, the main character says that ‘in order to really live, you must photograph as much as you can… you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity, the second to madness’. Do you think photography is inherently futile?"
Dayanita Singh - That’s a beautiful quote, but I think it only makes sense if you think of photography as an end in itself. But if you’re not interested in photography as pure documentation, it frees you to do so much more. My work, Time Measures, is titled after the name of one of Sebald’s poems.
I photographed these bundles of documents wrapped in fabric that I found in an archive in India. The viewer never finds out what the documents are or what they look like, and I never did unwrap them either.Does this then mean that the photographs are pointless?
Whenever people ask me how to become a good photographer, I tell them to read, jump into the world of literature. I hand them a copy of Austerlitz by Sebald, and tell them to come back to me when they’re done with it. Nobody ever comes back to me because that’s not the kind of photography they want to do.
They’re interested in instant gratification, going around with their big cameras, snapping photographs quickly without thinking. Can we raise the bar higher?
- An excerpt from an interview of famed Photographer Dayanita Singh with Apollo Magazine.
"She stretched out against the wall and kissed it. "Glad to see you, too," she whispered, and pressed her cheek against the old rough surface. It almost felt like it hugged her back.
"Dude, it's a house," I said from behind her. "Hug somebody who cares..."
(Ukhimath, Uttarakhand)
"I didn't know who He was or what He was until I saw him transformed into a Blue Butterfly and coming out from one of those windows.
Was there any proof to the lies ? Well the Blue's of one of those windows lying quite and strange brings a certain amount of truth to an otherwise abandoned tales of Metamorphosis..."
