Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Himalayan Travels

8 Days, 1060 kms and more (Delhi -Chandigarh - Shimla - Kaza - Manali -Chandigarh - Delhi), HRTC buses on high mountain roads, Kunzum La (4551 ms), Kaza (3565 ms), Rohtang La (3820 ms), Dhankar (3750 ms). Bitter winter weather, moonscape, stars on the horizon, crescent moon sighting at 1 p.m. (post meridian, yes!) over Spiti River.

This is the worst withdrawal I have ever suffered. Hope to put up the travelogue soon.

                                                          Click on the image for details

Sunday, September 26, 2010

Impressions

The impressionists were a group of French painters largely beginning to gain prominence around the late 19th century. Led by Monet who had had enough of paintings of royalty. The funny kind of self portraits, Louis XIV type. Painting, he said, should represent what the human eye sees. And he pursued, what I believe, a scientific approach (as scientific as you could get in the late 19th century). He observed that what the human eye sees when it sees a field of grass is not essentially each blade of grass and it's shade in every detail. Rather, what it sees, would be blobs of colours yellows, greens, dark greens, whites, blacks juxtaposed next to each other in a certain pattern, which when seen from a distance mixed optically to form the composite picture of the field of grass. To Monet, the quest was to represent this pattern of distinct colours without mixing them, so that once you saw the composite mixture your eyes would see as if seeing real life. And saying this, he set off in the singular most significant quest in his life. To paint in a way that would replicate what the eye sees. He sat entire days, waking up only only to stare at a building or whatever the subject was to try and understand how light and shadow lent the colours various shades. How each shade interacted with each other creating the impression the eye saw. To get underneath what the human eye saw and took for granted every living moment. And this is the way he painted!

Rock Arch West of Etretat
Guess what the real thing looks like?


Now, here are a couple of mental exercises before you click on the pictures to see the larger versions. Try and list mentally the colours you would have on the rock and the water from the picture. Then take a look at the painting (click on it to view the large version) and have a look at the colours used. Also, notice how the colours when applied on the canvas are not mixed. They don't blend into each other. No matter how unlikely the colour, they're all existing juxtaposed next to each other unmixed.

Monet was this huge guy. The kind who would walk into to a room and the centre of gravity would shift towards him. Just as he envisioned this new way of painting, so did he influence a whole lot of other guys. And so grew the impressionist movement where a lot of these painters met up at a cafe near Monet's studio in France, discussed techniques and styles and developed impressionism further.

One person of course who stood out the most, whose name is possibly synonymous with art, is Van Gogh. Van Gogh's genius lay, according to my limited explorations of this whole new hobby, in his intuitive understanding of colour relationships. His brilliance absolutely is from the way Starry Night on the Rhone




 just lights up from the inside. There's a brightness from the stars, from the lights by the river that seem to come out of the painting and fall onto you! There are other similar paintings; The CafĂ© Terrace on the Place du Forum, Arles, at Night, the very famous Starry Night. In a letter to his brother Theo, Van Gogh mentions how it is wondrous to him that the night can be painted without any black colour. He refers to the night outside the Cafe at Place du Forum, Arles. And if you check out the painting and the others, it indeed lacks use of black almost completely. In fact I even came upon a paper that concludes that Van Gogh's style, the swirls and spirals coupled with the use of luminosity actually convey a feeling of motion to the viewer!Of course the fact that he suffered deeply in his last years and finally committed suicide may add to his legacy. But it surely can never take away from the genius he was.

What's most interesting is the sudden new perspective pursuing/developing something like this can give you. And it's amazing to realize that whatever we see everyday could have so many aspects to it. For starters, the next time you step out of your office or home and look at the sky or some trees in the sunlight try and count the number of distinct colours you see.

Sunday, September 19, 2010

There's been a lot to write. Especially with so much of painting happening all around. I have kicked Van Gogh out of my display pic. to put in one of my own. But I'm in more than cursory appreciation of Monet and the entire group of impressionists. Creating something with your own hands in totality is a very rare occurrence of late. I mean yes, if you write something that's completely yours, then that's one of the things; else there's hardly anything that we do that could count as making something with your own hands. It's definitely been something that gives me reason to be pleased with self.

Sunday, September 12, 2010

“Make a list. Cross it off. Build a fort. Read a magazine. Turn off the tv. Make some coffee. Smell the flowers. Take a day off. Take two days off. Take a week off. Go outside. Buy a plane ticket. Leave the country. Fall in love. Wear something new. Wear nothing. Camp a mountain. Swim with the fish. Paint a picture. Paint yourself. Listen to new music. Listen to old music. Play music. Take a walk. Make a new friend. Reconnect with old friends. Write people letters. Send the letters. Tell the truth. Grow your own fruit. Look at the stars. Breathe in. Breathe out.

Now, remember this moment.”
- Make a list. Cross it…from Goodmorning & Goodnight by Basheer


Have always crossed every list I've made. Stopped making them anymore. Never tried building a fort. Read a magazine. Tv's been turned off for years now. Can't make coffee. Haven't smelled flowers in a long time! Day offs - NA. Bought plane tickets. Flew off the mainland, though not to a different country. Fallen and bruised a couple of times. Need to buy new clothes! Check. Still needs to be done. Swam with fish in the Indian Ocean (While snorkeling in the Andamans a really curious bunch of butterfly fish would keep staring back at me after fluttering off into the distance to check if I was still there.) Have been painting non stop for the past 3 days. I'm too complicated to be done justice on canvas. Have been listening to a lot of Indie music of late, love most of it! Old music: refer to previous post. Need to find my harmonica. Missed out on football today :( , prefer that more to walks. New friends; that's not happened in a long time now. Reconnected with a few, yes. Does writing loong emails count? Try to, most of the times. Planted a mango tree 15 years ago, should have borne a lot of fruit. Stare at them very often. Check. Check.

Now I won't forget this in a long time!

You should do this exercise mentally if not blog it.


Doesn't get better than this. Pure vintage U2. This isn't just blast from the past, it's gas attack; central nervous system under threat!

Nothing better to do on a Sunday than dig up old stuff on your computer and look back at a much younger picture of you.

a) First job blues.
b) Quitting.
c) Republic day in college :-D.
d) Boredom in office can be turned into a blogpost. (copied from my office note book I diligently used during my internship)
e) Leaving home for the first time.

It's amazing how this blog captures so much of my past. I can remember the days, images briefly. Sometimes the feelings of anticipation, elation, worry attach themselves to the images too. Even the writing... I used to tinker with multiple backgrounds. Once I had this NatGeo photo of rains in the savannah; that's the one I remember most prominently. So there are posts with horrid font colours since the background wouldn't contrast with the white font colour it is now. There are posts with random capitalisations, drunken punctuation etc. etc.

It's scary to think I've considered deleting this site a few times already!

Saturday, September 11, 2010

Lingshan

I struggled with this book through 4 years of college. Each year I stopped at a different page. Each year I tried again. I never went past a quarter of the book. There was no defined storyline. No characters to follow. But there were passages that flourished dazzlingly. The pictures of primitive metasequoia forests, giant panda reserves and ancient civilisations on the banks of the Yangtze shone through with a sunlit brilliance.

Eight years have passed since I had this book in my hands for the first time. And now reading it again after so many years the passages wrap around me like mist in an alpine forest. Passages I had forgotten seem to surround me and cloud any clarity I had managed to achieve. There are passages that capture the essence of some of the most intense parts of my life. Reading the book is like revisiting familiar parts of a dimly lit street where every observation is keenly etched in the poor light.

"But why have I come to this mountain? Is it to experience life in a scientific research camp such as this? What does this sort of experience mean to me? If it's just to get away from the problems I was experiencing, there are easier ways. Then maybe it's to find another sort of life. To leave far behind the unbearable perplexing world of human beings. If I'm trying to be a recluse why do I need to interact with other people? Not knowing what one is looking for is pure agony. Too much analytical thinking, too much logic, too many meanings! Life has no logic, so why does there have to be logic to explain what it means.? Also, what is logic? I think I need to break away from analytical thinking, this is the cause of all my anxieties."

- Gao Xingjiang, Soul Mountain

I am inspired in spurts to cover various passages from the book in multiple posts. Then gradually that inspiration ebbs and flows. Nothing is constant with me and that's given me more than my shares of problems. Maybe I will come around to it gradually.

Wednesday, September 08, 2010

It's evening now and dusk advances faster than my clock. I sit in an empty room, without any furniture, whitewashed walls. The single window opens to a tree whose branches silhouette against the darkening sky. I hear crows cawing as they settle in for the night. I'm all ears today. I have a lot to say but I'd rather listen to you tonight. If you were willing to speak, I'd love you to fill me on what you've been up to. Of how much you hate living here. Of how much you want to quit. Of your stupid boss and barely bearable colleagues. Of how badly you want to be home. Of...

My tales are of dark green forests and the emerald green sea. Of colours and sounds far removed from after office traffic snarls. Of another world... But my stories will wait for another day. Today, I only hope to listen.

Wednesday, September 01, 2010

My rickshaw came to a halt on a mound; the rain had intensified doubly and I briefly considered waiting for a bit. I'd paid a hundred rupees to get here, it would be stupid if I sat inside waiting for the rain to subside I thought to myself. I was quite wet in any case from the drift getting in through the sides of the rickshaw. I stepped out of the rickshaw. The view in front of me hit me like the final movement of the crashing drums in Carl Orff's O Fortuna.

Flat empty beach stretched for kilometers on both sides of me. A deserted lighthouse stood on my right. Skeletal remains of the compound wall barely stood upright around the place. The sky was thick and ashen. My view faded into the torrential downpour in the distance and a raging wind blasted across the utterly desolate beach. The sea churned as if a thousand rivers had emptied into it. And water fell out of the sky in extreme malice and spite.

I walked up to the edge of the water and looked around me. I was the single living being in this vast flat space in the middle of a raging storm. The wind made it difficult to stand straight and the rain stung my skin; water got into my eyes. I stood shivering violently in the cold; in awe and in fear. I looked searchingly to the ends of the beach hoping to spot someone, someone else who could see what I was seeing, someone else who would, like me, remember this day at the beach forever. There was no one of course and somehow that completed the experience. It was mine to keep, in the purest form. Unmixed by any other opinion. 

It's been over a month now since I visited Somnath and some of the Kathiawar Peninsula. And even though I don't have a camera that documented every moment of my solo trip, it'll be difficult forgetting any of it.

I distinctly remember preferring mountains to beaches when I was younger. Of course, that became invalid around 4 years back when I went to Leh. But over the last couple of years all my trips have been to beaches and I''ve enjoyed each one of them thoroughly. In 24 hours I will be at the place below and I hope it'll be the best yet!


                                                           Photo Credits: Milam Saxena

Saturday, August 28, 2010

Friends At Last


Music: Bickram Ghosh, OST Little Zizou, Friends at Last

One of those tunes that can pop back into your head after months and suprise you completely. From the movie Little Zizou. I saw this movie many months back and it still feels like eating your most sinfully favourite dessert alone. Absolutely love the lilting tune.

There's no stopping the heart once Dilshad Patel comes on screen... and Ataxerxes Khodaiji... I want a name like that!

The song's picturised beautifully in the beach town of Udvada where Xerxes and Iliana finally become friends and seal it with a mudfight on the beach. The song takes off with these two kids running amok in the muck and the setting sun in the background.


Still have to fulfill the promise I'd made myself years back; Still have to visit Udvada. I used to be fascinated with Parsis and still look curiously into Cusrow Baug everytime I pass the place on the way to Theo's.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Jump Little Children - Mexico

Song in my head. On infinite loop.

Pardon the horribile colour scheme. I really am awful at tinkering with html code.  NOT!

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Oil on canvas

I guess I can say with some surety now, me and oil paintings, we'll go the distance. After the catastrophe that was my first oil on canvas the second has turned out to be rather presentable. Hopefully the subsequent ones shall raise or meet the bar or even if the bar tanks, it won't be very difficult to ignore it.

Oil on canvas seems to be a relatively easy medium as you can keep working on the same piece over and over again for a couple of days since one painting could take over a month to dry completely. So a painting's never really lost as long as you keep working on it. Of course the flip side is one could worsen it further with contrary intentions. The most amazing thing about the medium is the flexibility of being able to add layers on layers and therefore adding multiple dimensions to a painting. Once someone is a little adept, painting really is SO much about a painter's point of view, a personal interpretation of the subject.

I think it satisfies my inner being, this deeply philosophical, extremely serious, bearded dude in constant need for complexity. But it's nice to have a potential new hobby. And that too a rather fancy sounding one.

Do look up Leonid Afremov to see what force is required to turn a dreamy vegetable like me to go and buy art supplies and finally get down to painting.

Sunday, August 01, 2010

Weekend

I stopped writing about my daily life quite a while back on this blog. Not maybe cause they ceased to be significant. Just that at some point I didn't want to do it anymore. Also, the assumption that people reading it would be interested about my mediocre existence was rather ambitous for my abilities. But again, the argument against it is that we all live interesting lives or atleast we like to interpret it like that. Here's a beautiful explanation of this phenomenon. Anyways, I'll stop being boring (hoping of course there are people reading this to be bored, but even if I'm addressing an empty room they do say that walls have ears!).

I think I MUST put on record my day since yesterday evening. Hopefully many years down the line I'll look back at this post and remember this day and it'll make me happy.

Late night bike ride through old city. Getting wet in the rain. Eating the most amazing club sandwich and drinking hot chocolate after being drenched, at a place by the banks of the river in the old city. Sitting up the whole night listening endlessly to Colin Hay and pouring myself generous amounts of Vodka distilled from fine French grapes. Deciding on a whim to drive off to Thol Lake at the break of dawn. Hitting the road; sunrise on the way to Thol in between two villages on a beautiful road flanked by the darkest green vegetation and a horizon fringed by dark misty clouds. Sitting by the huge lake looking out at the distant islands and the flocks of birds flying to and from them. Surrounded by birdsong for two hours straight hours, not a single human voice, the sun rising and glinting off the lake trying to make the perfect calendar picture; best Sunday morning ever! Return, sleep like a log. Wake up in the afternoon to find that the skies have darkened and are darkening still, like a director building suspense and dimming the lights on screen. My nerves are taut with anticipation; I cannot wait any longer to see how violent this downpour is going to be. And then it breaks, as the general sounds the horn I can hear the leaves rattle from far as the army advances in fury! Within seconds the rain is outside my balcony in a huge roar. Thick fat drops drown everything and all I can hear is the gushing sound of torrential rain.

I’m hungry and I order a pizza. I put on an old Woody Allen movie and wait for my pizza to come. But I can’t put my mind to the movie entirely; the rain draws me out constantly. I’m caught by a scene in the movie, where Woody Allen who fancies Jenny Nichols suggests they sit and watch Singing in The Rain and order food in. As the camera shows both of them watching the movie and eating, this song starts playing! Suddenly I’m gripped with this urge to drive out in the pouring rain. I finish my pizza and drive off. The roads outside are flooded, water flowing from one side to the other. I drive off into the university area. It’s beautiful, this part, since there are hardly any vehicles that come here. The road is flanked by the university grounds stretching almost to the horizon on both sides and dotted with shrubs and trees. As the sun sets over the grounds in the west I recall having googled the time for sunrise almost 12 hours previously.

I return to my room. Soaked to the bone, cold and shivering!

Monday, July 26, 2010

There's a certain bluesy tune to the rainfall outside my balcony today. It's been an incessant flow, making me feel like I'm living next to a mountain river. Like the Beas that flowed below the hotel I was staying at in Manali. I remember the view from the room: looking out into the upper valley, a forest of dark green pine trees and grey cloud capped mountains.
..................................................

It's been speeding and slowing at will, the rain. Like a whimsical child playing with her imaginary friends, talking to herself. And I wish it poured and poured and poured more. Like it would flood and everything would get washed away. Washed clean of the tiniest speck of dust and purged of every memory of the past. And the next day would bring only the freshest, most thoroughly well scrubbed world of new possibilities.

Friday, July 09, 2010

Listening to Sain Zahoor sing Aik Alif on loop for the past hour I think. Reminds me of last year and the feelings associated with these songs. Almost like being washed up on shore by tidal wave, in a mixture of helplessness and awe that's just right.

An extract from Rumi's Masnavi.

Mathnawi VI: 2955-2962

The spirit is like an ant, and the body like a grain of wheat
which the ant carries to and fro continually.
The ant knows that the grains of which it has taken charge
will change and become assimilated.
One ant picks up a grain of barley on the road;
another ant picks up a grain of wheat and runs away.
The barley doesn't hurry to the wheat,
but the ant comes to the ant, yes it does.
The going of the barley to the wheat is merely consequential:
it's the ant that returns to its own kind.
Don't say, "Why did the wheat go to the barley?"
Fix your eye on the holder, not on that which is held.
As when a black ant moves along on a black felt cloth:
the ant is hidden from view; only the grain is visible on its way.
But Reason says: "Look well to your eye:
when does a grain ever move along without a carrier?"

"Rumi: Jewels of Remembrance"
Camille and Kabir Helminski
Threshold Books, 1996

Sunday, July 04, 2010

"In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life. An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping things across the plains - flattening everything in its path, tossing things up in the air, ripping them to shreds, cutting them to bits. The tornado's intensity doesn't abate for a second as it blasts across the ocean, laying waste to Angkor Wat, incinerating an Indian jungle, tigers and everything, transforming itself into a Persian desert sandstorm, burying an exotic fortress under a sea of sand."

- H. Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

Sometimes I get the feeling maybe I'm reading too much into this guy. Maybe he's good but not as good as I think he is. Maybe he's warped my brain in someway, stolen it without me knowing and kept it in some gelatinous blue liquid in an underground lab he has in his basement. Experimenting with it, transferring whatever he wants me to think into it. And thus impairing completely my ability to judge anything fairly, enslaving me to every word he puts on paper. If the book I pick up starts like this, I don't mind being held hostage thus. I don't know if I should stop with him already.
I'm left behind as a residue, of a time that's long forgotten. No one here knows me anymore, all who knew me are long gone. A relic hoping to find a place in the sun that will rise in a few hours. I can do with the shade, reflected light is enough for my depleting appetite. In an attempt to catch attention I know I'll make a fool of myself. Like the court jester sentenced to the gallows for his below average attempts at humour, I know that'll be my destiny. Unlike any other, my road is unmapped and mine only.

Thursday, July 01, 2010

A fruitless attempt...

I have been reading Bukowski for the past hour and half. Drinking the wine left over from last winter and smoking the last couple of cigarettes of the night. And I don't know where this will lead me. I started out with a note to you, which I didn't have the courage to finish. I didn't have the courage to tell you why I chose the ways I did. And yet I know I'll regret this the next morning like the many things regretted on a drunken nights excuse. I'm hoping to find songs and sounds that fit seamlesslely into the night. Of confused emotions in conflict with the rational world I will wake up in. Finding passions that I had thought were shipwrecked in the middle of the great ocean, in complete isolation, in absolute lonliness, feelings from a body that's been dead for years; Is magical. Like the card trickster guessing the cards the audience were thinking of. And the surprise that spread across the hall of admirers. It's more than just that actually, everyone knows it's a trick at the end of the day. Unlike a child whose genuine amazement has beset me too. I sit partly inebriated, stunned and wonder by myself; how this dead body of mine was awakened by your coming.

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Banalata Sen


At the end of all the days, dusk comes like the sound of dew;
The kite wipes off the scent of sunlight from its wings.
The earth’s colours all quenched, the manuscript prepares
To tell its stories, lit by firefly gleams.
All the birds come home, all the rivers - all life’s trade ends.
Only the dark abides; and, to sit face to face, Banalata Sen.

(Chaudhuri 1998)


Possibly the only lines that could emote the feelings today. Though sadly, the best is lost in translation.

Friday, May 14, 2010

The week has just slipped through the sink hole in the washroom basin. Washed down along with the soap water, the alcohol tinted blurry nights, office-day-morning headaches and excessively humid Bombay days.

Suddenly, even though it's a Friday evening and everyone in office is running home dressing up and going out; I'll sit in, waiting for night to fall and drive my way back to a quiet night home.

Maybe you grow tired of an expectation filled Friday evening in office, the evening that'll end in an alcohol induced stupor, that'll make you numb to everything that just drained into the sinkhole. That's a good thing because it saves you money. Money is an easy excuse too, a nice cover. But the repetitive cycle that is a week, the office centric carousel that starts each Monday and ends on a Friday can take enough from you to give back very little. And that's when your mind wanders, is the weekend that excuse you really need for attending the weekly circus.

Friday, March 19, 2010

Colin Hay after ages!

After killing the day in my room, trapping it inside this little coop I call home, getting it's throat and strangling it until it ran out of breath, I got up and went outside. It was dark and I paused to consider the transpiring of the day. The morning was already a faded memory. I couldn't remember anything in sequence; everything was isolated and broken and I couldn't find the sequence of events. It had been just another day in a whole blob of indistinguishable, sticky summer days. A cobwebby something in my mind put a, well, cobweb over my thoughts and I needed to clean up and clear my head. Entering the shower, I washed and scrubbed myself thoroughly. The last thing I wanted was obvious traces of murder on my self. About half an hour later I felt clean enough to step out. Walking to my room I contemplated if I should feel guilty about what I had done. But then my mind quickly rationalised that it was best to not to wallow and extend the misery by feeling bad about what I had done.

I stepped inside my room and turned up the music. I tried to focus my mind on something beautiful, something that is the exact opposite of an oppressive single room, an expansive blue sky maybe? I needed happy memories. Immediately images of the sea flooded my mind. I could see the bluest of blue skies, bright sunshine, smell the salty air and hear waves crashing on the beach. I could hear Colin Hay sing about a beautiful world and swimming in the sea. To go out beyond the white breakers, the place to feel completely free. Sitting down to watch the sun sink in the ocean, and the sky holding back whatever bit of day it can.

I was feeling sufficiently better now. And it was time for dinner. Putting on my white tshirt I called A and started towards the mess. Walking past the little wooded area behind my building I sensed a bit of purpose in my walk. And finding that purpose lifted a huge weight off my shoulders. Like the oppressive heat of the day lifting with nightfall, it was easier to breathe again.

Tuesday, March 09, 2010

Wind Up Bird Chronicle

"All I could see were shaggy, grass-covered mounds stretching on and on, the unbroken horizon, and clouds floating in the sky. There was no way I could have any precise idea where on the map we were. All I could do was guess according to the amount of time we had been driving.

Sometimes, when one is moving silently through such an utterly desolate landscape, an overwhelming hallucination can make on feel that oneself, as in individual human being, is slowly becoming unravelled. The surrounding space is so vast that it becomes increasingly difficult to keep a balanced grip on one's own being. I wonder if I'm making myself clear. The mind swells out to fill the entire landscape, becoming so diffuse in the process that one loses the ability to keep it fastened to the physical self. That is what I experienced in the midst of the Mongolian steppe."

-H. Murakami.

A third reading in progress. Never ending love affair this.

Thursday, February 04, 2010

JDS went out, two days before I aged another year. It's almost fitting that I have R.E.M. playing loopy songs dragging me along with them. Stranded between two different feelings unable to be captured by either emotion, it's like losing ones way in the jungle acutely aware of being lost and yet not knowing if you want to find your way back.

I recently came back from a couple of games that become part of your permanent memory. Like the relay victory back in 11th, or the 100 ms. gold the same year at annual school sports. The two match winning goals are now a permanent imprint in memory.

After getting back though, the sense of euphoria disappeared suddenly; it got sucked into a hollow pit and left behind a huge vacumn that refused to budge despite my strongest efforts. I stared at the walls in my room for many days hoping they would magically turn into unicorns and make me go chasing. But walls don't become unicorns, which is why they are walls and unicorns are mythical. It was new, unexpected... why something I literally dreamt of doing turning into reality would feel so contrary to expectations.

Nevertheless with the music back on after a whole year of quiet, familiar ghosts visit again. And the fact that soon the place will empty out and there'll be no shadows to take shelter in, seeps in steadily through the inadequately waterproofed roof and floods everything in my room.