Friday, July 31, 2009

The Word

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Thursday, July 23, 2009

Chasing The Monsoon (Part II)

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Under a wan and lukewarm morning sun Kolkata's 270 grimy square miles of living space looked cleansed, polished and refreshed. It was as if the city had gone to the barbers and had a facial. It's pored cleansed and breathing. The Monsoon rains had sluiced the streets, washed away the grime on the walls, and swept away (albeit temporarily) the grubby pavement dwellers. Suddenly flashes of greenery; previously begrimed in a thick coat of Kolkata dust, were springing up everywhere. Green shoots and pulsing flowers quivered bravely under dark-grey skies, their struggling stalks squinting through the cracks on the roads and pavements. Nature was reclaiming what was rightfully hers. The city now sparkled as if brand new; a veritable garden city I spied from atop the rooftops. A far cry from the 'surfeited muck-heap' that Rudyard Kipling had described. But as I walked through the centre; following the receding flood waters, the old Kolkata began to reassert itself again. Traffic lights had broken down, straggling gangs of pavement dwellers and gaunt cattle appeared looking dazed under the sun (as if they'd been hiding underground).

The people in Kolkata are different to the other people I'd seen in India. There is a gaiety about them, as though teetering on the edge of the apocalypse, they want to squeeze as much out of a single day as possible. Living on a day to day basis does that to people. Tomorrow is far too distant to worry about today. But with this helpless poverty comes another feeling which I was beginning to imagine. A feeling I had identified and caught and was now grappling with in my mind: relief. A relief that comes from the realisation that you have reached rock-bottom. That you are scraping the very bottom, nay the very dredges of the world's barrel, and yet here you are - still alive! It ain't so bad after all - and what's more: you can take it. Life is distilled. It is reduced simply to a matter of survival. One is no longer concerned with the accoutrements of civilisation and its lofty ideals such as education, work, promotion, envy, fashion, the rat-race, love and books. All of life, your thoughts and dreams and aspirations are condensed into a little space the size of your fist: your stomach. Life is reduced to your stomach and its satiation. It is then, and only then, that one realises what it really means to be human. And this realisaton, as the Noble Prizewinner Albert Camus once remarked, underlies its comedic Monty Pythonesque absurdity. Kolkata is the earthly incarnation of the Myth of Sisyphus. Albert Camus, if he'd ever visited, would have loved it. Just like I do. So strong is the city's hold on me, so bewitching the curse, that even in my dreams I feel the urge to hug the citizens that prowl the streets. To grab their heads and kiss them full and say in a soothing voice: 'It is ok. It will be fine' - and then they shake their ravaged faces happy in the thought that somebody has noticed. There is comfort to be had in knowing that your suffering has been acknowledged. There is nothing worse than it being swallowed whole by times maw. I have suffered but it makes me feel better that you have seen it. And in a way this writing and fotografing, amongst many things, is a living-epitaph. An evolving organic monument, to the many faces; happy and sad, of the human condition.



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Sunday, July 19, 2009

Chasing The Monsoon

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At 5.50pm, announced by deafening thunder-claps, the Monsoon finally rode into Cochin. Like those Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns with the 'man with no name' it blew the trees into a frenzy; it lashed down in a hanging curtain of mist as opaque as the hill fog of Darjeeling. In the coffee shop the waiters rushed to the windows, clapping and yelling and laughing, their customers forgotten amidst the hoo-haa. One waiter, emerging from the kitchen, glimpsed the magniloquent spectacle outside, and slamming his coffee-pot down onto the table, joined in the jubilation crying 'Ho! Ho! Ho!'

Women with bright sari's jiggy in the rain with a look of sublime happiness on their faces. The school children are dispatched home early. They carry the smiles of children who know school will be closed for the remainder of the week. Their smiles reach up to the skies, snatching at the rain, grasping at the wind, pulling it down with invisible ropes; beckoning the billows that skud in from the sea. The sea looks awesome; framed by a dark mass of purple cloud it seethes as if a boiling cauldron. I watch the darkness as it nears; the roar is deafening as the rain pelts the tin roof. I can barely hear my thoughts. I am happy. Back in the coffee shop there's a bustle of mops, buckets, plastic sheeting and old bedspreads. These are tucked into the gaps between the windows to stop them from leaking. It feels as if I am onboard a foundering ship; with the sea leaking in. Water is now lapping my slippers. I throw away my haughty self and help the waiters to seal off the problem areas. A wave of good-natured joviality washes over us as we work together to keep the coffee-shop afloat. Later we enjoy a drink on the house. We are saved.


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Saturday, July 18, 2009

Currently absorbed in: William Blake

Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And water’d heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?

Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

William Blake (1757–1827)



Poem animation...





Poem explanation...





Contemporary poem rendition...



'Tiger in the night' (Katie Melua)

You are the tiger burning bright
Deep in the forest of my night
You are the one who keeps me strong in this world

You sleep by the silent cooling streams
Down in the darkness of my dreams
All of my life I never knew
You were the dream I'd see come true
You are the tiger burning bright

I was the one who looked so hard I could not see.
Now I could never live without the love you give to me.

I lived like a wild and lonely soul,
Lost in a dream beyond control.
You were the one who brought me home down to earth.

For you are the tiger burning bright
Deep in the forest of my night
All of my life I never knew
You were the dream I'd see come true
You are the tiger burning bright

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Sunday, July 12, 2009

The Pilgrim

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'On the edge of the desert; in the gap between sun and iris, I fell through. She caught me between wing-tips and then she said to me (in an almost whisper): 'Go fly'. So I flew. I miss her always'

(A poet)


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'Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the world...and I saw, what many men have dreamed they saw'

(Moby-Dick or, The Whale)



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'You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No Sir, when a man is tired of London he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford'

(Samuel Johnson)



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'
When the pilgrim is done with travelling; when he returns home from his voyagings with staff in hand and soles toughened; he realises that he has travelled no great distance at all - merely from himself to himself'

(Wasim Shafi - Filosopher, Fotografer, Professeur, Accountant, Pilgrim)


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Currently watching...The Black Album (A new play by Haneif Kureishi)


Saturday, July 04, 2009

Unguarded Moments

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