Ya Right !

The precious pearls rolled down her cheeks. As she wept, giving way to her pent up emotions, I thought- ‘he didn’t do the right thing.’ And there it was again…..back like a cyclic redundant error- the ‘Right’ thing!

Right….
a very interesting and versatile word. Its usage as a prefix and suffix is omnipresent and universally abused. We wait for the right person and right job; try to follow the rules right; use and abuse our rights; try to do the right thing in the right way at the right time; wait for the right season to bring out our quilts and right reason to join a revolution. We wait for the right pair of denims and shoes; wait for the nonexistent right to defeat the left in Bengal; the right moment to trip the shutter; the right age to vote, drink and have sex. We also wait for the authorities to take the right actions; fight with a fellow passenger to establish our birth-right over the window seat; ponder about the right way to kiss and wonder at times when the world looks blurred- if our optician got our power right!
In short- we have a right complex. It’s our moral irresponsibility.

The ‘Right’ related obsessive compulsive disorder is as unique as your nose or my bald pate. My cousin once asked his mom, ‘Now that I am in class six, is this the right age for me to use slangs?’A friend of mine with a habit of screwing up often complains, ‘But I tried to do the right thing this time!’ My dad it seems, is obsessed with trying to prove that he is right (and more importantly- that I am wrong). I wait for the right time to do things……(probably a side effect of my romance with the camera). My epitaph should ideally read- ‘And the right time came.’ My friend T, who’s totally in love with her boss, measures the right words for the sweet nothings she exchanges through sms. According to her, she fails miserably.

In Gregory Robert's Shantaram, we meet Abdel Kader Khan who does ‘the wrong things for the right reasons.’ After that introduction, probably for the first time in my life a lot of things fell into place. Morality as preached by the holy scriptures or our elders has a strange tendency to lose relevance in the real world. In antithesis, the words of the wily old don add meaning and purpose. The failure of the proposed morality probably stems from the fact that it sees life in two colors- black and white- Right or Wrong! However in reality, life is all about the multitude of greys. Choosing between right and wrong is easy. Picking the more right from the plethora of wrongs- now that’s the bitch.

As I sat there, trying to console her, I realized I was both sad and relieved. Sad because of the obvious reason…but relieved? Let’s face it, no matter whatever I said, I am human, I am imperfect….I was insecure. So when he bungled….was it too wrong for me to feel relieved? But I also did feel petty for feeling so relieved. And while the devil preached- ‘to hell with it, enjoy while it lasts’; the strange voice that we like to call conscience asked, ‘was that right?’

Photograph : Yours Truly

The Butterfly Effect

“It has been said that something as small as the flutter of a butterfly’s wing can ultimately cause a typhoon halfway around the word. –Chaos Theory“

So began the film.
The Butterfly Effect is a movie about a boy played by Ashton Kutcher, who suffers severe traumas while growing up. He blacks out, often at moments of high stress and people around him aren’t sure if he is lying. While fishing for answers to heal his emotional scars, he finds that when he reads from his journals, that he has been keeping throughout his adolescence, he travels back in time, and is able to essentially ‘correct’ parts of his past, thereby causing the blackouts he experienced as a child. However, as a consequence to his corrective choices, when he propagates back to the present: his alternate futures never remain same. His corrective actions influence the characters and they end up being different from where he had started- a hazardous side effect of time travel. No choice is the 'right' one.

Quite influenced by the film which marks a fitting end to my day, I googled up a little about The Effect. Beyond the mathematical psychobabble, what this lesser mortal could grasp in a nutshell is that it is a component of Chaos Theory and is all about the sensitive dependence on initial condition. It states that small variations in the initial condition of a dynamic system may produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system itself. Eg, a ball placed at the crest of a hill might roll into any of several valleys depending on slight differences in initial position.

This theory marks a very interesting departure from the prevalent notions of fate and fortune. Even if we consider the remotest possibility of knowing the future, the fact that we will change our present or near future decisions based on that knowledge to avoid say a problem will create a ripple in the continuum of time, whose magnitude will affect the future that could have been. Hence the only constant that still remains is change.

Today I was woken up by a phone call from this lady that I am quite fond of and developing a great liking for. She asked me to go through the horoscope for the day. Bleary eyed, I obliged. There it was on page 3 of a supplement, written by a tarot and coffee cup reader (whatever that is)!!! Her predictions for the lady were- “An issue concerning love may become a cause for concern as two people fight for your affection. You’ll have to let go of one for the other.” Ooops, I forgot to mention. She also has a second admirer who it seems grew confident enough about his feelings by the end of the day to inform the lady about the seriousness of his intent. It’s a tad interesting to note that I was the one who introduced them to each other. Now the tricky and difficult part…..the questions. For starters-

1. How different things would be if I hadn’t introduced them?
2. If she was absolutely sure about today’s predictions, how different her reactions would be?
3. Was the other guy influenced by the horoscope….influenced even a teeny weenie bit?
4. If the three of us absolutely believed in the prophesy, would we try to avoid the conflict? If so, how ?

Many more corollaries may follow, but answers to them will never be known with absolute certainty. We may speculate, but then they would be just that. And when I was almost tempted to think….I wish I never got them introduced….. the Chaos Theory kicked in. If it wasn’t him….it would be someone else….the space, time and characters may change but life doesn’t magically transform into a bed of roses. And probably this is what makes life worth living.

Image Courtesy :: Stumm47 from deviantart.com

On his birthday

Last Monday we celebrated garndpa's birthday. The patriarch turned 86 and seemed pleasantly surprised with the love and affection we showered on him. Hope we could show him the same respect and love all through the year. My cousin wrote a poem for him, which probably he liked the most. He is a poet and writer among several other things you see. While clicking, I hit on the idea of making a series on him. The lens sure lends some different perspective to the people we take for granted. Tagore was right, first capture the beauty in your own backyard before venturing far and wide.

Photograph: Yours Truly

Ex-(ample) !

Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness.
With these words the legendary Yousuf Karsh outlined a strange paradox - the equal importance of shadows and highlights in adding depth and dimension. Too much of one and you are at a risk of becoming too dark or too bland. We need the perfect balance. It’s this magic ratio that bewilders us with choices.
Life is all about choices. Having them, choosing them, living them or leaving them. Some choices like- whom to marry are big, while some like propensity for Calvin and Hobbes or Archies are even bigger. But comic-books or cuisines- the arbitrary constant that remains is the omnipresence of the fourth dimension- time. After a point of time, our present choices are condemned to the past and left to rot in the junkyard of retrospection. And we, their once doting owners, disown them, derogatorily labeling them as our ex-s.
Off late I have been encountering a lot of ex-s- of my friends and my own. Lemme start with my blasts from the past. Things you do and choices you make have a strange property of reappearing more frequently when they go sour. Take my choice of Vodka for instance. The virgin alcoholic started with White Mischief, graduated to Fuel and finally attained nirvana with Smirnoff. But in doing so, he condemned his pocket to some serious pinch and attracted the ire of lesser drinkers! He became the snob who snubbed the White. My second brush with an ex came in the form of an ex- gf (Girl friend for the lack of a better verbal substitute. We are still confused about what to call our old feelings- lost in the twilight of infatuation and attraction.) We got back in touch, smoothed out some old problems, created new ones and revived our amazing professional rapport. In short we became friends, or did we?
Algebra teaches us to consider X as the unknown. A + B = X. Friendship plus commitment equals love. Ok there are lotta defunct versions of that equation and none close to solving the riddle. But what none seem to care about is the possibility of friendship with an ex. While some like me live in the utopia of its possibility, others like my friends G and Max aint so sure. Is it possible that I, by virtue of my three ‘serious’ encounters, am better qualified to comment about it than my friends who work with the serious limitation of just one element in the sample space ? Or is it this single minded surgical focus that separates them from this carpet bombing Romeo? When push comes to shove and it’s time to move on, we deal with our past in different ways. How we do that is up to us- again a matter of choice. So I continue to be her blues manager and she continues to inspire me with her talent. But down the line we both know how incredibly similar we are….. and the thought of spending our lives with someone as imperfect as ourselves scares us. So we play Goldilocks and continue with our search, for the elusive ‘perfect' one.

Photograph : Your Truly

On Vices, Vodka and Vibes.....

Phew….what a relief ! It’s final. Thanks to the global financial meltdown, my first job will not be in the land of shifting sands, moustache and relics of royalty….It will rather be in the city I love so much and have grown to call my home. All this boils down to more savings, lesser responsibility, mum’s gastronomic delights and a new set of old friends.

My bustling city is a place over-populated by 13 million fascinating individuals with utter disdain for traffic rules, united by ubiquitous Bong-pride and a ‘genuine’ appreciation for Tagore, Teresa and Tangra (not the place offering cheap alcohol, but the fish). But lately, it seemed that the city had been magically transformed for two people. Hour long conversations flew by in a space of minutes and few days apart seemed like weeks. Both decided it was time to play Einstein and rewrite the laws of relativity…. include the particularly heady and peculiar affects of infatuation.
But they were the guys…. the lady however,was in no hurry.
She measured her distance in light years and intended to take her own sweet time. Or did she?

Trivia apart…..
Off late I have joined this odd bunch of motley crew for a weekly trip to the watering hole. There, over alcohol, nicotine and spring chicken we try to ‘chill.’ All of us are compulsive about labeling. Be it clothes, sexuality, relationships, even terrorism… we love our labels. It adds order to the chaos. So much so that our actions are often confined by the labels themselves. So clothes can become downmarket, sexuality- confused, relationships- serious, and terrorism- cross-border. It is at this juncture that the intoxicants come handy and help us think out of the box. We gain a perspective of the fly on the wall. We are able to Extrospect- or introspect oneself from outside!

Last Saturday, after two pegs of Vodka and ample samples of salty chicken, I realized that I had committed the cardinal sin. I had forsaken my dreams and morphed them to accommodate the blinding euphoria. A Sobering experience like the hangover headache. And all this, while Darfur starved, Iraq fought, Afghanistan bled, Congo died and a couple mourned with the nation over the loss of their only son in the 26/11 tragedy while our politicians continued the omnipresent mudslinging. That was the day my aspirations resurfaced after I had dropped off the edge of the earth.

Back in my college days when my management prof. harped on the importance of conflict in group dynamics, I would roll my eyes and say - Ya, right… WATEVA ! Turns out the bloke was actually right ! Imagine a piece of CU syllabus actually standing its ground in real world! UNBELIEVABLE!

As I watched the interplay of group dynamics unfold with undercurrents of hope, aspiration, anguish, jealousy and despair- the fly on the wall finally got it.
The equation to the triangle is easy. Its intimacy that’s the bitch!

Photograph Courtesy: James Nachtway

Alcohol Induced

And she went again,
tripping over her feelings;
knocking down and rebuilding
those chipped walls, papered
with faded yellow roses...
and tear stained glass
which encumber countless shattered dreams..

Under those white ivory trinkets
She sat and shivered
sucking every breath in
as icy thoughts hit her heart;
threatening
to paint a snowy white canvas,
bright with life.

Her soul rests in its solitude
warmth wanders in and out
of a home- stranger and friend,
at the same time.
she stares inside for a few moments then keeps
looking out of the window...
Golden gates yearning soft goodbyes


And I wonder...
should I hold her hands... ?
should I...?
But no, I just let her be.
Smiling inwardly
as she lingers for a while before leaving
with a refrain of a peaceful afterglow
in which
I dream freely.

Loneliness…is so beautiful !

Photograph- Yours Truly

The Date...

On a night like this, she would not have been out. But tonight, it was different. It was August 6- their anniversary. The drizzle resumed as they rushed to stop a speeding taxi. Slanting silver ropes slammed into the puddles around them disturbing the reflected temptations of Park Street.

He looked into her eyes and resisted the impulse to joke. She was lost! Whatever had distracted her still disturbed her. She was looking at him, but looking beyond. In the speeding Ambi he watched the cinema of neon-lit city dreams stream across her face, seductively playing with her lips before tumbling down the décolletage of her little black dress. But the coloured affection failed to reach her eyes. She seemed resigned to her fate.

“The opiate of love deprives the soul off desires. Floating in the Dead Sea of the ultimate aphrodisiac, there’s no pain and no feeling of grief.… Remorse drifts like ocean weeds and vanishes into the grey stillness.... Body succumbs to a cryogenic slumber, the listless heart beats faintly and breath mellows to random whispers as one slides towards oblivion…..”

He was still shuffling through his thoughts when he realised that it was their street. They walked back from the cab and as they went through the wide French door of their ground-floor apartment, a desultory breeze riffled the white curtains. The rain grew heavier. He tried to switch on the lights but realised that the ubiquitous Calcutta power cut had kicked in. She went in and soon a soft yellow light filled their inner sanctum…..

She had changed into something informal that seemed to hug her snugly like a protective lover on a winter evening. He stupidly envied her dress. Their eyes met and held. Thunder shook the streets and lightning filled their eyes as they stood beside the poster of ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ that she had managed after bribing a cleaner of an Esplanade cinema hall.

Their flight was late and by the time Nahiya and her husband reached the South Kolkata address, they were greeted by the sharp glittery sunshine that follows a heavy shower. He entered the cobwebbed interiors through the wide French door and saw Nahiya staring at a poster. “That’s my aunt’s. Beautiful isn’t it?” she said. The alley cat mewed and Audrey Hepburn looked on as he gazed at the calendar beside the poster. It still read- August 6, 1962.

Illustration by Yours Truly :)

(Entry for The Times of India Spellbound contest, 2008)

A Late Goodbye

It is all over….. the laughter, the liking, the camaraderie... all wiped off like some cosmetic pretension at the end of a drama. Fate often puts us at the crossroads where you are caught between the crossfire- love and hate. And sooner or later, that probabilistic randomness also introduces all the people who show us what we could and at times shouldn’t let ourselves become. As I sat there talking to her enveloped by the familiar darkness of my bedroom, I thanked the randomness of life which some like to call fate. After the show is over, the actors mingle inconspicuously with the audience, and we the audience meet them- the waster, the betrayer, the tramp, the villain and the hero. The anonymity is not achieved by the revelation of his true self, but the actor just puts on another mask. And in the shadowy rain drenched streets outside the theatre away from the harsh lights of the stage, which paradoxically help in the charade, we discover what we believe to be the true character of the actors (of course we do not know them as the actors).A culmination of beauty, the beholder and all our flaws…

“All that glisters is not gold...

....In gilded tombs do worms enfold”

And then fate loads the dice.....again.

Yesterday she became the mirror that reflected my flaws and inspired reverence. In this complex world nothing is simpler than a person who declares, “I am complex.” That is honesty......perhaps the only form of it that can be attained practically. And basking in the reflected glory of that brutal honesty, I realised....how my whimsical nature which I had cherished for long might seem to others. I was told “stop trying to help everyone you meet. You are not that important to the rest.” And strangely enough, these almost caustic words soothed me while jarring me back to reality. This rude requiem for the relic of childhood romanticism was necessary. Catharsis has many faces and I needed to grow up......

“Revenge is a dish best served cold” he said. “But I am incapable of absolute hate.....the kind that generates textbook retribution.”...I replied. Perhaps I will choose the easy way out.....I’ll forgive and I’ll remember the name.

A wiser friend of mine once said..... “There are two ways to shorten a line- wipe it off or draw a bigger one beside it.” I have spoken; let my work speak from now on.....

(Image Courtesy :: Dream on by Orzz from deviantart.com)

Varanasi Vignette

Photographers, there are millions! And while a handful are aiming to make an image that puts mediocrity to flight, the rest of the shutterbugs wielding their ubiquitous dig-cams, are content with recording births, marriages or that lovely vacation by the sea. But be it the elite or the dregs, with every click, both attempt to fossilise their experience and the past for posterity. All those who gaze upon that photograph, inherit a part of that past. In essence, every picture tells a story, has a story.

My story began one balmy autumn afternoon when I was idly chatting with a fellow photographer. Amidst the purple haze of cigarette smoke and between endless cups of tea we decided to embark on our first photography odyssey. Little did I know the quantum of truth in the statement- He that travels far, knows much. Thus began our enlightening enterprise to the land of life, lights and after-life: Varanasi.

Is the photographer a documenter or a story teller? Is the photograph a slice of life, detached from time or is it a moment within the continuum? Question like these suck us deep into the cryptic vortex of the visual language. It was a question I was compelled to ask myself. Should I behave as a documenter recording what I saw, or should I tell the story of my journey? I was confused.

The challenges did not just stop there. While exploring the ghats of Varanasi, I realised that besides capturing the ever-present human drama, there are also certain truths to be told. Unlike a poet or a painter, a photographer has a stricter task- responding to the moment, not dwelling in it. From my textbook knowledge I knew, while freezing the right moment in time on film, there is no ‘frame’ for bias. Easier said than done! In an ideal scenario the faces of Sadhus and sinners should all be examined without piety or prejudice. But ideals I discovered are like horizon. The nearer you get the further it seems.

I never thought I would attach words to my photographs. But I realised- every picture not only tells a story but hides one behind it. You open the shutter, and the interesting stories come. Sometimes there is a story but the picture is missing. I can vividly recall all photographs that I did not take on this trip.

(The procrastinator I am, I finally wrote this after almost 4 months of the trip. Thanks to much coaxing from a few friends. I am planning to publish an e-book of the pics and experiences of Varanasi as a tribute to the successive generations of people who travel, live and make Varanasi the place it is today. Lets see when it's finally done....)

Photographed by fellow traveller and photographer per excellence- Soumik Bag

Catharsis.....

Truth is a bully we all pretend to like. And some pretend to preach a lie about the truth itself.

Experience they say teaches. Maybe…. but only for those who wish to learn from it. There is a truth that is deeper than experience. It’s an order of truth that separates the profound from the merely clever…the reality from the perception; the dark from the darker. The cost of knowing it is at times greater than what any heart would willingly pay.

Knowing it doesn’t always help us to love the world, but it does prevent us from hating it. And the only way to know the truth is to share it, from heart to heart- not like I got to know, but like I am telling it to you now.

Strange or shameful as it is to admit it, I was glad that some things, someone, some experiences had flinted my heart. That hardened lump within my chest is what protects me from the curiosity that ultimately leads to the cat being killed.

The world is not black and white. It’s varying shades of grey through which the monochrome blues unfold. It’s like the exciting search for the cipher in a black and white photograph- without the distraction of colour. Adversity brings out the true shades. And the colour of truth is grey. Not absolute and extreme but somewhere in the middle.

Power changes, loyalties change and along with it everything changes. I wonder which is more toxic, the power of politics or the politics of power! Everyone wants to master both and ends up being their slaves.

There is only one constant in life… that is change. I remember discussing with a friend about the “expiry date” of a relationship. But what if that “date” itself is an illusion. A concept we cook up to give validation to our need for solace. Or perhaps to buy some temporary truce in the continuum of time.

I could play the part of a Bollywood character with poignant silence…screaming for so called “justice”.

Or I could be the clichéd character journo, hell bent on an expose of the great lie. But I am none.

Nature enlightens us that deception is elemental to survival.

Never let anyone know what you are thinking..... That may be difficult.

But the other option of always knowing what the other thinks of you….is a pretty achievable one. You can control what the other thinks of you!

What is the best thing in life?

Is it power? The Power to know beyond the smokescreen, the power to influence and ultimately control someone other than ourselves?

Or is it love- the opposite of power? Love is dangerous! It overpowers, and makes you blind. We love simple things in life and yet love to flirt with the complex shades. We use, abuse, beg, lie, borrow steal, coax, coerce and deceive to get to the top. Is it worth it? That is subjective. Truth is that truth is relative to the liar. For a loner like me, the loneliness that zenith offers is a tempting prospect. And that my friend is the truth of the lie.

I am stunned and stoned! So, I bid adieu.

(Pic courtesy :: ckythomyorke from www.deviantart.com)