A blankness engulfs the silent morning. I wake up and sit with no thought crossing my mind. I walk out of the tent... I can hear the birds cooing and feel the sun lazily focussing on this side of the third rock. The mind is so receptive, attentive and willing. There is a crispness in the air and I just feel like taking a walk along with her. She joins me and we start walking towards the lake.
There's a big rock in the middle of the lake. The water is still in spite of a few children playing, splashing the water. The splashes actually are a part of the stillness, just as how the noise they create is a part of the silence. After crossing the half-mark, we stop and look at the lake. Absorb the lake. There are others who have joined us in this journey, who are enjoying this serenity in their own sense... cracking jokes, photographing, talking about life and death, etc.
I wonder how many looked at the lake.
Originally posted on CP on August 24, 2006.
Disappear
You lock your room and start walking down the stairs. A child stumbles upon a step a bit far from you. You would have run down quickly to help the child get to his feet if the mother weren't there. You expect the mother to get to the child quickly, shower sugary words and soothe the pain. No. The mother slowly gets to the child and looks down, without offering any humanitarian assistance. The child looks up at the mother, all set to cry.
The previous night you had a bad day at the office. You kept telling yourself that things are going to fall in place and everything will be alright. You wished for a weekend that would start immediately. You understand that confusions, misunderstandings and bitterness with colleagues are all a part of the ups and downs of office routine and soon you'll be back with a smiling face and be yourself. In an absent-minded moment, you banged your leg into a metal pillar. Though you didn't suffer any serious damage, the pain remained and you had a hard time putting yourself to sleep.
The mother lifts the child by his arm, which itself should have been painful. And gives him a careless slap and tells him:"I've told you a thousand times. How many more times do you plan to slip at this step?" Now you have gotten down the stairs and you're close to the child. You can see tears flowing very silently into his cheeks. Without making a sound, he gathers his bag and slowly, very carefully starts descending. You just want to pull him close to you, run your fingers through his hair and tell him that everything's alright and it's not just kids, even adults fall down often and there's nothing wrong with what had just happened.
You step into the road. Gradually the metropolitan noise fills your eardrum, which you're so accustomed to. You swear to have tonight's dinner without TV in the background. You see an old lady negotiating with a heavy bag, obviously beyond her physical capabilities. You hate this combination of smoke and sun and you wish you had woken up earlier and avoided the crowd. You see the child seriously discussing something with his friend. The tears have gone. It's a busy street. You continue.
Originally posted on BS on August 29, 2006.
The previous night you had a bad day at the office. You kept telling yourself that things are going to fall in place and everything will be alright. You wished for a weekend that would start immediately. You understand that confusions, misunderstandings and bitterness with colleagues are all a part of the ups and downs of office routine and soon you'll be back with a smiling face and be yourself. In an absent-minded moment, you banged your leg into a metal pillar. Though you didn't suffer any serious damage, the pain remained and you had a hard time putting yourself to sleep.
The mother lifts the child by his arm, which itself should have been painful. And gives him a careless slap and tells him:"I've told you a thousand times. How many more times do you plan to slip at this step?" Now you have gotten down the stairs and you're close to the child. You can see tears flowing very silently into his cheeks. Without making a sound, he gathers his bag and slowly, very carefully starts descending. You just want to pull him close to you, run your fingers through his hair and tell him that everything's alright and it's not just kids, even adults fall down often and there's nothing wrong with what had just happened.
You step into the road. Gradually the metropolitan noise fills your eardrum, which you're so accustomed to. You swear to have tonight's dinner without TV in the background. You see an old lady negotiating with a heavy bag, obviously beyond her physical capabilities. You hate this combination of smoke and sun and you wish you had woken up earlier and avoided the crowd. You see the child seriously discussing something with his friend. The tears have gone. It's a busy street. You continue.
Originally posted on BS on August 29, 2006.
Hindu Photos
Ethics in media is declining/reshaping/becoming questionable and The Hindu is no exception. With it's minority appeasement content, bias towards the DMK and the tabloid last page, the newspaper I fell in love with might soon become a matter of history to me. A couple of comments on a couple of photographs:
Half of the photo is wasted on a cameraman. Why didn't they edit it out? There's a lot of steam between the two players and we don't have a photo that captures the split between them.
In the past few months, Dayanidhi Maran's photo in the newspaper is a constant, the variable being the page number. Though he's done some commendable things since he became a minister, projecting him as a leader of the future through such photos (take a second to look at the picture) is tiresome.
Half of the photo is wasted on a cameraman. Why didn't they edit it out? There's a lot of steam between the two players and we don't have a photo that captures the split between them.
In the past few months, Dayanidhi Maran's photo in the newspaper is a constant, the variable being the page number. Though he's done some commendable things since he became a minister, projecting him as a leader of the future through such photos (take a second to look at the picture) is tiresome.
Desensitized Zone
"I think it pisses God off when you walk by the color purple in a field and don't notice it" - Shug, Color Purple, Alice Walker.
Walker does not refer to the mankind's inattentive approach to nature's aesthetics. Though true that is - we hardly notice the magnificent optical textures of jasmine or the tenderness of it's touch, or, to simply put it, it's raw audacious beauty. Sophisticated taste even triggers you to be moved or enthralled or awed or touched or sometimes even shocked by the subtleties. My taste, as unrefined as it can get, I can only sense the pleasure involved. The simple pleasure that jasmine provides me is all I know!!
But Walker's purple is not purple. It is sensitivity. It is respectability. It is acknowledgement.
People are Rude. In a manner of speaking, if you're travelling, they react as if you trespassed on their property; if you're a customer, you're intruding someone's work; if you're at work, you're taken for granted. There is proof for a gradient degeneration in our courteousness. Read literary works written a few centuries ago to understand their lifestyle. A loud obscene comment in public, which would've turned heads in that age is hardly noticed today. Generic humour which was only a funny good-natured banter is now sprinkled with lewdness, impoliteness and intentional offense.
So, what trigerred this transformation? How is the present different from the past? Two things popup in my mind - population, and technology. Thinking about population, every major city of any cultural origin is characterized to a certain extent by it's rudeness. Think New York, London, Tokyo, Mumbai. Has over-population desensitized us? Has the increasing number of people/sq.foot irritated us and eroded our courteous faculty? If so, is it going to be a slow descent into barbaric ages?
Modern technology, which has promised independence of many kinds, has remarkably reduced the intensity of an individual's interaction with the society. I think the cave of nextgen gadgets in which most of the younger populace lives today have been numbed for long to 'feel' the beauty or pathos or depth of anything that happens to him/her. Have the iPod's and cellphones and satellites overwhelmed our senses to the extent that we don't even acknowledge the next person as a person?
Originally posted on LJ on May 9th, 2005
Walker does not refer to the mankind's inattentive approach to nature's aesthetics. Though true that is - we hardly notice the magnificent optical textures of jasmine or the tenderness of it's touch, or, to simply put it, it's raw audacious beauty. Sophisticated taste even triggers you to be moved or enthralled or awed or touched or sometimes even shocked by the subtleties. My taste, as unrefined as it can get, I can only sense the pleasure involved. The simple pleasure that jasmine provides me is all I know!!
But Walker's purple is not purple. It is sensitivity. It is respectability. It is acknowledgement.
People are Rude. In a manner of speaking, if you're travelling, they react as if you trespassed on their property; if you're a customer, you're intruding someone's work; if you're at work, you're taken for granted. There is proof for a gradient degeneration in our courteousness. Read literary works written a few centuries ago to understand their lifestyle. A loud obscene comment in public, which would've turned heads in that age is hardly noticed today. Generic humour which was only a funny good-natured banter is now sprinkled with lewdness, impoliteness and intentional offense.
So, what trigerred this transformation? How is the present different from the past? Two things popup in my mind - population, and technology. Thinking about population, every major city of any cultural origin is characterized to a certain extent by it's rudeness. Think New York, London, Tokyo, Mumbai. Has over-population desensitized us? Has the increasing number of people/sq.foot irritated us and eroded our courteous faculty? If so, is it going to be a slow descent into barbaric ages?
Modern technology, which has promised independence of many kinds, has remarkably reduced the intensity of an individual's interaction with the society. I think the cave of nextgen gadgets in which most of the younger populace lives today have been numbed for long to 'feel' the beauty or pathos or depth of anything that happens to him/her. Have the iPod's and cellphones and satellites overwhelmed our senses to the extent that we don't even acknowledge the next person as a person?
Originally posted on LJ on May 9th, 2005
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