February 2012
10 posts
“What are you reading?”, I ask. This only the second time I’ve seen her. I already like her. I am very nervous.
“Oh, some Conrad”, the voice confident and clear.
“Do you read much?”, she asks
“Oh, a lot. Mostly Tom Clancy shit though. Need to read more intelligent stuff”
Giggle
“I wish my brother would read more. I hate buying books...
Maps and compasses →
Seth Godin on the topic:
The compass, on the other hand, is more important then ever. If you don’t know which direction you’re going, how will you know when you’re off course?
And yet…
And yet we spend most of our time learning (or teaching) the map, yesterday’s map, while we’re anxious and afraid to spend any time at all calibrating our compass.
Sweep
The police constable’s boot goes straight for Seenu’s jaw.
*Thwack*
It’s a sickening sound and a quarter of the coach I am in turns around to see where it came from. I am 3 ft away from it.
There’s a howl of pain for an instant. Then silence. The rhythmic clack of steel on steel suddenly roars. Dies. And roars again.
“How dare you enter these coaches? Have I told...
That Father Lost →
As one commenter notes, this sublime piece of writing is a meditation:
Two griefs: the first, the departure of him whom we had loved, demands suspension of our normal lives. The second, the departure of those with whom we had grieved, demands resumption.
Also: On fathers and loss.
“No one has the right to live without being shocked. No one has the right to...”
– Philip Pullman
“Ideas, unlike solid structures, do not perish. They remain immortal, immaterial...”
– Alan Moore
“There’s no remaking reality. Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take...”
– Philip Roth
“That’s what so many people didn’t understand about life. The real world is the...”
– Orson Scott Card
Benaras
Namit Arora shares his experience of visiting Varanasi in this lovely piece on 3QuarksDaily. Go read that.
My only visit to Varanasi was at the end of 2008. Accompanied by a friend, it was a stop on a 6000km pan-country journey whose purpose was somehow never defined, nor spoken about the minute the first train pulled out of the platform.
Getting off at Mughalsarai, we rented an incredibly...
January 2012
4 posts
“When fear crawls out in the evenings from all four corners, when the winter...”
– Elsa Binder, 30 January 1942, from Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust (edited by Alexandra Zapruder)
Elsa Binder wrote eloquently and passionately about the destruction of the Jewish community in Stanislawow, Poland. Her diary was found in a ditch on the way to an execution...
“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is...”
– Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities [ via Frank Chimero ]
2011
Some mistakes from 2010 were repeated. Some lessons were reinforced.
Finally left the city that I grew up in.
Some moves paid off.
Fell sick.
Traveled a great deal.
Met a lot of unforgettable, amazing people.
Lost good friends.
Got over her death.
Rediscovered music.
Learnt to live.
If you haven’t read this first, please do so. In it Pico Iyer expands on getting away from it all and incredible rush of things into our lives.
That joy of quiet is why I live where I live - at the edge of a village.
That joy of quiet is why I reach where I work just a little after 7.30 AM.
That joy of quiet is why I sometimes take the road by the lake back home.
That joy of quiet is why...
December 2011
9 posts
“I hope you will have a wonderful year, that you’ll dream dangerously and...”
– Neil Gaiman
Here’s wishing all of you a great new year. Be safe. Have fun. Do good work.
Tintin
The hospital bed is a very dank one. No one has told me that recovering from a serious and life threatening urinary tract infection was going to involve me peeing almost uncontrollably. I am irritated beyond normal. Hungry. Thirsty.
1986.
My father swings into the tiny room and hands me a brown cover proudly stamped with “Shankar Book Bureau, Malleshwaram”. I ask him what it...
“When we die, these are the stories still on our lips. The stories we’ll only...”
– Chuck Palahniuk
Maybellene →
A poignant take by Luke Dittrich in Esquire on Chuck Berry, his life, his career and the things taken away from him:
Here’s what happened to Chuck Berry after his ideas changed everything: He became famous, yes. He became a famous black man, touring around Mississippi and Alabama and Texas in the 1950s, playing concerts to theaters full of screaming white teenage girls. Is it any surprise...
“For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo...”
– Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero
“Don’t be afraid. The darkness you’re in is no greater than the darkness inside...”
– Jose Saramago (via L’ Yeux Verts)
I lost a friend today. A teacher too. He perhaps has had as much influence on me as my father. He’s taught me as many things on life, about life as much as my father.
He once told me that the greatest of teachers are story-tellers at heart. I refused to believe him for long, but now I do. He also told me that the best teachers are those that turn their students into teachers for the rest of...
Film
Father and I are at the edge of platform number 1 at Pachora station. It is just a little beyond noon and the sun is a December gold and warm. The signal turns green. The Gitanjali will soon come roaring down the track.
Father takes out the Zenit, winds the film, calibrates the light and notches down a exposure.
“Here, put the strap around your neck and hold the camera with a straight...
November 2011
6 posts
Going to School
Nalwar is an unforgiving place. Like much of Northern Karnataka, it is barren, rocky, almost devoid of trees and hot and dusty throughout the year. The only thing that grows here are enormous cement factories that seem to add buildings every time one passes by enroute to Pune or Bombay from the South.
It is also the place where a young boy, looking no more than 5 boards the train one bright...
“Raymond Chandler cut his typing paper in half. He’d type until he made a...”
– The Big Sleep | Head Butler
How
A 6-yr old charmer is currently staying with us.
“Uncle, what do you do?” “Oh, I work with computers” “But I thought you were a writer? My mumma said you keep writing all the time” “Yes, I do write, but not as often as I want” “Ok, so how do you write?”
How? How?
All my life I’ve been preparing to tell people why I write, but...
The funny thing about vampires...
This is an absolutely amazing post from one of my favourite blogs ever. So good that I am reproducing it in full.
The Funny Thing About Vampires
According to lore, they have to be invited in. Within the sacred space of your home, they can not harm you. They can not suck one drop of your precious life-giving blood unless you open the door and invite them past your threshold.
If your time, your...
Pre-dawn, I went to the beach and walked for about an hour. It was raining and there were fierce gusts of wind blowing the wet sand about. Giving me company that early in the day were a bunch of crabs whose brilliantly red shells I noticed only when dawn became day. I found a spot at the far edge of the beach where the land suddenly rises and the waves crash into the three coconut trees that seem...
October 2011
10 posts
Like every other day, I woke up at 5AM bleary eyed and glancing at the phone for any missed calls and messages. After splashing water to shock the face and body in action, I stepped out for a run at 5:15AM. I usually put on some music when negotiating the bad roads on which I hope to lose weight, but today was different. I had nothing but a sneaking dawn, the cool air of Bangalore and a dog who...
“If you know someone who’s depressed please resolve never to ask them why....”
– Stephen Fry
Feet Up
Many, many years ago the father and I were talking about our travels. My interest in the Indian Railways was then in full bloom and I would often quiz him about the technicalities of traction, signalling systems and how a train could switch tracks without the need for a steering wheel. He would patiently explain, taking pains to make sure the physics was not beyond my understanding.
Looking back,...
The smell of the sea pleased him so much that he wanted one day to take it in, pure and unadulterated, in such quantities that he could get drunk on it. And later, when he learned from stories how large the sea is and that you can sail upon it in ships for days on end without ever seeing land, nothing pleased him more than the image of himself sitting high up in the crow’s nest of the foremost...
“Comics can now embrace their natural tendencies to be quiet. They’re like...”
– Craig Thompson
“I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates...”
– Milan Kundera (via slekes)
7th October
“Are you going to come to Adarsh Graphics today? We need to finalize everything.”
“Babe, I’ll be a bit late, so just wait outside Universal Bakeries, OK?”
An hour later, both of us walk into Adarsh Graphics. The portly guy manning the counter recognizes V.
“Haan, Madum, aap ka paper type ready hai”.
I touch the textured, slightly green roll. It feels...
The mother had her hands on the iPad. She was reading an article about Bolivia’s lost railways.
“How do I see the next page?”, she asked.
“Swipe, left or right”, I said.
“Swipe? That’s all?”
“Yes.”
She beamed.
“This is like reading a regular book. Wow. Why isn’t your big computer like this?”
***
Thank you, Steve....
Growing up
Geoff Dyer, one of my favourite writers, recounts his days as a single child:
Next to my school—less than ten minutes’ walk away—there was the Rec, where you could play football or just run around. There was no shortage of companions, but always at some point I would have to go back home, back to being on my own, back to my parents. And some days there was just no one to play with. Bear in mind...
September 2011
17 posts
It was fifty years ago today that Bob Dylan had his first recording session at Columbia Records. Dylan was backup harmonica for folk singer Caroline Hester — It was shortly after that Dylan was offered his own deal with Columbia.
see more — Bob Dylan: The Early Days
(via life)
5 tags
“Everybody who writes is engaged in the remarkable enterprise of making...”
– Ben Yagoda
1 tag
“There is a sort of waking nightmare that sets in sometimes when one has missed a...”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Lees of Happiness”, found in Tales of the Jazz Age (via bookoasis)
The Orissa itch has begun again. Soon. Soon.
Neil Gaiman: 8 Good Writing Practices →
Write.
Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.
Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.
Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost...
The Train Driver
Peter Johnson was a tall man. Very tall. He was also very fair-skinned. And spoke perfectly weighted English in that oh-so propah accent. If he hadn’t peppered our first conversation with random bits of “ShaniyaNe”, “PunNaku” in guttural Madras Tamil, I would never have know that he was from Arakkonam.
Peter Johnson was a train driver. He liked to be called that and...
neelavanam:
The pendulum sways in space~ Unaffected by what it sees. Twelve numbers watch~ Two hungry hands~ Eat time.
Letters
I’ve written much about my father on this blog. Of our shared interests in photography. Of our shared interests in food, cooking, history and dozens of other things. But of all, what fascinated both of us was writing letters to each other.
Yesterday, I was looking back at a few he’d written to me. But unlike reading them in detail as usual, I merely looked at them intently. Following...
Someone asked me the other day why I don’t write about my work much here. I thought about it for a few minutes, but dismissed it right there. Afterall, people much more qualified than me have written beautifully about what it means to work for a startup, what the challenges involve and how you try and fashion success out of what is usually doomed from the get go.
However, for the past few...
A few days ago, a friend of mine (thanks, Mohan!) shared a link via email. In it, Eric Krim, a photographer shares his thoughts on what Henri Cartier-Bresson teaches us, still, about street photography. As someone who has gravitated from landscape to street and portraits, all the ten points ring very true. But perhaps the one that stands out is this:
4.) Stick to one lens
Though Henri...