In Plain Sight

13th November 2024, Kolkata

At a busy intersection in Kolkata, shorn of any elements of nature, this billboard lorded over the teeming masses. The green forests, the fresh air and the clean water promised could only be visualized but not experienced. To use such imagery for a product which has established health risks for users and contributes significantly to the dirtiness of our urban surroundings doubled and tripled the irony. All the more reason for busybees of the city to pause and reflect. Who are you trying to please by winning your race and are those egging you on doing so with the right intentions?

Siren

Scott Rodgerson/Unsplash

I wonder who it was that first made the diabolical switch for the meaning versus the origins. The sirens were originally seductive creatures calling lonely sailors to an imminent death by wrecking over the rocks. While their intent was nefarious, the songs themselves and the creatures themselves had to have been alluring. Cut to the modern age, when sirens sound anything but attractive. The ambulance's whine, the fire-engine's high pitched croak, the air raid's insistent warning - are all sounds which cannot be ignored but definitely not something that draws the listener towards them. In borrowing words from Greek mythology, this particular one suffered a cruel modification. Even if preparing for doom, why can't the music and/or sounds be kept happy?

Remember

Ricardo Gomez Angel/Unsplash

Remember this cold December morning. In your bones, in your veins. The sun is a no-show and the fog a cold dampness long past its welcome. You will need it on a clear summer day when the leaves are bright green from the sun's fury and the very earth seems toasted brown. But you won't remember. On that day, you will simply wilt under the insane heat walking rapidly towards shelter not recalling that not so long ago, you had actively sought the sun's company.

Monumental

3rd December 2025, Neyyar WLS, Kerala

The task seemed enormous but definitely not devoid of its charms. As we approached the boats to cross over into the wildlife sanctuary boundaries, the bathing elephants and those charmed by them caught our attention. Three elephants of various configurations were in the process of getting a scrubdown while gawking tourists video-ed the entire affair. The dedicated teams pursued the elephantine project of a luxurious bathing with a vigour matched by the tranquil expressions of their subjects. Important discussions on heritage awaited us on the path ahead but the brief glimpse into an almost sacred trans-species connection was a welcome addition.

Vectorized

23rd October 2022, Living Roots Bridges (Vector)

Simplifications are distortions, plain and simple. Vector images fall squarely in that category of information but their distortions offer a focused clarity. Shades are abandoned for blockiness of colours and disorder soothed into mathematically repeatable curves. The clarity of a photograph may be seeming but a vectorized version lays bare an object's reproducible soul.

Batterer

12th October 2010, Arambol, Goa

If there is one sound that I associate with the sea even more than those of waves is that of fluttering. Flags, collars and palm fronds all sputtering their own tunes making a walk along the shore an auditory exercise as well as physical. The relentless gusts of air that the material difference between land and liquid sustains speak more of its wildness better than the clash of water and shore. A trip to the ocean correlated mostly to the sun, sand and salt is often inclusive of much battering by the winds.

Non-Bucket List

13th January 2008, Kalyani

For certain places, there will always remain a special regard. These are not once-in-a-lifetime bucket list destinations or did they provide boast-worthy holiday stories. They are simple places, where familiar faces gathered and wandered in the winter sun. Flowers were announced and commensurately appreciated. The food was warm and soulful, the conversation lined with personalities from within the family itself. No larger world vision, no decay of politics discussions. Generations and geographies brought together by a few dozen kilometres of local travel away from home yet carrying its glow within.

Pirates

1st November 2008, Newport, USA

Everyone loves pirates. That much is clear. That excludes those they may have looted and/or killed. Maybe. Because the outlaw is default cool and forever story worthy. And for a while, rich and influential too. Compared to those killjoy enforcers, grim men with the grim task of compliance, pirates are forever tagged as the fun ones.

Shivers

7th April 2009, Boston, USA

Quite distant from the horrors spatially and chronologically, a quote often read before but now seen carved in stone. If I remembered correctly, it was Ma who brought it up first in one of her history lessons. In the bleak pre-spring of Massachusetts, the quote found expression next to a memorial shaped like stacks, chimney stacks. Involuntary shivers. Both at what had happened and at the fact that we never learnt.

Lost

7th July 2008, Benares

There is a certain joy to being lost in Varanasi. A city older than time allows you to think that you may not be the first to have been so. Disorientation does not lead to dismay here but rather to discovery. Important enough for Gautama Buddha to rush to once he acquired enlightenment. He could not think of a better place to make his first sermon. And that was about 2,500 years ago. I hear that order is the new mandate for its ghats and that laser lights are phasing out lamps. I hope that in the long unbroken sequence of humanity that this inherently mesmerizing city has seen, such ideas are merely a blip on the surface of smooth, well worn wisdom.

Free

13th March 2008, Kolkata

The effort was to make a centrally airconditioned space seem more natural. The tragedy was that they chose to decorate a space that tends to be drearier than even the average office cubicle. The net result was that in the course of a meeting, all you could think was to run, run, run, run to where the deer run free.

Quiet

6th December 2008, Taunton, Massachusetts

The crunch of the shoes is not unlike gravel once I give it a few hours but when fresh, it gives me the joy of being a cat. As of now, the wind is louder than my footsteps and for someone as ungraceful as me, that is a rare privilege. There is the novelty factor as well, coming from hometowns where winters are sunny breezy affairs requiring a double sweater at most and that too only to keep the notion of winter alive. Here, quite a few degrees of latitude above the tropical ones, the whiteness is like living within a cone of silence, most colours muted and those that escape do contrast but in quiet rebellion. 

Ignore

30th December 2025, Indian Express

Far too often, you will hear that your opinion does not matter. That the system is beyond saving and all you can do is save yourself. The collective is no longer a thing, concern cannot be organized around. The powerful will do what they want and the others must endure. Ignore their ignorance.

30th December 2025, Indian Express

Grease

The old man and his cart were always together. At first glance, his mountain of junk on his cart looked just that with all manner of metallic riff-raff. But there was order concealed beneath the chaos. The friend's bicycle had been through a lot patiently weathering rain, sun and fog for two years now and being in my keeping, it had seen no redemption. A rare moment of responsibility saw me take it along, tyres deflated and every joint screaming like a banshee to the aforementioned man with a cart.

He set about rescuing the ride with patience and confidence. His shambly walk and his less than fresh clothes were no longer a shadow on his abilities. He took apart the bicycle piece by piece and unlike unidirectional destructive forces, set upon healing it. The frame was turned upside down, the wheel covers were straightened, the rider seat's nuts were tightened, the chain was set free from its crusty rusty recent past. Then came the final aspect of the wheels, where he opened up the heart of the matter.

13th April 2024, Dehradun

Sitting between the wheels and the chain, grim balls of steel first popped out. Some were examined and discarded while others passed the quality test to re-enter their underground home with shiny new company. The grease was ladled in among them and the cover put back over. There they would hum again, bringing long lost motion to inertia. The scruffy man with the cart smiled in a faint sliver. His job was done. The machine lived again.

Stone and Moss

16th September 2025, Ajinkyatara Fort, Satara

For the imaginative, it is a sure-shot attention trap. At the edges of most older cities now overflowing with billboards and honks, far away on a hilltop looms a fort. Looms is the right way to describe it because flashiness was never its calling card. Through lashing monsoons and splitting heat, the stones stayed put. It was there, whenever the need arose, to absorb all shelter-seekers from the rapid enemy advance, its ramparts manned by archers and its gates locked shut. The occasions for which it was designed are now long gone but it continues to draw the faithful - some for their exercise, some to dangle their legs off the edge and some simply there to gaze out on the city king-like.

Possession

8th September, 2024

Often is the foreign trip which sends me on a buying spree. The first few souvenir shops always fail to impress me but by the 10th, I am already falling for some aspects of their tackiness. It may be a matter of constant exposure that my resistance breaks down or maybe deep down, I am that souvenir hunting, selfie powered tourist that I claim to despise. So there I was again, this time in Bangkok, surfing the (most of them probably Made in China) bonanza of tourist trinkets when I came across these two pachyderms. My heart settled on them immediately as a gift for my pre-teen nieces and with that intention they found their way into my suitcase. They travelled in their stately fashion to my home in India from Thailand but unlike many other items refused to move ahead. I too did not protest. Maybe the nieces were only an excuse for something that I had always intended for me.

Pause

7th March 2025, Keoladeo NP, Bharatpur

They call it the golden hour for good reason. Everything photographed acquires a soft glow and shadows turn long and contemplative. The photographs make for good Instagram material but more importantly being out and about in that light casts a soft glow on your life as well. Irrespective of the nature of the day that was, there is an appreciation of completion. Completion not in the sense of done and dusted. Completion in the form of a reflective pause, contemplation's easily accessible rewards realized before the race sweeps you up again the morning after.

Agua

When Cristiano Ronaldo famously set aside the cans of soft drinks and replaced them with a bottle of water, I daresay he didn't mean this. At a global conference tangentially related to the environment, canned water was hardly an inspiring sight. As per the manufacturer, the use of recyclable cans and sustainably sourced water made it a much greener choice compared to the plastic PET bottle competition. But I suppose the simple choice of a water cooler and a few paper glasses would have left the water budget for the event severely underutilized.

21st July, 2024

Slop and AI Slop

Much of the past year has been spent in experimentation with AI. As an early adopter of publicly available AI, I have seen it go from powerful to muted and to powerful again. As many YouTube videos also insist calling it Intelligence only because it produces seemingly intelligent output is misplaced. Predicting is not the same as creating and as of now the code is doing the former, albeit very well.

Calum Lewis/Unsplash

In many ways, AI does with content what I do when I am cooking. I know the ingredients and the order they should go in. I know the time splits for each of those components to be heated, fried or boiled. What I produce looks a reasonable approximation of what the final output should look like. But since I am doing the task mechanically, you can always taste the difference - that final quality of the end product from a real person invested in the process as opposed to me.

Background

Kolkata Airport (CCU), 24th December 2022

I am obsessed with observing street and wall-art created exclusively for public consumption. Metro pillars, underpass walls and sides of urban buildings are now decorated with art of wildly varying quality around the world and I don't let any of that work pass by me ignored. I can't help wondering about the artist(s) who came together to set up this brush of everyday people with the good, the bad and the ugly of the principles of colour, perspective and culture. I want to imagine that they take a deeper joy in presenting their art to the world in places that are definitely not galleries but consequentially feature in most people's lives prominently even as they rush by to their next task. As a background, they might live until rain, sunshine and politics put paid to their existence but as projections of freed imaginations into the banal routines of their spectators' lives, they offer an inestimable value.