Among the living…

Paris, a city I first visited as a child with my enthusiastic parents way back in 1991, doesn’t seem to have changed significantly in three decades. Or so my musty memory tells me.

I happened to be there last week and one of my favourite days was when I walked into the Père Lachaise cemetery , looking for Edith Piaf’s grave. I first discovered Piaf’s music on the good old FM network in my school days. Intrigued, I saved some money and bought a tape with a collection of some of her more popular songs. And fell in love with her.

On a crisp, bright, Parisian morning, I felt history seeping into my pores and my imagination running wild, as Edith sang to me and I walked past the quiet gravestones of people who had written books for me, sang songs for me, opined philosophies for me…

Hello 2018!

First post.

Will try going back to shooting some film this year.

Fingers crossed. Fingers crossed.

Brown

Sometimes I feel my consistency with this blog is as empty as this frame. But hopefully, more writing is on the anvil. Fresh determinations to put pen to paper and finger to keyboard midway through 2017!

Image: taken sometime in March this year…in Bombay. We were lazing about, waiting for friends to join us for a breakfast, when the beach suddenly opened up. Emptiness in Bombay is surreal.

Posting, again, after many undisciplined months of thinking about this blog! So this note was written last month but it’s worthy of a repeat here…

I’m back in Africa. After 25 years.
Having spent the better half of my childhood growing up in these parts, it’s funny how I don’t ‘feel’ anything at the moment. It’s probably the 14-hour journey, my heart persuades me.

This isn’t the best image of Africa I’m posting. I’d actually planned for a batch of fluffy clouds against a rich, azure sky, taken just as we’d be landing in – but I fell asleep. I’d even imagined a grove of lush, tropical trees…or a golden field along the highway – but I forgot to pull the camera out.

So this is the best I could manage – a view from my room.

As I write this, sipping on locally brewed coffee, images and colours from the past (hidden in the recesses of my memory bank) begin to return. I see the wormhole Alice jumped into right there…in front of me. And after a quarter of a century, I’m about to step into my own wonderland…again!

Insomnia…

…bitch… 

When fish fall in love

So….

Following up from the previous post, which was posted, well, almost a year ago…

(And what a year it has been!)

‘I’ has now become ‘we’

*smile*

Ms Mentalsyrup joins the bandwagon and (hopefully), there will be more posts this year. More photographs. More memories. More laughter. And ofcourse, more food!

And as usual, continuing with streams of consciousness, please watch ‘The Fish Fall In Love’ and find yourself a slice of happiness.

2015

First post of the year.
Food, what else?
Hopefully, it’ll be a busier year on this blog!

Crinkly

Images. There is just such a massive overload of digital. images that one experiences in a given day. Technologically regurgitated into our half-dead minds…the internet, TV, bill-boards, newspapers and the other lot in between that fills the crevices between mass-media.

So when we discovered walls in this quaint palace in South India plastered with photographs, all shot on film and mounted in crinkly wooden frames, we just decided to let the sepia tones filter into our souls. Images.

Kaapi, anna?

Filter coffee, aka kaapi, is literally a balm that soothes the frazzled soul. There is magic in this concoction that spells pure joy.

The Dravidians got this beautifully right!

Indian Coffee House

Indian Coffee House, Gwalior
A quaint den for either conversations and solitude…take a pick and step into one of the most anachronistic coffee shops in the country

Monroe!

The joys of discovering your dad’s collection of films and books…tucked away in 40-years worth of nostalgia. And scribbly notes peppering this landscape of memory.
Joy!

Frozen in

This is generally what vacations are for us…mountains (or anything that qualifies as way too away from the city), food and walking…lots of walking!

So, the old images that came bopping out of family albums, stashed away a decade ago, have the same imagery…of some quaint places…people around food…looking cheery. Me? I looked leaner, black mop of hair on the head (nostalgia) and Ma’s self-conscious grin into the camera.
The obsession with image making in the family runs deep when my grandfather started saving money and shooting his kids (read mum, uncle and aunt) as they grew up. Of course, a refugee family crossing into India post partition would have it tough so the black and whites got restricted to a dozen or so in a year. But it’s wonderful to flick through images created 50 odd years ago.

Time does freeze up.

Nostalgia comes trickling through the cracks in sepia tones.

Funny, how today, all I need to do is shoot off a mobile and add a layer of sepia. And blog it. Digital archiving.
But maybe, half a century down the line, someone in the family tree will be looking this off online…and reminiscing about memory, life and all that love teaches us…

Another post…

So it comes down to this…random words strung together in the middle of the night 

Another post on this blog (after many months) starts off with the enthusiasm of a 4-year old trying to learn to cycle…little training wheels pointing away on both ends of my amateur writer’s soul…
My love for writing (and coffee), which is sporadic at best…will definitely have to be counterbalanced by an infatuation with food, mountains (yes, mountains over the sea, hands-down), ink pens, edgar poe and some measured moments of madness…

Hallelujah. 
(ORIGIN Old English, via ecclesiastical Latin alleluia from Greek allēlouia (in the Septuagint), or (from the 16th century) directly from Hebrew hallĕlūyāh ‘praise ye the Lord.’)

Bihar

Just came back from my first foray into Bihar. The land of ironies where poverty and beauty keep slapping you in the face.

This image was captured by a team member on the shoot (Shijo George) and I couldn’t help but share it forward.

Evenings

Moonpeak Cafe,
Dharamshala, Himachal Pradesh

Snip

Barber shops and massage parlours…throw in a tattoo here or there and you have a classic recipe made in India…

Monkey man

In the land of a million gods, a few find their way through to our hearts in the strangest of ways…

Hanuman at Pushkar, Rajasthan

Pigeons

Pigeons. Again.
Some love-hate relationships will never change…

Pushkar

Walking about in a quaint little town in Rajasthan, this little sign just seemed to pop out of nowhere…
The town of Pushkar is an interesting mix of the ancient and the new, the religious and the hippy, all jostling together, attempting to find meaning in love, life and all things in between…

Read

Love books…and bookshops!

Travelling again

Somewhere in the Kangra Valley…

Open

The good things…

Coffee and lemon cake

Fresh

Latest addition to the family…

Fool

Fooling about at 1.04am