Sunday 26 August 2012

Did you take your vitamins today?




"A caterpillar is letting itself down on a thread, twirling slowly like a rope artist, spiraling towards his chest. It's a luscious, unreal green, like a gumdrop, and covered with tiny bright hair. Watching it, he feels a sudden, inexplicable surge of tenderness and joy. Unique, he thinks. There will never be another caterpillar just like this one. There will never be another such moment of time, another such conjunction. These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It's probably a vitamin deficiency. - Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (2003) 

These caterpillars are from Sanjay Gandhi National Park, Mumbai. It is purely due to a lack of effort that at the moment I am unable to call them by their given names. That is my one failing. Even though for years I have been captivated by caterpillars. As proof I present a post I wrote sometime back.

Tuesday 21 August 2012

The Inconsequent Wild Roses

The complete photo album is here: Wild Roses

Henri Rousseau, the French painter best known for his paintings depicting elaborate jungle scenes and exotic landscapes, had never visited a jungle. In fact, he never left France. His inspiration came from illustrated books of famous expeditions, the botanical gardens of Paris and stuffed wild animals in the museums. Also perhaps, a desire to escape the banality of modern existence. In his living years he was ridiculed because his jungle paintings were 'mere' fantasies without any regard to geography or even a sense of proportion; his 'exotic' imaginings. Even though he steadfastly described himself as 'one of France's best realist painter'. These contradictory reactions to his art were precisely the reasons why he became famous after his death. His paintings are beautiful for not only what they depict but also for what the particular manner of depiction evokes.

In India the jungle of our mythologies and bedtime stories is more real than the one that is a short train ride away. The peacock after pecking at the open garbage dump, may settle for the night on the Neem tree in our suburban neighbourhoods but the one that dances underneath that flowering tree with parrots and bulbuls next to a stream overflowing with lotuses is more alive to our senses. We have no desire to see because we know how it feels. At times it seems even our perceptions are preordained.

The first word that comes to mind when confronted with the English landscape is agreeable, even polite. However, some miles down, one often comes upon a dramatic dialogue between the lone tree and the raging winds. For a few moments even the sheep look on in suspended animation. The woods here have been called tame*. There are no tigers coughing at twilight, no cobras coiling in the shade of the banyan. But to a child's 'alluring eye' as Louis MacNeice writes, they are 'a kingdom free from time and sky'. Only to appear tame again as the child grows up– each moored to a village with its 'inconsequent wild roses'.

In all the instances mentioned above to my mind's eye the most alluring is the moment when the wild rose becomes 'inconsequent'. How and when and by what alchemy does this transformation transpire? What catalyst, what reagent is at work here? And in the end result if something is gained, then what is lost?

Henri Rousseau's jungle paintings are here.

*Woods by Louis MacNeice

My father who found the English landscape tame
Had hardly in his life walked in a wood,
Too old when first he met one; Malory's knights,
Keats's nymphs or the Midsummer Night's Dream
Could never arras the room, where he spelled out True and Good
With their interleaving of half-truths and not-quites.

While for me from the age of ten the socketed wooden gate
Into a Dorset planting, into a dark
But gentle ambush, was an alluring eye;
Within was a kingdom free from time and sky,
Caterpillar webs on the forehead, danger under the feet,
And the mind adrift in a floating and rustling ark

Packed with birds and ghosts, two of every race,
Trills of love from the picture-book---Oh might I never land
But here, grown six foot tall, find me also a love
Also out of the picture-book; whose hand
Would be soft as the webs of the wood and on her face
The wood-pigeon's voice would shaft a chrism from above.

So in a grassy ride a rain-filled hoof-mark coined
By a finger of sun from the mint of Long Ago
Was the last of Lancelot's glitter. Make-believe dies hard;
That the rider passed here lately and is a man we know
Is still untrue, the gate to Legend remains unbarred,
The grown-up hates to divorce what the child joined.

Thus from a city when my father would frame
Escape, he thought, as I do, of bog or rock
But I have also this other, this English, choice
Into what yet is foreign; whatever its name
Each wood is the mystery and the recurring shock
Of its dark coolness is a foreign voice.

Yet in using the word tame my father was maybe right,
These woods are not the Forest; each is moored
To a village somewhere near. If not of to-day
They are not like the wilds of Mayo, they are assured
Of their place by men; reprieved from the neolithic night
By gamekeepers or by Herrick's girls at play.

And always we walk out again. The patch
Of sky at the end of the path grows and discloses
An ordered open air long ruled by dyke and fence,
With geese whose form and gait proclaim their consequence,
Pargetted outposts, windows browed with thatch,
And cow pats - and inconsequent wild roses.

Thursday 16 August 2012

Light and Darkness

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it. ― Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

The photo album is here: Light and Darkness

Tuesday 7 August 2012

The Woman Who Stares at Birds



He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you. – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil 
 
While the first part of this aphorism, perhaps, is a caution to activists of all manner and fashion, it is the second part that I can attest to. For I have stared long at birds, and the birds have stared back at me. Though in 99% of the cases it is the birds that have noti
ced me first, what with me being nothing but a clumsy ape.

In the process I am most certain we have gazed a bit into each other too.

I can almost see the question form on your lips, “And what have you learnt?” I could counter with a question of my own, “Does every life experience need to end in a lesson learnt?” For if we gaze, howsoever briefly, into the human world learning– as in acquiring knowledge or skills– wouldn’t be our shining beacon. Though for a bird acquiring knowledge and skill is often a matter of life and death.

But staring at birds has made me realize a few things about birds and about humans. Birds aren’t indomitable. Their life too is all about struggle and adaptation. No less than the life of any human. Their songs may appear to be joyous and rapturous, even effortless, but like any artist they are almost killing themselves to produce beauty: Pouring huge amounts of energy and a collection of past experience of generations to distill a few notes of sheer brilliance.

If we could suspend our arrogance, our sense of superiority, for just an instance then perhaps happiness would not be a pursuit. Nor the end point of all our pursuits.

The Birds: Painted Stork, Purple Sunbird and a very wet House Sparrow.

Also would like to add that the facebook page will feature more photography while the blog will feature longer writing pieces.

Friday 3 August 2012

To whomsoever it may concern

 
Four years and 300 plus posts later the blog now also has a facebook page. Maybe you'd like to come by and say hello: https://www.facebook.com/SometimesIWriteSometimesIAm
Thank you all for stopping by, reading and commenting. It has been hugely encouraging.