The Spaniard In The Works

Manasellaam maargazhi thaan, kanavellaam kaarthigai thaan

2009-12-01T08:31:00.003+05:30

On the cusp of the two months - Karthikai (for a lovely lovely description of which, read Raja Rao's Kanthapura) and Margazhi - I thought of these lines from the song 'Nenjam Ellam' (Mani Ratnam's Ayutha Ezhuthu).

Lyrics by Vairamuthu. Someone competent please translate: Veena? BM? Rahul? Vivek?

Kaadhal ennai varudum poadhum
Un kaamam ennai thirudum poadhum
En manasellaam maargazhi thaan
En kanavellaam kaarthigaithaan
En vaanam en vaasal thirandhu
En bhoomi en vasathil illai
Un kuraikal naan ariyavillai
Naan arindhaal sooriyanil suththamillai

Catch [insert new number]

2009-11-29T09:55:00.002+05:30

Last night at a party, I met a newly-wed couple. They did the sensible thing and had a registered wedding, and this is apparently what happened:

Before they got their certificate, they had to put up photographs of the wedding up on a board in the Registrar's office.

"Why the photgraphs?" I asked.

"For proof."

"So you guys got married in some other way and also got a registered wedding?"

"No no - it was only a registered wedding."

"But the registrar presided, right?"

"Yes."

"Wait. So you had to prove to the registrar that he married you off?"

"Um... yes."

*

Of course, it would have been much better if the building in which they'd got married was one in which photography wasn't allowed but I'm guessing they haven't thought of that one yet.

old hollywood

2009-11-27T06:16:00.002+05:30

Watched The Petrified Forest last night on TCM. What a lovely film it is. So matter-of-fact yet shining with innocence. Leslie Howard, already prefiguring Ashley Wilkes' nostalgia for a more beautiful past but with less weariness and more charm; Bogey not yet Bogey, exchanging gratefulness with Howard (if Howard is grateful to be shot in the film, Bogey was eternally grateful to Howard for getting him the career-making role in the first place); and Bette Davis luminous (in those days they had faces).

Someone should show Johar et al the film. On second thoughts, better not. They'd make a Kurbaan out of it, one way or another.

I think I should now go watch Revolutionary Road once again.

Phalanx

2009-11-26T05:58:00.002+05:30

The new issue of Phalanx is out and I only just found out via Aditi (for some reason I seem to have dropped off their mailing list).

Lots to read: M K Raghavendra's editorial on why the Anglophone Indian wants to be a novelist; his essay on Bresson; Hans V Mathews on Jancsó's The Red and the White [pdf].

Oh, and a review of Inglorious Basterds as well, but since I'm on the film I may as well point you to this fantastic essay about it.

That should pretty much take care of the weekend, yes?

another AIR recording

2009-11-23T22:11:00.002+05:30

has come and gone and I wasn't there to listen mostly because I forgot and was doing other things. Just as well, I suppose, though I'm sorry to have missed listening to Aditi Machado read.

Not sure about repeats, but what I learnt from this round was, I need to write more! Some of those poems were ancient.

Sigh.

The rest is music

2009-11-23T15:56:00.004+05:30

This post was supposed to be about the Beatles. It was also supposed to be about Andreas Otto and the way he plays his cello, about his antic face, performance, all the things I know nothing about was going to hold forth upon anyway.

It was also going to quote from Alex Ross' book.

Instead I give you Klaus Voormann:

images

2009-11-16T14:29:00.003+05:30

here.

And some image of text(tho taken out of context they make no sense whatsoever, I realise. This may disappear tomorrow):

A talisman for the week

2009-11-16T09:28:00.003+05:30

Everybody needs a way in to where they're going. Mine was John le Carré's A Most Wanted Man. I'd read it before, but I re-read small bits of it again to remind myself that all cities have a shadow self that nobody official will show you. I may not have found it, or might have only caught glimpses of it, but at least I knew it was there.

*

Conferences are things beyond my experience - never attended them, never needed to. It was fascinating, as a consequence, to observe the conference birds in their habitat: they move at an eager angle, with a pack of cards in their hands. These cards are exchanged as if one hand must not know what the other one does. Quiet murmurs accompany this exchange.

Needless to say, I do not have a card and don't intend to get one. What will people want to know - how to get in touch? I can always scribble my email on the back of some else's card, no?

*

I was, strangely enough, not bored at all during these conferences. Since I was not a journalist, I didn't really need to take notes or network or anything, but I took (some) notes anyway, because I figured that in the normal course of my life no one would invite me to observe a seminar on how ports work, or take me to high-security container terminals (no photography allowed), or give me a close-up tour of the harbour and even offer to slow the boat if I needed take specific photographs.

More importantly for me, these official interactions really did help me understand some things about the way government works, and the pride people working for it take in their work. It also gave me the license to be nosy and ask any question I wanted and there were people who would answer. One young gentleman knew everything about this city he had made his own.

*

That's another thing: the number of people who live in Hamburg who are from elsewhere. Not that it's a huge city or anything, but given the nature of my trip you'd think I'd meet at least a few people who were born there. I met two: one was a second generation Chinese woman, whose eyes flickered slightly in annoyance when I asked (as I routinely asked everyone) where she was from; and the other was one of the people in Hamburg Marketing. Like the average Bombayite, the average person from Hamburg is fiercely loyal to their city.

*

I just couldn't get why everyone kept asking if we found the place too cold. It wasn't. It was just fine. Two sunny days out of six is pretty damn good.

*

Yes, yes, okay. You want to know what I packed and what I couldn't. That's a whole other post, right?

Coming up tomorrow.

Opening the Light

2009-11-14T09:31:00.003+05:30

Update: Images here.

Okay, that's over now!

And I don't even know how to begin.

This has to be the fastest I've ever worked: I left Hyderabad on the 24 Oct with nothing except a camera, and had an exhibition of 50 photographs and some text ready to view on 12 Nov. That's six shooting days in Hamburg, three days in Bombay to make prints and 4-5 days in Hyderabad to have framed 50 photographs and think about and create text.

As I've said elsewhere, I should always work like this. I loved the pressure most especially because there was no pressure to do anything specific except create what I wanted to. Nobody was standing over me asking to see what I'd done so far, no one was wringing their hands about directions, or wanted to know in advance what they could expect.

This post is, of course, a rather off-the-cuff series of remarks about my experiences.

What really had me anxious before I left was the question of how to photograph a city in six days. What is a city anyway? Most often it is its public spaces - buildings of note, cliches about what makes it 'special'. What about people? How would I tell, looking at anybody, what made them belong to a city, and what their relationship with it was?

I used the text to explicate or think about some of these things. Being able to search for anything on the net and read up about it in advance is both a curse and a blessing: sometimes I felt I knew too much and knew nothing of any worth.

The other anxiety-inducing thing about the trip was that I had no second chances. Our days were packed, sometimes in a very press-junket-y way. There were conferences that chewed up half the day; we were taken from one place to the next and I knew I could never photograph the harbour again, or the marine training centre.

I was also worried about shooting in the rain - the results were iffy at best, and unuseable at worse. What if it rained the morning we were on the harbour? (As it happened, it did, but not in some disastrous way, as the image on the poster will show).

The most interesting thing about the project was how I was constantly having to re-shape the intent of the project on an intellectual level, with what was happening every day around me. Let me explain:

I was working with only the barest sketch of what I wanted to do with the photographs, but the barest minimum included working with text, with the immigrant quarter, and the idea of taking images back to absent people. This last meant I already knew there were some arrangements of frame and composition I wanted in advance, though I didn't know how or where the opprtunity would offer itself to me. This meant I had to be intuitive and alert all the time. In practice, this meant that at the end of every day, as I uploaded the 100-150 odd photographs I had shot that day, that I had to view and select, shortlist and discard in the space of two or three hours, so that later I would not have to re-view 600 and more images and be overhwelmed. What I was, in effect, doing was making decisions that I was going to stand by, whether they were the right ones or not. I was going to choose even before I had time to abosrb and trust that what I had experienced suring the day was enough to guide my perceptions at night.

The other interesting thing was the inclusion of text in the images. I had decided in advance that I would do this twice: for one text, I would need empty roads; for the other, I would need a wall. The text would be used on the image, but made to look as it if had always been there, already beena part of the 'real' place. I did this because I wanted to think about what we mean when we say 'documentary' images - which is what one would commonly assume a project like this one would involve.

I wanted to think about this because even the most 'documentary' image, even before the age of Photoshop, used darkroom techniques to change the image: whether in the choice of paper used in printing, or exposure, or several other combinations of techniques. What if I made it obvious that I was intervening in the image, but made it hard for the viewer to see how? What if a road in the early morning outside the main bus station, had the most unlikely text painted on to the road? How long would the viewer stand in front of this image trying to puzzle it out and what would they make of it?

So there was that.

The other thing was how to combine the images, and what order and how much to control of where a viewer would stand first?

(One image from my very short trip to Bergen-Belsen, gives no indication of where it was taken. It was meant to be the last image viewed but that's not how the arrangement worked in the gallery. That should have been interesting also.)

Phew. Okay, I've gone on long enough. I knwo everyone wants to see the images. Some are supposed to be on the gallery website, but they're not up yet. Will link when they are.

It goes without saying that many of you who read this blog have images that had you in mind when I shot them or when I viewed them and realised they reminded me of you.

More about that soon.

Oh: on the day of the opening, the most dramatic moment was when my son's bus didn't turn up until an hour later than it usually does and my mother was frantic but I was in a press conference (to which nobody came because of the GHMC election rallies that were more newsworthy) so I didn't know she was calling and she was sobbing over the phone when I did return her call. The bus turned up, no harm done, but it was a nice few moments of total panic.

mostly irrelevant thoughts-for-the-day

2009-11-10T09:15:00.004+05:30

When you add (and save) enough blogs and posts on your feedreader, the numbers eventually begin to look like dates from history*.

Additions in the last two days include Tao Lin's blog (nice url, yes?) and zunguzungu.

*

In other news, I had a duplicate print of a photo I really liked, which I had made in Bombay and couriered to someone who hasn't got it yet. This depresses me immensely because it means either someone in the studio or the courier is responsible for its loss, but I'm now too far away to do anything (much) about it.

*

I'm using test prints like a pack of cards to decide how I want to arrange the images. I've more or less decided, but holding the uneven-sized prints makes me feel like I'm playing Patience - which, if you think about it, I am.

*Bloglines tells me it's 1925 today.

Posting the Light: Dispatches from Hamburg

2009-11-06T14:51:00.004+05:30

So this is where I've been and what I've been doing.

If you're in Hyderabad, please come.

That's on the 12th of November, from 5pm to 6pm at Kalakriti Art Gallery, Road No. 10, Banjara Hills.

The exhibition will be on until the 18th. So if you're in town and can't make it to the opening, drop by on any other day.

(There will be more posts but only after the exhibition has opened.)

Back!

2009-11-05T23:13:00.000+05:30

Did ya'll miss me?

Updates from tomorrow. Now I need to sleep.

Aditi Machado wins the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize

2009-10-15T18:37:00.003+05:30

Via email from Aparna Rayaprol:

The Srinivas Rayaprol Literary Trust

&

Department of English, University of Hyderabad

Invite you to the presentation of the inaugural

Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize

to

ADITI MACHADO

Presentation by: Padmabhushan
Prof. Shiv K. Kumar
Chief Guest:
Sudeep Sen, poet and editor, Atlas

Poetry Reading:
Aditi Machado
RSVP:
9490317318/rayaproltrust@gmail.com
to

Sunday, October 25, 2009 at 5.00 pm

Saptaparni, Road No. 8, Banjara Hills

Congrats Aditi!

Pratilipi in October

2009-10-12T08:16:00.002+05:30

The new issue of Pratilipi is up and no, this is not a pointer to anything I've contributed!

Look out for the six essays by Keki Daruwalla, K. Sachidanandan, Priya Sarukkai-Chhabria, Arshia Sattar, Noor Zaheer and Giriraj Kiradoo (also co-editor of Pratilipi).

Also two of Vivek Narayanan's poems (about which* more when I return**.)

__

* And that's a promise, Vivek.

** This is also the time to say that there will be no more posts until mid-November. I'm travelling until then. I'm on mail, of course, but the Spaniard will be asleep.

Pessoa

2009-10-08T06:58:00.002+05:30

In the last year I have carried The Book of Disquiet with me everywhere. If it means I must carry a bag large enough to accommodate it, I find one that fits the purpose. Only in the last few weeks, Pessoa stands in the bookshelf with the glass front that once belonged to my grandfather (who kept in it a flat, small round of Vicks that he would take out and sniff. To me, the smell was magical and meant possibilities). The cover - with one man shot, his back arched and his hands flung up in the air, and another caught mid-stride, his day's purpose re-shaped - looks out at me every time I pass.

It would be a crude formulation to say that I have learnt immense amounts from Pessoa but it is a crudity that is given shape by my inability to put any of that 'learning' into practice in the last year. I dip into the book when I want to know what the day holds for me; to find the words for things long known; to confirm my objective self-pity. I consult it as I would an oracle.

So here's Pessoa in Poetry this month, translated by Richard Zenith:

In me every thought, however much I’d like to preserve it intact, turns sooner or later into reverie. If I wish to set forth reasons or launch a train of argument, what comes out of me are sentences initially expressive of the thought itself, then phrases subsidiary to those initial sentences, and finally shadows and derivatives of those subsidiary phrases. I begin to meditate on the existence of God and soon find myself speaking of faraway parks, feudal processions, rivers that pass almost soundlessly beneath the windows of my contemplation . . . And I find myself speaking about them because I find myself seeing them, feeling them, and there’s a brief moment when my face is grazed by a real breeze rising from the surface of the dreamed river through metaphors, through the stylistic feudalism of my central self-abandon.

See?

Facebook-style Update

2009-10-07T11:35:00.001+05:30

Space Bar is ready to throw a tantrum. Who wants to join her?

potpourri post

2009-09-24T08:27:00.004+05:30

I'm tempted to put a picture of a spinning top or something here and leave (it at that). But I won't, because a) it doesn't do to repeat oneself and b) it's not that I don't have things to blog about; just not enough time to lay them all out post by post.

So I'm going to do what Ludwig usually does.

1. Last things first: Some people are calling this a Lit Spat. I think that's a bit of a misnomer. If Bal had a larger point to make it is so large as to be invisible.

2. This is much better. Seriously.

These days, the debate over how to write about reading is a cold affair: a de-militarized zone. I avoid the terms literature and criticism here, and perhaps even debate is too hifalutin a word to describe what has amounted to a decades-long pissing match between creative writers and critics. The current steely silence is evidence only of empty bladders; the combatants have become preoccupied with internal skirmishes.

( the editors of the Quarterly Conversation respond to the essay). [via 3qd]

3. My recent hang-outs include: The Green Light Dhaba, The Plastic Graduate, The Last Resort (what is it with the kids? Why was I not like that?). Also a German blog that I just like to read, even if I can't understand a damn thing. And Sarah Jane.

4. By now everyone knows about Steve McCurry's blog, right? I think I landed up at Tom Pietrasik's blog from there. (while we're on the subject of photographs, go see Sydney chez BM).

5. There's something I'm forgetting, but not sure what. Will return to update, maybe, but mostly this should keep everyone occupied until I return (which is likely to be mid-November or thereabouts).

6. Oh, ya - I remembered. Don't forget to check out Mint's new Free Verse page every Saturday. Can't remember the last time a newspaper published poetry. So far there's Anjum Hasan (better read the poem here, since it's terribly formatted on livemint and not fixed yet), Chandrahas Choudhury, Aseem Kaul and Vivek Narayanan. Yay for Mint and a special thanks to Chandrahas, who has pushed hard for this.

RIP Meenakshi Mukherjee

2009-09-16T19:56:00.008+05:30

It's still hard to believe. Meenakshi Mukherjee died this afternoon, on her way to the release of her new book in Delhi.

More later, when I can string my thoughts together.

The first ~~obit here.~~ [that was, apparently a beta page. Here's the link now]
*

9.15 pm: I'm still trying to say something useful but it all seems like a gross breach of privacy or is just too incoherent. I think I'm going to leave it at an announcement.

Launch of Arzee the Dwarf in Hyderabad

2009-09-16T11:20:00.003+05:30

Chandrahas Choudhury's first novel, Arzee the Dwarf is being launched in Hyderabad on Saturday, 19th September.

I will be in conversation with Chandrahas and he will read from the book.

That's:

Saturday September 19, 5.30 pm
Crossword Bookstore,
City Center, 1st Floor, Shop No. 101-108,
Junction of Road No. 1 & 10,
Banjara Hills, Hyderabad - 500 034.

Note: Those who got mails from me about Chandrahas' talk at the University of Hyderabad, please remember it has now been cancelled.

Revolution 09.09.09

2009-09-09T21:21:00.003+05:30

Forget everything else about this day - you know what makes it memorable?

The release of The Beatles' Mono Box Set. It makes me apple green with envy, to think of all the people who can (and will) order it off Amazon (let's not talk 'afford' here, okay? I can give up plenty to be able to 'afford' this. I'm fanatical like that).

So now you know what's #3 on my wishlist.

'a purveyor of picong'

2009-09-09T07:37:00.004+05:30

That's Michael Hofmann, comparing Frederick Siegel with Naipaul:

From the beginning, Seidel was always a bogeyman, a Bürgerschreck, an épateur—a carnivore if not a cannibal in the blandly vegan compound of contemporary poetry. He is a purveyor of picong, a Trinidadian term, “from the French piquant, meaning sharp or cutting, where the boundary between good and bad taste is deliberately blurred, and the listener is sent reeling.” (This, as good a description of Seidel as inadvertence or serendipity can come up with, is from The World Is What It Is, Patrick French’s outstanding new biography of V.S. Naipaul, and what a lot the authors of Ooga-Booga and A Bend in the River have in common: both of them Insider Outsiders, traveling compulsively on all five continents; sharing an unspeakably deep attraction to a sort of eighteenth-century squirearchy that may or may not be England; a fascination with Africa, with Joseph Conrad, with Islam; both are students of the remorseless spread of global capital and culture, the Gulf Stream of development and the countervailing El Niño of terror; both are equally at ease in fiction and non-fiction, and in a blurring of both; and last and far from least, both exhibit, and are proud of, an insouciant erotomania. Surely Seidel, never a professional poet, never a reviewer, reciter, promoter, or teacher of poetry, could put his name to Naipaul’s boast: “I have never had to work for hire; I made a vow at an early age never to work, never to become involved with people in that way. That has given me a freedom from people, from entanglements, from rivalries, from competition. I have no enemies, no rivals, no masters; I fear no one.” Both are barbed, solitary, aloof, alarming figures, becoming, if anything, less mellow with age, and more like their intrinsic fossil selves, jagged and serviceable, “sharp / And meek,” Seidel says somewhere—he does love his noses—“like the eyesight of the deaf.” Thomas Mann’s term Greisen-Avantgardismus—meaning something like “the experimental progressivism occasionally found in the very old”—suggests itself. We as readers are uneasily privileged to witness their bold, inflammatory, defamatory gestures—gestures we know there will never be time or second thought or pusillanimousness to take back.)

My Pratham books and Mindfields!

2009-09-07T17:32:00.006+05:30

Five years after writing them, (and taking any mention of them off the back of the second edition of my book), my three books for children are finally out! These Pratham books have been so long in the making because they've been simultaneously translated into several languages, and I'm not sure how easily they'll be available in bookstores, but here's their website.

One book, The Flyaway Cradle, is for children between the ages of three and six. The other two - Cheenu's Gift and Phani's Funny Chappals - for early learners (7-10 year olds; these books are for first time learners and for children who are not used to reading books for fun because they don't have the resources for that kind of reading).

*

In other news, I've got my copy of the latest issue of Mindfields as well, to which I've contributed an article on K.

Quite apart from the fact that I've contributed to it, if you have kids or are generally interested in alternative education, consider this a plug for the magazine.

*

So it has been that sort of a day. As you can see.

and i'm saying it.

2009-09-06T21:45:00.002+05:30

nothing.

just pushing posts down, marking time, taking space.

wondering what it would be like to grow up thinking the beatles' music was a big puzzle which can only be made sense of by watching taymor.

and waiting. (for nothing in particular. not even with anticipation.)

just.

YA Loot

2009-09-01T07:36:00.002+05:30

[because Aishwarya asked]

The Puffins first:

1. The 22 Letters. Clive King.
2. Fell Farm Campers. Marjorie Lloyd.
3. The Old Powder Line. Richard Parker.
4. Up the Pier. Helen Cresswell.
5. Pageants of Despair. Dennis Hamley.
6. Heartsease. Peter Dickinson.
7. The Extraordinary Adventures of The Mouse and his Child. Russel Hoban.
8. Flambards in Summer. K.M.Peyton (I used to love the Flambards books when I was in school).

Other YA books:

1. The Bridge to Terabithia. Katherine Paterson. (probably the only recent book in the loot).
2. A Northern Childhood: The Balaclava Story and other stories. George Layton.
3. The Nine Lives of Island MacKenzie. Ursula Moray Williams.
4. Legends of the Round Table. Adapted by Barbara Ker Wilson. (under 'W').
5. Grimm's Fairy Tales. Illustrated by Jiri Trnka.

Still more books:

1. Adam and Eve. Willie Rushton.
2. The Shaw Alphabet Edition of Androcles and the Lion. GBS. [it's a pain to read. What was the man thinking?!]

Wishlist: Item #2

2009-08-31T10:21:00.001+05:30

I can't decide whether I am an extremely content person or an extremely discontent one. It's been two years since my first and only Wishlist post. This must mean that I have wanted nothing urgently enough since (Tony Leung doesn't count) or that most things are so terrible y shouldn't actually exist at all.

Wishlist item 2, of course, is a necessity and an urgent one at that. I need bookshelves.

Recent acquisitions include:

1. Large number of Puffins dating from 1968-72. Lovely books they are, too. One Farjeon from way back when. More YA books from decades ago. These are cast offs I was happy to house.

2. More castoffs, this time books I'd once given away coming home to roost (I'd offered to donate them to some library but now they're sitting on my floor).

3. Loot from Amit's reading. Hachette gifted me reprints of Buchan, Haggard, Sapper, Wallace, Grey - all very exciting. Also Alex Rutherford.

This is not counting the books I take out and am too intimidated to put back. Every time I take out a book, the shelves seem to sigh with relief and wiggle around in the extra space. So the taken-out ones stay on the floor, or by my table, or on the bed.

I need more bookshelves! Basic, one-book-deep, many shelves high ones.