Idyllic afternoon in Mendocino, CA

A boy and his dad, out fishing.

Dances with waves

One early morning by the Pacific ocean, I decided to try my hand at photographing waves. For some reason, as I danced around the surf with my camera (trying to stay relatively dry!), I realized that it was easier for me to compose shots with the waves coming in right to left. The left-to-right shots were quite terrible, not that these are very much better. I learnt that it was pretty hard to shoot waves...pointers and advice are welcome! 

The other thought I had while taking pictures and generally prancing about was that each wave was quite unique, each one left its own imprint on the sand. Sometimes the imprint was the back of a large dinosaur, sometimes a dinner plate. Often it would remind me of the banks of a river, or perhaps a riverbed. Or a tasty pudding. Or clouds. A frothy bedspread, the train of a long, lushly lacy wedding-dress. Or simply flecks of foamy whiteness on sand - like looking down at clouds set against the earth. It was fun, it reminded me of the cloud game we used to play as kids - lying on the grass, looking up at the clouds guessing what each one looked like. We should play the wave game too...I think people would be happier if they spent some time playing it maybe once every month, early on Saturday morning out by ocean.

Merced and Michelle

Madame Michelle Obama spoke at the University of California's newest campus - in Merced CA. Merced is in a no-man's-land, to my mind, in more ways than one. Set in the San Joaquin valley of Central California, often referred to as the Gateway to Yosemite; in recent times though, known for less attractive reasons. Merced CA is possibly the foreclosures capital of the nation - one in every 82 house-owners have problems with their payments. There are undeveloped house tracts, unfinished houses and empty, decaying old neighborhoods. On one side of town though, there is hope - in the form of the UC Merced campus. And that is where Ms. Obama landed, in response to an audacious, hopeful request for her to speak at their commencement this year. As someone who was the first amongst her family to go to college, what she had to say resonated directly with some of the students at the tiny, new campus.

I've been to Merced a couple of times. It's not a pretty town, just a regular old ag-community. The only coffee shop there is the Starbuck's. In fact, it reminded me of some of the worst dead-end small towns in India. But the university campus is there, so there are students and they bring raw hope with them. Madame Obama would never have thought of visiting Merced if some hopeful student hadn't said (somewhat naively), why not invite the First Lady to do the commencement?

That's the key. There is a university campus, and there are students - and things happen because of them. It's the same anywhere across the world, from Oxbridge to Delhi University to tiny, tiny Merced. 

Wisteria wakenings

One spring morning...the winter-silent wisteria awoke and I saw this outside my window. It had been brown and bare for three months and I'd wondered if it was dead. Watered it occasionally, constantly thinking of revival possibilities.

the most beautiful castle ever

California Poem: Robinson Jeffers

Carmel Point

The extraordinary patience of things!

This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses - 

How beautiful when we first beheld it, 

Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;

No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,

Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads-

Now the spoiler has come: does it care?

Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide

That swells and in time will ebb and all

Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty

Lives in the very grain of the granite,

Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff. As for us:

We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;

We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident

As the rock and ocean that we were made from

Robinson Jeffers

View from a dear old friend's house in a tropical country

A (not-so) little piece of lovely warm 'n wet tropical paradise indeed!

Book update-1

Yes, it's true. I'm writing a book. Actually, its a huge reason why I started this blog in the first place - so I could sort of use it to warm up, get the juices flowing and then switch to the book. The book is also a significant reasons why my fair and faithful blog-readers are subjected to periods of silence - I'm either too busy @ work or too busy @ work on the book! 

And now, after thinking it over, I believe its time to use the blog to tell everyone how far things have progressed too! So the first update is, I've done over 50,000 words i.e. about 200 pages and I'm a couple of chapters away from completing the first draft. That, as experienced writers tell me, was the easy part! 

Thoughts?

Japanese Maple Revival!

It's back. Or rather, the brother of the one that died is thriving again...! So that means I did manage to save one...with huge doses of sulfur powder and other fungicides over 3 months...

Elephants in my backyard...

One lazy Sunday afternoon in my old neighborhood...

Cultural Imperialism...or global meltingpot?

Recently while in India, wandering around old bazaars and new malls, I chanced upon this...Indian Barbie! Now, normally I'd dismiss this as one more sign of cultural imperialism (American consumerist icon etc) flowing into ye olde country from the West, but then I noticed that:

a) Barbie was in a sari i.e. traditional Indian attire, complete with jewelry etc 

b) Barbie had black hair and considerable amounts of Indian-style makeup (no blondes!)

So...is this cultural imperialism, signs of what happens in the global meltingpot and/ or clever 21st century marketing? And what happened to all the Indian doll characters? Were there ever any? Requesting anyone who played with Indian dolls to comment! 

 

Zooming back with Mumbai taxi art!

So there's this agency in the UK called Creative Review and they're fascinated by the stuff stuck onto taxis in Mumbai! Urban art...they've interviewed a couple of the sticker-wallahs...to understand what goes into transforming a mundane black and yellow mode of transport into a hopping, vibrantly colorful personality with a mind of it's own! 

www.creativereview.co.uk/crblog/?s=mumbai+taxi

Watch the artists' interview after the jump!

The US economy in shambles

So it has come to this. The masters of the universe have done it yet again. The Wall Street virus spread silently across all financial markets, carrying with it the debilitating disease of denial, the symptoms of irrational exuberance and the inevitable accelerated decline into dissolution. Meanwhile, with a raging recession fully under way, the NYT reports on Saturday afternoon parties (starting @$1000 per person) - champagne brunches on steroids fueled on a bit by severance packages and layoff settlements...and perhaps by a lot more of "recession-proof"players...drug money, oil money,  defense money...and of  course, the latest being government money. Trouble is that the government money is taxpayers' money...and so you and I are the chumps that are going to be left holding the bag at the bleary-eyed, budget-busting, economy-enervating end of this party...!

All this and more, coming with a trillion dollar deficit bill that will go on for at least the next 10 years...unfolding just about 8.5 years after the US was in a budget-surplus situation. Thank you, President Bush!

1am Phoenix time - November 4, 2008

It is election day in the United States, the very early hours. Over the next 18 hours, we will find out whether the country can look towards the future, and hope - regardless of whether it chooses as it's president an old man who has earned his wisdom the hard way- by sacrificing a lot at war for the country or a young man, who has words of hope and dreams. Either way, it will be a point of departure from the state of mind the country entered when it handed Dubya the mandate in a post 9/11 world.

Many posts have happened since then, none as indelible of course. But milestones nevertheless, of dubious achievement. The largest deficit ever, the most expensive war ever, the most significant decline in the stock market and the economy since the Great Depression, the list goes on. Every day on the radio, I hear people talking about their 401Ks melting away, their houses valued now at a tenth of the purchase price. Industry observers talk about WalMart doing well, while Target suffers - because everyone is stretching dollars. Economists offer cold comfort - 'not as terrible as the Great Depression', they say.

But no one ever talks of giving up. I hear a seventy-year old man, his life-savings vaporized talking about how he's thinking of his next new small business idea that will keep him going, the single mother that's thinking aloud of what work may come her way to keep her two
kids fed and clothed. There's the student who's finishing college with a little bit of cash, looking forward to work - a job, any job. The sixty year old who looked forward to retirement, only to find that he has to keep working, to ensure he has health coverage. These are the ordinary people who have no choice, they have to keep going without any heroics. While reading about the very rich (i.e. the recession-proof) scooping up property, companies and other assets at bargain-basement prices, preparing for the eventual inevitable rebound. I wonder what the ordinary folks around me think, are they resentful? They don't seem to be. In fact, some of them read about the others anticipating a rebound. Some even smile in hope. I wonder what keeps them going, is it simply the insane optimism of someone who has no option to give up? Who knows. I can't say. What I can say is that its there, inexplicably, indisputably there - the sense of hope, the anticipation of cyclicity, the feeling that after things have gotten so bad, they can only get better. Does this happen in other countries? Maybe so. But it's definitely very strong here, for sure. That is what to me still makes this one of the best places in the world to live, and to work. And to think that I didn't even want to come here!

Truffaut and Ray: 400 Blows and Pather Panchali

400 Blows and Pather Panchali. I've watched both films, they are memorable and brilliant - both telling stories in different ways while being breakthrough in their form and structure. Truffaut's first feature film defined the French New Wave movement. Ray's first film, Pather Panchali (Song of the Road) won eleven international awards including 'Best Human Document' at Cannes.

Truffaut and Ray, Ray and Truffaut. Overlapping lifetimes, parallel perspectives. Ray acknowledged the influences of Jean Renoir and Italian neorealism. Truffaut was a film critic until he decided to take a hand at it himself.

Both films are in black & white. Both feature small boys as their protagonists. Antoine Doinel and Apu. Both films turned out to be the first in the series of three or more sequels. The sequels follow the boys, Antoine and Apu as they grow older - experiencing love, loss, life. Both are bleak in parts and end with hints of a certain kind of hope.

Pure cinema, with curious parallels.