A boy and his dad, out fishing.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
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.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
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.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
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.
Sunday, April 5, 2009
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
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...
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!
Watch the artists' interview after the jump!
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