The twisted life of a steadicam operator!

From Shanker's facebook!

Le voyeur

Aeng couple at Moshe's doing lots footsie and handsie

Mr. Chhaya of the 9th floor hugs the corner of the lift

Hand

Arm and poster for 'Partygirls' on bus

Old friends on a rainy day

Rohan and Chitra on a lovely rainy day.

Met in college, went to town, had lunch and great coffee at Indigo Deli. Saw the exhibition SOAK at NGMA, with Bahaar, Kuntal and Ranjit. Went to Jehangir for the OSIAN exhibition which had already closed. More tea at Samovar. Then got soaked in rain and went to Haji Ali! My first time there in all these years. Then, a 3 hour drive home via the Bandra Worli Sea link in pouring rain! But all worth it.

I am told that this name was a true expression of relief by the inhabitants of this house, refugees from Bangladesh. This was at EPDP, or East Pakistan Displaced People's Colony, which later came to be known as Chittaranjan Park, Delhi.

Rain again!!!

This morning at 7:45!

Dilli art and history tourism, personal and otherwise

The lovely 'Dancing Girl' sculpture of Harappa at the National Museum. It is really small, something I had never imagined, having only seen photographs in text books till now, a total of four inches in height. Somehow, I have always found the description of the sculpture as a 'dancing girl' unconvincing. It is nude, with well-articulated sexual organs and jewellery associated with a courtesan and that amazing posture, but still the one-liner description does not convince me. Mortimer Wheeler and my history teachers from DU may damn me. Sculpture in ancient India has funnily been of a Bunuelesque nature, where women are either goddesses or the prostitutes.

Phallus and terracota figurine.

Vasantsena the courtesan, Gupta period.

Kuber, the god of wealth, Gupta period. Wealth and pot-belly go hand-in-hand!

Map of Banaras.


Map of Jammu with amazing perspective shifts.

Trust GOI to do this in the miniature gallery, making it look like a silly Punjabi restaurant.

And this.. GOI creativity.

Nehru automata at Teen Murti Bhavan. It makes small moves as it makes the 'Tryst with Destiny' speech, in a room replicating the Parliament House.


Dr. Rajendra Prasad and a security guard who seems to be looking at the camera.

Ambedkar and Govindvallabh Pant in the audience.

Nehru's sitting room.

Nehru's office.

The famous portrait of Nehru and Gandhi.

A cartoon in a Marathi newspaper, saying 'remove all dirt from the country'. The dirt is Churchill.

Inside the Red Fort. Small shrine outside public toilet, behind the Meena Bazaar.

The bridges across Ring Road. We discovered the new Freedom Fighters museum, mainly the INA, across from the Red Fort, at the Salimgarh Fort. I crossed these bridges for the first time, having always driven below them.


You cross teh railway line using a bridge that cheaply but cutely replicates the ramparts of the Red Fort.



British interventions.

Lutyens homage trip.

And lunch at our family favourite, United Coffee House in CP.


Guard at the Indira Gandhi Memorial, where they have made a 'River of Glass' on the path she last walked and transparent glass where she fell. Who thinks of all this? The Memorial is actually very well made, also partly because she was way more photographed than other leaders and very incredibly photogenic and charismatic at that. The memorial skips any mention of the emergency, by just talking about her losing the elections and returning to power three years later. All this is way more palpable than the Nehru or Gandhi memorials as we saw all this happen. The memorial becomes morbid as you move through the rooms (and how many tourists, my god, brought in hordes by tour operators), as they display the clothes worn by and bag carried by her when she was shot - a bullet-holed orange saree. And then seamlessly it turns into a Rajiv Gandhi memorial, with his tattered clothes and Reebok shoes too on display. Why?

The new high-tech multimedia exhibition at Birla Bhavan, the Mahatma Gandhi memorial, funded by the Aditya Birla Group, done by NID alumni. Above, a kaleidoscope, with changing Gandhi images. All form and little content. Lots of video projections, lots of interactive displays and all video content sourced from either old DD style documentaries, or Richard Attenborough's film. Surely they could have generated more content? Then, things like a 'Tree of Unity' sculpture, where you stand on either side and hold hands and the tree lights up with blue lights. Its a one-liner fair.

LCD screens in Gandhi's eyes!

Ladakh 2

The Main Market, Leh



Kebab seller and hordes of Bihari migrant labourers in the market

The only cinema house in Leh, just called Cinema house, with no name.


Lobby.


The small and intimate Samkar Gompa. The only women monks we saw.

Courtyard at Samkar Gompa

Tibetan refugee market


Apricot tree in a bylane

Dawa's toy son at the guest house

Stupas at Shey Palace, DD transmitter

Shey Palace, where the king of Ladakh stays


Medieval paintings at Shey Palace

In the prayer room

Hemis monastery

At Hemis

Rivers of sand




Guest House at Tang Tse, near Pangong.

Rivers of snow.

The Army restaurant at Pangong Tso


Pangong Tso. 1/3 in India, 2/3 in China (Tibet).


Crystal clear water. Salty to taste!

On the way back from Pangong Tso Lake


Chang La Pass at 17500 feet! You are advised not to stay longer than 20 min because of the rarified atmosphere. Complimentary apple tea, courtesy the Indian Army.


Chang La.


The way down from Shanti Stupa, Leh.

The highest golf course in the world, Leh.

Twister over Leh town.

Ladakh sketches

Apricot flowers at Alchi

So this is my veryyyyyy delayed report on Ladakh, delayed due to too many reasons to list, including my bad MTNL connection! Most of my friends already know about the trip, have seen the pictures, read Rohan's lost post, but I would still like to write about it as it was so beautiful, plus, I will remember it better if I put it down.

That scale is unimaginable, over-powering and very beautiful. What follows is an annotated photo-essay . Of course, like I told my parents, no pictures can ever describe it - the vastness, the deep blue sky and the ever changing landscape, which is a geologist's paradise, so varied, every few kilometres.
 

At Alchi, by the Indus

At a restaurant on the way back from Lamayuru

At Lamayuru monastery

Moon landscape near Lamayuru

DD relay centre at Basgo, in the middle of nowhere!


Leh

I had given up on writing this post. But the pictures of Ladakh in the papers in the last two days, due to elections there, just brought it all back. This is still a very incomplete post. Will upload more pictures, write more when I can.

Meghe Dhaka Tara

On the wall of FTII's main theatre.

In Bangalore

oh man!

kuntal and me, probably at the end of the second year at ftii! me and my famous shawls, delhi style! this surfaced on facebook. :)

From Chennapatna

Sponsor an executive

4th March 2009

excuse me?

at shoppers stop, juhu.

The other day

I took a picture of the boy who was making hungry faces at us across the window pane, miming eating the food he would buy with the money that we wouldn't have given him. This was one of his intermediate nasty faces before glee.

I often tease kids at crossings and they play up the performance that goes with professional begging a little longer.

Pune, Mulshi and Nandurbar

Just returned from a week long shoot in these places. Was excited about going to Nandurbar for its quaint name that we had heard in relation to the bird flu outbreak. And we traveled there from Pune by an all-night sleeper bus. That is something you should experience once in your life - and once is enough!

See more pictures here.

School at Nagsar village, Nandurbar


Ponderous, arty school kids

Quilts made of Congress flags

Drying red chillies

Paani..

Paani doodh se mehngo hai..
Ve paani tel se mehngo hai..
Ve paani..

Religion and therapy

In Argentina, they say, there are two kinds of people - therapists and those who go to therapists. Somewhere else (I forget where), it was those who go for confession and those who go for therapy. If religion and therapy are different kinds of mindfucks for fucked minds, give me therapy any day. It doesn't jam city roads.

Have been driving to and from South Bombay with frustrating regularity and the current traffic jammer is the urs at Mahim. If not that, it could be Ganpati, navratri or the Mahim fair. Today it took two and a half hours, including all the jams along the eternally under-contruction Western Express Highway (express highway?). Yesterday was similar. Last week, it took two hours when we had left town after 11 pm.

A friend had said, 'every god has it's day'. Tuesdays it is Siddhivinayak, Wednesdays, Mahim Church and Thursdays, the dargah at Mahim. The naive atheist that I am, I still shake my head at what all people do, the lengths they go to, to feed the abstraction called god. Having grown up in a religious family hasn't helped understand things any better. Someone once told me, religion may be there to teach you tolerance, be tolerant towards the religious. If only the religious were tolerant, or could be religious without jamming roads, blaring loudspeakers and the flavour of the month - go around killing people.

So, between religion and therapy, it is an easy choice for me, if ever I have to make that choice.

Manto ki truck

Through the pitter-patter of thick, dusty raindrops on my windshield I saw this. 'Good man di lalten' written in Gujarati on the back of a truck. Some very literary truck-wala, quoting from Manto's 'Toba Tek Singh'. Or, is that a truck-art way of saying 'Use dipper at night'? Great, nevertheless!