What a wonderful bird the frog are

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

2009-03-23T13:12:00.001-07:00

NFAK

2009-03-04T12:21:00.000-08:00

Lyrics/Translation

Chuck Norris Facts

2007-09-11T17:27:00.000-07:00

In my current state of mind, Chuck Norris Facts is my Website of the Month. Here's their Top Ten:

Guns don't kill people. Chuck Norris kills People.
There is no theory of evolution. Just a list of animals Chuck Norris allows to live.
Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits.
The chief export of Chuck Norris is Pain.
There is no chin under Chuck Norris' Beard. There is only another fist.
Chuck Norris has two speeds. Walk, and Kill.
The leading causes of death in the United States are: 1. Heart Disease 2. Chuck Norris 3. Cancer
Chuck Norris drives an ice cream truck covered in human skulls.
Chuck Norris is my Homeboy.
Chuck Norris doesn't go hunting.... CHUCK NORRIS GOES KILLING

Martin Munkacsi

2007-06-21T11:13:00.000-07:00

I was reading a recent post on TOP, which linked to (wonderful) pictures by Martin Munkacsi, whose name was completely unfamiliar, but I knew I'd seen this picture somewhere. A little research reminded me of the context.

Martin Munkacsi, Three Boys at Lake Tanganyika, ca. 1930

"[It] made me suddenly realize that photography could reach eternity through the moment. The only thing which completely was an amazement to me and brought me to photography was the work of Munkacsi. When I saw the photograph of Munkacsi of the black kids running in a wave I couldn't believe such a thing could be caught with the camera. I said damn it, I took my camera and went out into the street."

-- Henri Cartier-Bresson, November 1985

Listening to...

2007-06-05T02:43:00.000-07:00

... Vijaya Jadhav Gatlewar. I want to hear this lady live. She is absolutely terrific.

Kalindikhal Wrapup

2007-04-05T02:27:00.000-07:00

Two more days of the Kalindikhal writeup have been overdue for months. After crossing the pass, we headed down the beautiful Arwa valley, first fording ice-cold rivers (you could see the source glacier a kilometre upriver, and one particular raging, thighdeep torrent had blocks of ice floating in it and threatened to sweep us off our feet), then crossing moss-covered boulders and lovely smaller streams (camping for the night at Arwa Tal), and finally walking through river meadows filled with grey mist and green grass and flowers until we got to the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) camp at Ghastoli, a beautiful place with an absolutely surreal little pond a few hundred metres before the camp. The armymen welcomed us and provided cups of tea, and after some pleasant conversation we headed further down to Mana (a little village just above Badrinath). Halfway down, we managed to intercept a construction truck just where the motorable road starts, and took a riotous little ride down the winding road, being tossed around like sacks of potatoes in the open back of the truck. We crossed the Saraswati river over a narrow bridge below which the stream plunges so steeply that the water level is perhaps a hundred feet higher on one side than on the other. From Mana to Badrinath and its sinfully relaxing hot-spring-fed tanks, and then homewards via Hrishikesh. Goodbye, then, and here's the last lot of pictures.

Jackass

2007-01-14T23:59:00.000-08:00

... penguin, i.e.

(Photo: Edgar Thissen)

2007-01-13T17:55:00.000-08:00

Hee hee hu hu ha ha ha...

(calvin and hobbes theme subjects)

2007-01-13T10:52:00.000-08:00

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.

Bilu-da plays Desh on a funny sort of morning.

"Anarchism is an ethic"

2006-12-28T00:52:00.000-08:00

An interview with Henri Cartier-Bresson (by Charlie Rose, July 6, 2000). The interviewer is obnoxious (and reinforces all American stereotypes -- I particularly love the "-Money? -No, film." exchange). However, this is still a remarkable piece of footage. An hour long, it gives fascinating glimpses into the life, mind and times of one of the icons of twentieth century art -- even if he would never admit it.

(Incidentally, a big thumbs up to this lovely little Firefox plugin that lets you record streaming video from Google Videos, YouTube etc -- I just downloaded the full 171 MB of the HCB interview in extremely high quality.)

Besur, Betal, Back!

2006-12-26T16:13:00.000-08:00

I personally wasn't sure if it would ever happen, but Besur Betal Betar is actually back up, loud as life and twice as natural. A little prodding from DD was all it took.

My apologies to all those whom I promised, months ago, that it would be up "within a week". Please be merciful and spare my worthless life.

Ali Akbar Khan (lots of EP records and 78's among other things) and a couple of fantastic Malhars from Ajoy Singha Roy on the air today. Click here to listen, and enjoy :).

(BBB, for the uninitiated, is a streaming radio station for Hindustani Classical music.)

2006-12-24T12:34:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas, folks, and a Happy New Year too.

(And in the true holiday spirit, ahem, this. Humans will be, ah, humans.)

Kalindikhal - Part 9

2006-12-21T01:30:00.000-08:00

24th July (Kalindi Base - Kalindi Pass - Rajparav) : Woke up at around 2:30 am. It was dark and bitterly cold, but the thrill of getting to the pass helped us get up and dress and pack quickly. God knows what the staff were doing all night -- we hope they slept -- but they managed to conjure up food and warm drinks all around. We started off around 4 or 4:30. Everything was bathed in an eerie blue pre-dawn glow (it was quite a bit darker than the pics suggest).

First light soon hit the surrounding peaks, turning them golden-pink.

We moved up an icy, crevassed slope between a dark, rocky outcrop and a huge white bulge.

Fresh snow made it difficult to make out the crevasses. After a bit we roped up, Vishnu leading, and moved on very cautiously. It was tough going, since we were wearing plastic mountaineering boots (and gaiters) for the first time and they're very awkward if you're not used to them (and to the weird, splayed gait needed to ensure purchase on the snow).

There's some ice-axe-anchored crevasse-testing going on in the rightmost pic.

The roping-up proved to be prudent. After some time, we found ourselves on the lip of a crevasse about a couple of feet wide. First Vishnu jumped across, then Vishnoi. Then, to complete the trio of V's, it was Vladlen's turn. As he hesitated on the edge, Happy turned to me and said "Yaar, teri guide ki bahut phat-ti hai!" ("Your guide gets really nerved out"). I was about to make a suitable retort when we looked around and found the guy had disappeared, rucksack and all, and faint shouts of "Help! Help!" were coming from the icy depths :P. Thankfully he'd jammed somewhere inside and not gone all the way in. The folks in front dug their iceaxes into the slope to hold him in place on the rope, and after fifteen minutes of mighty pushing and pulling he emerged, unhurt and surprisingly cheerful. To our eternal regret, we were so caught up in the moment that nobody took a photo.

The rest of the climb was a bit of a struggle (and my lack of conditioning showed), but we eventually made the couple of hundred metres to the pass itself, at 5947m. It was gorgeous -- there's no other word for it. Bright sunlight, blinding snow and an incredible view.

(Click on the picture, enlarge it if necessary, and scroll left to right to see it properly. It covers about 180 degrees. If I can get a 10-foot long print of this from the original file it should be a knockout.)

And here are the lot of us on top. Mukut, Abigamin and Kamet (7242, 7355 and 7756m, L to R) float over the clouds just above my head (I'm the leftmost guy).

After a few minutes on top, we decided to head down the other side to Rajparav. This involved clambering down a steep, snowy slope to a huge icefield that seemed to stretch on and on and on and finally roll over into infinity.

That's our advance party of porters in the right two pics, and the thin lines cutting across the icefield (enlarge the middle picture) are crevasses. We plodded on and on across this white desert, sinking in ankle to waist-deep with every step. It was also pretty hot, and we ran out of water, and had to refill our bottles from a shallow puddle of meltwater a couple of inches deep. The road to Rajparav lay along the right side of the icefield, but as the sun rose higher and higher the surface became more and more soft and treacherous. So we decided to pitch camp a little earlier than planned, just below the lip of the icefield straight ahead. There was no way to walk down, so we had to rappel down the ice. This was great fun -- we rammed a couple of iceaxes into the ground and anchored two ropes to them (the main rappel line, and a safety rope). There was a small snag -- the safety rope was too short, so Mahavir and Gagan Singh stood on a little ledge where the safety rope ended and unhooked the rapeller from it when he got there, so that he could climb down the last few metres on the main line alone. Vishnoi and I had rappelled before (down a three-storey wall of our hostel in IITK :)), so we went last, along with Vishnu, eschewing the whole safety rope business and trusting the main line alone.

Here's the rappelling scene -- the middle third of the picture is ice. Vishnu, the last man down, tied his rope to an ice screw which he had to do some fancy ice-climbing to recover later.

Little meltwaterfalls trickled down the rocks below the lip of the icefield, and we clambered past these channels to get to camp...

... where much fooling around was done.

(Wrapup)

Justice. Wheeeeee!

2006-12-19T02:41:00.000-08:00

From Rediff:

The Delhi High Court has convicted Manu Sharma under Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code for the murder of model Jessica Lal.

Justices R S Sodhi and P K Bhasin also found Vikas Yadav and Amarjeet Singh Gill alias Tony guilty of conspiracy and destruction of evidence. They have been convicted under Section 201 of IPC.

The court declared that Manu Sharma, son of a senior Haryana Congress leader, had actually fired the shot that killed Jessica.

And this rather poignant excerpt from an interview with Jessica's late father:

Is it true that Manu Sharma's parents visited your home and apologised to you?

Yes, this is true. On December 25, 1999 we heard a knock at 11 in the morning. I opened the door and saw a couple. The man said: 'You don't know me but could we come in?' I asked them to come in. Then he asked me if my wife could join us. I called my wife.

He then introduced himself as the father of the accused and said he and his wife wanted to call on us, but did not have the courage to do so. For 15 minutes there was no conversation. Then they got up to go. My wife noticed they had left behind some flowers. So she asked Mrs Sharma about them. Mrs Sharma said these flowers were meant for Jessica. We accepted the flowers and placed them on her grave the next day.

PS: Back. Will post.

When all are one and one is all

2006-11-01T23:51:00.000-08:00

The crummy old sound system, the new Bose, the crowded audi, the riotous Egyptian/ballroom dancing/crawling behind the band, the weird noises from the music club at night, the corny songs, the smashhit songs, the catcalls... it's good to know at least some of that still lives on.

It was a fun four years. And you rocked again this Diwali, guys.

Pegu, Harshat, Riaz et al. at Gurgaon:
Kandisa
Mora Sainyan (Fuzon)
Roobaroo
Pal
Dooba Dooba (and just a bit of Smoke on the Water :P)

... and Biplab, Dipanjan et al. at Pittsburgh:
Maa Rewa

Cow Poetry

2006-10-18T19:33:00.000-07:00

Distant Hills

The distant hills call to me.
Their rolling waves seduce my heart.
Oh, how I want to graze in their lush valleys.
Oh, how I want to run down their green slopes.
Alas, I cannot.

Damn the electric fence!
Damn the electric fence!

Thank you.

(by Gary Larson in "The Far Side". The original image, showing a cow reciting the above in front of an audience of cows sitting on chairs, is not posted because of this. This post is dedicated to the Diabolic Dancer, who introduced me to Cowabduction.com.)

Har soz mein har saaz mein maujood hai tu

2006-10-16T02:11:00.000-07:00

Yeh zameen jab na thi, yeh jahaan jab na tha
Chaand suraj na the, aasmaan jab na tha
Raaz-e-haq bhi kisi par ayaan jab na tha
Jab na tha kuchh yahaan, tha magar tu hi tu.

Kalindikhal - Part 8

2006-10-13T00:53:00.000-07:00

23rd July (Suralaya Glacier to Kalindi Base): Great views in the morning:

Today, after some clambering...

... we got onto a pure white river of ice with, for a change, no rocks on it. This is probably still the Chaturangi, upstream from the point where it is joined by the Sweta Glacier (I haven't found a complete map yet). Here's what it looks like down the valley...

... and up it...

... and even further up, with Kalindi Pass itself running up the centre of the picture, between the white hanging glacier and the darker rock behind it:

Chandra Parbat was off to our right:

There were little meltwater rivulets running through the glacier, which we jumped across with suitable melodrama :P

... while Vishnu and Mahavir paused to play cards on the ice at regular intervals. I presume this shows some sort of high-altitude savoir faire.

We walked up the glacier to the foot of the pass (~5700m) and pitched camp there. Walking on the ice was surprisingly easy, and not very slippery at all. The glacier had its source in a massive icesheet (coming from China?), whose size is impossible to convey in pictures. Here's an attempt:

And here's our camp right at its rightmost end, where it's all cracked up:

The seracs behind Vishnoi are pretty far beyond him, and are each at least the size of a many-storey building.

Here's a view up the pass itself. We'll be going up this slope the next morning at the crack of dawn.

We sat outside in the gathering gloom for dinner, then prepared for a very short night -- we'd have to be up at 2:30am and start out by 4:30, to get on the ice before it started growing soft and dangerous in the sun. Vishnu had earlier suggested we might not even sleep tonight ("Nobody sleeps. The kitchen runs all night"), but that plan was shelved and we did get a few hours' shuteye.

(Part 9)

Kalindikhal - Part 7

2006-10-13T00:09:00.000-07:00

(This part was wrongly included in the Day 6 episode. Sorry about the mixup.)

22nd July (Khada Patthar to Suralaya Glacier, 6km): I started out early today, and moved ahead with Vishnu. We got onto the glacier fast. The glacier was covered with rust-coloured rock. We'd heard the name "Raktabaran" ("blood-coloured") applied to one of the ice-rivers here. It could have been this very one (Update: according to a map I've just located, it wasn't), possibly as one of the four colours of the Chaturangi (which literally translates to "four-coloured") glacier. As is no doubt evident, my glacial geography is rather weak. Vishnu had passed this way a couple of weeks ago with another team, and he scouted out the trail of markers, little piles of stones, that he'd placed then. We moved ahead at a rapid pace, and I enjoyed the feeling of being at the front for once. After a while, we caught the most fantastic view of Satopanth, gleaming blinding white only a short distance away.

Vishnu was going to guide an army expedition up the mountain right after our trek. He pointed out the route to the summit: up the snow ridge starting between the two large black horns (standing out in the middle picture).

I think something about the views of the peaks today invigorated us. I can speak for myself, at least -- normally I'm pretty slow and steady, but today I felt like racing ahead all the time.

We also passed some interesting ice mushrooms -- large flat rocks carried down by the glacier under which the ice has partially melted, leaving them perched on frozen pillars.

And then this interesting little traverse of a knife-edge ridge of ice: normally, a glacial ridge has a sheer drop to on one side and rubbly, gentle slope on the other -- one walks just below the edge on this rubbly side. For this short stretch of maybe 20 feet, both sides were sheer, slippery ice. Vishnu marched out onto this edge, balancing like a tightrope walker...

... and keeping himself perched upright God knows how, hacked out some footholds on one side with his ice-axe. This took quite some time and the rest of the party turned up as he was finishing the job. I went across first, minus pack and (throwing dignity to the winds in the light of the abysses on both sides) on all fours, putting my hands on the edge and my feet in the footholds. The rest followed in identical fashion, except of course some, or possibly all, of the porters who tightroped across (with packs) like Vishnu.

I hate being a plainsman :(.

I'm to the left of the ridge, and Ajay about to cross it on the right, in the left picture. The right picture is what we'd have fallen into on the other side if we'd slipped. We had a gala time chucking pebbles into this pool after we'd crossed over.

The sheer walls of ice flanking these ridges were quite spectacular. Here's one angle on them:

Our camp was on the glacier itself, on a rock-strewn sheet of ice with a little hole for water nearby.

(Part 8)

2006-09-30T21:13:00.000-07:00

Ashtami, Sunnyvale, 2006

Re brishti dhore ja, nebur pata koromcha...

2006-09-26T04:45:00.000-07:00

"This land of rivers is a land of floods, of great movements of water and the breaking and desolating of banks: Jibanananda Das wrote of the sad green river-shores of Bengal. It has been, well into a period of living memory, a land of famine, natural and man-made. Particularly within living memory, it has been a land of conflict and uprooting and helpless suffering for millions -- more millions than ever in human history on a comparable area of the earth’s surface. (This is statistics not rhetoric.) Much in Bengal’s past is of a piece with its recent predicaments. It was that past which, not so long ago as historical time goes, refashioned a harvest festival in the light of a singular combination of myths to create the unique worship of an eminently protective, eminently affective mother-goddess. That worship has so far retained its vitality, as social though not religious ritual. (The priest is one of the most poorly-paid functionaries at Durga Puja, below the image-maker, and far below the lights technician.) Not all the canned music and electric gimmickry, appropriation by political parties and gut-level street vulgarity, has been able to dispel the latent meaning of the exercise, simply because one must enact it if one goes through the exercise at all.

Durga Puja thus articulates that peculiar vein of sentiment for which the Bengali is marked, not to say stigmatised, by the world and by himself. It can, and often does, degenerate into banal sentimentalism; it induces unproductive stances and ineffectual scruples that prevent it from asserting its place in the world, or from doing any good to oneself or others. But it proves to be a compelling legacy that makes one look at the world in unusual lights, and from time to time makes possible some unusual gift of service or insight."

(Picture of crow at Kumartuli by Amit Datta of The Telegraph, Calcutta, in a rainy September, 2005; words by Sukanta Chaudhuri in The Asian Age, in a rainy October, 1999.)

Kalindikhal - Part 6

2006-09-23T13:51:00.000-07:00

20th July (Vasuki Tal): Rest day. Climbed up small slope next to the lake and did stupid things like this:

Clouds, clouds, clouds.

(I had mistakenly included some of the next day's stuff in the 21 July episode. Sorry about the mixup. It has been fixed.)

21st July (Vasuki Tal to Khada Patthar, 6km): Clear views in the morning! For once we're all cheerful :). Vasuki, Bhagirathi and a cluster of four peaks we could not identify in the distance, across the lake.

The route today involved yet another glacier crossing, and then climbed up a rocky, grassy slope to Khada Patthar ("Vertical Rock", 5456m), a grassy patch bisected by a stream. Here's Gagan Singh coming up the slope, with the glacier we'd just crossed behind him.

We dumped our packs in camp and walked up a little higher to check out the terrain beyond the surrounding ridges and to climb some boulders. Here we are being monkeymen:

Hiking boots are awful to climb in, btw.

Something about our oh-so-incredible nightlife -- evenings in camp mostly consisted of card games by torchlight, frequently simultaneously in multiple tents. Twenty-nine was immensely popular (I suck at it). Vishnoi, who assumed responsibility for teaching Vladlen the game, started with a stripped-down version and gradually introduced more complex rules as the evenings went by, until he happened to introduce some new rule that totally destroyed an exceptionally good hand held by Vladlen. "Fuck you!" screamed my venerable advisor, "There is no such rule!!! There is no such rule!!!"

Normally, we cook on treks ourselves, but this time the conditions were tough enough for us to assign the job to the porters (we took this decision after the first couple of days, and a subset of the staff pocketed extra shekels for this duty), and they did a great job, relatively speaking, for trek food is rarely palatable. The tomato/garlic soup and morning daliya were big hits.

(Part 7)

Yes, even bagpipes.

2006-09-22T00:59:00.000-07:00

AAK: He could play about 200 different instruments himself.

SH: Two hundred? Are there that many Indian instruments?

AAK: No, but he had left Bengal and studied Western classical music in Calcutta, so he knew things like saxophone, trumpet, the double bass, bagpipes....

SH: Bagpipes? In India?

AAK: Yes, even bagpipes.

...

SH: I have heard from other noted Indian musicians that it is common for aspiring musicians to do a kind of musical retreat -- a chilla -- where one spends forty days and nights in isolation, doing nothing but playing. Did you ever do that?

AAK: I did not need to. My father made me practice at least twelve hours a day for twenty years.

...

SH: Do you think if we could get, say, the leaders of India and Pakistan, or even of Israel and Palestine, together and force them to really listen to the right music they might see the importance of peace, and work things out?

AAK: Yes. I really do. And why not try this? I think even politicians who are also musicians are going to be more concerned with peace. Look at Clinton, his attitude to the world was different than those who came after him, or others. He had a tune in him.

SH: That's one way of looking at him (laughter).

...

SH: Do you like other kinds of music besides what you play?

AAK: Yes, I like Western classical music very much -- Bach and Beethoven. And sometimes country music.

SH: Country? You mean like Hank Williams and Willie Nelson and all that?

AAK: Yes. I like the melodies.

--

(Ali Akbar Khan, interviewed by Steve Heilig)

Kalindikhal - Part 5

2006-09-18T00:29:00.000-07:00

19 July (Nandanvan to Vasuki Tal, 7km): Woke up in the morning to find the sun out and Kedar Dome white and pristine on the other side of the Gangotri glacier, with Kedarnath peeking out behind it.

Here're a few more views of Nandanvan:

And here's our kitchen. Chandru and Chhota Govind did an incredible job manning it for most of the trip (with help from others), both in the morning and after a hard day's walk.

Our route today was chiefly along moraine ridges. Here are some pictures of the route. That's Panda taking a breather in the last picture.

And here are some of our fantastic porters:

We passed under what was probably Bhagirathi II (6512m), wrapped in cloud. The west face of Bhagirathi III, sandwiched between I and II and hanging over the Gangotri glacier, is one of the great "big walls" of the planet (see, for example, this site by Russian climbers). Here's a glimpse of B II (peer into the clouds in the top half):

We were walking along the Chaturangi glacier, a huge stream of broken ice covered with red rock...

... which developed light and dark streaks as we headed further upstream and tributaries joined it:

Apparently something like seven glaciers merge at this point. The white glacier in the bottom right of this picture is from Bhagirathi II (according to Vishnu). The picture looks in the direction of our route for the next couple of days (we took a left turn under the glaciated black peak in the distance).

The tricky portion of the day's walk was our second glacier crossing -- this time it was the Bhagirathi II glacier mentioned above. It took a long time and much zigzagging to cross, and then there was a steep and tricky moraine wall to climb up (the porters helpfully fixed a rope like a handrail).

(Look closely at the second picture and you can make us out crossing over.)

This was the last hurdle of the day, and on the other side of the glacier lay a beautiful green meadow surrounding Vasuki Tal (~4900m). The tal (lake) itself was singularly unimpressive, more a cold, dull pond than anything else.

The itinerary that Vishnoi had copied off the net read:

"Today's trek of 7 km takes us to the stunning Vasuki tal with blocks of ice floating in it. Also see stunning reflections of the mighty peaks in its waters."

Vladlen, whose Himalayan experience so far had chiefly consisted of cloud, fog, rubble and dull ice, kept repeating this caustically throughout the rest of the day. We ignored him and went off to climb some boulders.

(Part 6)

Silly pic

2006-09-07T15:48:00.000-07:00

LEFT HEAD: Oh quick, get the sword out. I want to cut his head off!
RIGHT HEAD: Oh, cut your own head off!
MIDDLE HEAD: Yes, do us all a favour!
LEFT HEAD: What?
RIGHT HEAD: Yapping on all the time.
MIDDLE HEAD: You're lucky. You're not next to him.
LEFT HEAD: What do you mean?
MIDDLE HEAD: You snore.
LEFT HEAD: Oh I don't -- anyway, you've got bad breath.
MIDDLE HEAD: Well it's only because you don't brush my teeth.
RIGHT HEAD: Oh stop bitching and let's go have tea.
LEFT HEAD: All right, all right, all right. We'll kill him first and then have tea and biscuits.
MIDDLE HEAD: Yes.
RIGHT HEAD: Oh, but not biscuits.
LEFT HEAD: All right, all right, not biscuits, but let's kill him anyway.
ALL HEADS: Right!

I was tagged by Tely. The object is to post a silly picture of yourself (preferably taken within the last few years) and tag others. I tag Bips, Bilu, 2gi, Apurva, TVAC, Satyaki, Nishit and Amrita, and solemnly resolve to avoid other tags in the future.

(California, 2006. With thanks to GC, JC, TG, EI, TJ, MP and Apple Computers, champions of silly pictures worldwide.)

Kalindikhal - Part 4

2006-09-07T03:56:00.000-07:00

18 July (Bhojbasa to Nandanvan, 12km): The morning was slightly clear. In other words, we actually got to see some peaks, mostly small ones though. Shivling and the Bhagirathi group were very elusive. Here's an ickle one at the side of the route:

And here's the Bhagirathi group, in a rare clearish moment:

After chai and some grub, we set out for Gaumukh, the head of the huge Gangotri glacier and the source of the Bhagirathi river. The glacier is continuously receding (global warming?) and so the walk from Bhojbasa has got longer and longer over the years. We tramped about 4 or 5 km along a rubbly path until we got to the immense wall of ice marking the end of the Gangotri glacier. Here are some pics:

Yes, everything in the top two-thirds of the first picture is ice. Rocks and bits of ice were constantly falling off the glacier into the water. While we were there, a car-sized chunk (possibly the one in the last picture) fell off with an almighty splash, soaking everyone around in a huge plume of ice-cold water. Thankfully we had moved out of range of the deluge a few minutes ago, and those in range seemed uninjured, though sodden and shivering.

After spending some time at Gaumukh, we headed up the lateral moraine (why must all moraines look like bombsites?) towards Nandanvan. We caught stunning views of the crevassed Gangotri glacier, and crossed rubble and sand. Here's some terrain (the "path" is on the left side of the picture):

At one point, the trail wound right under a huge landslide zone. I was walking alone, and decided enough was enough, and it would be suicidal to try to cross it alone. So I waited a good 20 mins or on top of a small hummock in the other direction (figuring this was the safest place to be if there was a slide) until Mahavir, one of our porters, turned up and we crossed together.

Our first glacier crossing followed shortly after. This was my first time on a glacier, and while everything seemed hunky dory there was the happy thought that if I fell and slid, I was headed straight for a churning, crashing stream 50 metres below. After some zigzagging, I found myself balancing on the edge of a drop of about 6 feet on sheer ice. I looked at Mahavir for directions. "Jump!" he yelled, "Don't let your feet leave the ground!" Both seemed impossible to accomplish together, so I consigned my soul to the afterworld and and tried a dainty little run down the steep slope. Needless to say, I slid and landed heavily (monstrously heavy backpack-heavily) on my feet, my knees feeling for a moment as if they'd popped their sockets. So much for the pleasures of glacier travel -- my knees grumbled accusingly. On the bright side, at least the slide hadn't extended all the way to catastrophe.

The less said about the last kilometre or so the better. In short, it was steep, and tough. I was realizing with every step that I was not quite as fit as I thought I was, and was pretty much in a daze, putting one foot above another. A couple of porters who had reached earlier came back and offered to help us with our loads, but I refused and plodded on. This got me into trouble with Vishnoi, who had sent the porters back and thought quite rightly that undue strain was not recommended. However, at least I got to Nandanvan, pack and all. Nandanvan (4337m) is a beautiful green meadow with rocks strewn around and little streams running through it. I was dog tired and altitude sick (splitting headache), and after a while drifted off to sleep without dinner.

(Part 5)

Kalindikhal - Part 3

2006-09-01T14:04:00.000-07:00

(The big delay between parts 2 and 3 was because I spent 3-4 useless days shopping for an used car. The thingummy has been bought (a black '98 Volkswagen Jetta), so back to blogging again.)

17 July (Gangotri to Bhojbasa, 14km): Breakfast in the city, returned to find Panda was down with a wonky tummy. Vishnoi would start out with him a couple of hours after us. So we divided up the kerosene...

... and set out, past the temple (where Vishnu, our guide, offered a brief puja).

The route runs up the right bank (looking downstream) of the Bhagirathi. After a kilometre or so, there's a little checkpost where a guard checks your permits and levies a fee based on how many days you're going to camp higher up. Dialogue ensues:

Guard: Aap kahan ja rahein hain? (Where are you going?)
Us: [innocently] Tapovan.
Guard: [suspiciously, looking at our massive backpacks] Tapovan?
Us: Haan. (Yes.)
Guard: Sach bataiye, aap Kalindi Pass ja rahe hain na? (Tell me the truth, you're going to Kalindi Pass, aren't you?)
Us: Nahi bhaisaab, hum Tapovan ja rahe hain. Teen din ka rasta. (No Boss, we're going to Tapovan. Three days' journey.)
Guard: Hmmm.

Well, in the end I think he did charge us only three days' fee, since he had no way of disproving our claim that we were going to Tapovan, which is just one day's march beyond Gaumukh. But my memory is a little rusty in my old age.

Here are a few pics from the route. It's pretty much like this throughout upto Bhojbasa, the camp before Gaumukh. The peak in the distance in the second picture is Bhagirathi II. Clouds made it impossible (from my position at least) to see Shivling.

Plenty of saffron, too :P.

Nice guys, this lot. We must've hit the height of the kavde season -- there were hordes and hordes of them off to Gaumukh with their two little jerrycans to collect the holy water.

After a rather landslidey stretch, we made it to Bhojbasa, at about 3650m. Vladlen promptly started doing some weird stretching exercises which he'd no doubt picked up from his hobby: dancing. I don't know whether this had a "come hither" effect or not, but he did manage to attract the attention of another firang, Yaniv, who turned out to be Israeli too, and had spent time in India and picked up "thoda thoda" Hindi. A very sweet chap. He was going to Tapovan. The two started jabbering in Hebrew...

... while we attacked the tea and pitched camp a short distance downhill and upstream from the line of teastalls, beyond the GMVN and the ashram. We were getting a little worried about Panda and Vishnoi, since it was almost dark and they were about a couple of hours behind us, so we sent some staff members back to look for them with torches. We were relieved when they turned up after some time.

(Part 4)

2006-08-23T04:54:00.000-07:00

Pothi padh padh kar jag mua, pandit bhayo na koye;
Dhai aakhar prem ke, jo padhe so pandit hoye.

Kalindikhal - Part 2

2006-08-15T12:21:00.000-07:00

16 July: Woke up early and went off to have breakfast somewhere in the city. Here are some misc. snaps from Uttarkashi.

We then loaded all our stuff onto a jeep (hard work! phew!) and moved out of Uttarkashi. Here's what an overloaded jeep looks like.

Halfway to Gangotri, we ran into this little shop with this awesome hoarding. Do click to enlarge it and read all of the writing.

But a little further ahead, we found the road blocked by a landslide. Tons of rock had been swept onto the road, and the rain had compounded the crime by bringing down a river of sludgy mud over it that threatened to immobilize any vehicle that tried to venture across it.

Apparently a bulldozer was on its way, but while we waited for it, some folks on both sides of the divide decided a little honest labour couldn't do any harm. So in a steady drizzle, people squelched around in the muck moving huge rocks and boatloads of mud with one crowbar, one length of webbing and a plentiful supply of bare hands. We all chipped in, some very enthusiastically wading right into the thick of things (literally), and some two-wheelers did manage to find a narrow reasonably solid route across (left) (with liberal amounts of pushing and pulling involved in each transit), but after a good part of an hour the effort waned and we decided stone-throwing competitions were a better way to while away time (right).

The bulldozer did finally turn up, a huge yellow caterpillar-tracked monster that ploughed purposefully through the debris. The huge quantity of earth it displaced with each pass showed very effectively just how futile our manual labour had been :).

And so on to Gangotri, a town perched at 3048m right above a chasm of rock through which the Bhagirathi thunders down after hurtling over a shelf.

You really have to stand on the bridge or one of the little platforms above this spot (right in front of the GMVN at Gangotri) to get an idea of the unimaginable force of a huge volume of water (a good fraction of the Ganga's flow at Haridwar) forced through an opening a couple of metres wide.

A nocturnal visit to the temple nearly resulted in a fight with a couple of self-appointed temple "guards". Thankfully, the situation was diffused before half the town was called into the fray.

(Part 3)

Kalindikhal - Part 1

2006-08-11T13:25:00.000-07:00

(This is the first part of a report on our recent trek to Kalindikhal, a 5947m pass connecting Gangotri and Badrinath in the Garhwal Himalayas. Dramatis personae: (Ravindra) Vishnoi, (Mrutyunjaya) Panda, Ajay (Singh), Vladlen (Koltun, my unfortunate PhD advisor), (Harpreet S.) "Happy" (Grover), me. The pictures were shot by all of us.)

Okay, so this story needs a prelude: if you're going to Kalindikhal, you need official permission from the "authorities". The latter is ill-defined. If you go to the Indian Mountaineering Federation (IMF), they will direct you to the District Magistrate (DM) of Uttarkashi, the district which contains the trek route. If you go to the Uttarkashi DM, he, pleading absence from his office, might direct you back to the IMF, or hand you over, like a sacrificial lamb, to his hierarchy of minions. After much running-around, we ended up having to get permits from both the IMF and the Uttarkashi DM. The IMF is mercifully in Delhi, and two of us were from Gurgaon, reasonably close by. The Uttarkashi affair was a nightmare, though -- read on.

14 & 15 July: Landed at Delhi airport at around 10pm after a disgustingly long flight across the Pacific and was met by a turbocharged Vladlen announcing that he had lost his luggage. Argued at length with Continental groundstaff (a pair of hassled-looking females) who hemmed and hawed and finally told us the stuff had been loaded onto the next day's flight. We filled up a claim form and morosely chugged over to the domestic airport to pick up Vishnoi, who was arriving from Bangalore. Minutes after Vishnoi's flight landed, we received word from Continental that some git had actually made off with Vladlen's pack by mistake, and had returned it, and could we please come and collect it? They didn't explain why their database insisted it was coming the next day, and we didn't ask. End result, the pack was restored to its owner and we all rolled along to Gurgaon in various stages of sleep-deprivation (Vishnoi: negligible, me: slightly less negligible, Vladlen: extreme).

Now we had to present ourselves in person at the Uttarkashi DM's office before it closed for Sunday, so we packed in record time and somehow bunged ourselves into an Innova in the wee hours of the same night. This is what the packing chaos (food, tents, stove, utensils, rope, sleeping bags, clothes...) in Panda and Happy's apartment looked like just before we abandoned it.

That's Vishnoi, Panda, Happy, the driver and Jeet (who'd popped in to see us off) from left to right. Vladlen was checking mail in the next room and Ajay had been sent off to Uttarkashi to initiate negotiations three days earlier.

The car trundled on through the night and the early hours of the morning through Haryana and Uttaranchal, making a forced detour because the direct road had been blocked to allow unending streams of "kavdes" (pilgrims) to walk their way from all over North India to Gangotri-Gaumukh to collect the water of the Ganga from its source. Only notable incident in a largely sleep-dominated drive: Vladlen getting out to piss in a large crop-field and returning to comment, "I'm sure you know this already, but we're standing in a sea of pot." If he was to be believed, cannabis did seem very popular indeed in those endless farmlands :).

We reached Haridwar sometime in the morning, where we switched to a 4WD car and Vladlen took suspicious bites off my roasted bhutta (corn) and succumbed to the guilty pleasures of roadside nimbu pani (he religiously stuck to mineral water wherever available otherwise).

From Haridwar on to Uttarkashi, passing the Tehri dam (left picture: reservoir behind the dam) and lunching at a little restaurant with a fabulous rear verandah view (right picture). It was overcast and everything was lush green.

Enter bureaucratic mayhem. We arrived at Uttarkashi to find that Ajay had spent three frustrating days arguing with the DM's minions (more encouragingly, he had also located a trekking company which would provide a guide, porters and extra equipment). At the Intelligence Unit (ha ha) hideout, we spent an hour fighting our urge to plug an old idiot who kept stalling us on one stupid pretext after another, the last being a clause somewhere in the official literature which stated that "a team of fewer than four foreigners is not allowed to trek to Kalindikhal". Now we had one non-Indian, Vladlen, but there were five more of us and we were sure (read, "eager to prove") that the clause applied only to all-foreign teams and not to our group! The offices closed one by one as the evening approached, we phoned and visited all sorts of officers in their homes, we used a contact in the IAS to "persuade" the Uttarkashi DM via the Haridwar DM, we alternately sweet-talked and bullied the minions, and finally, hallelujah, managed to get the forms signed by the CO and the SDM. The aforementioned old guy was left in the lurch in the process, but we were not particularly sympathetic.

Left picture: Us accompanying the minion with our application file (on the right) from one office to another half a kilometre away. That's Ajay in shorts on the left. Right picture: The SDM signing our forms. That room also functioned as a courtroom with a little fenced-off witness-box and everything, by the way.

Statutory warning: To go on treks like this which approach the China border, be prepared to deal with bureaucratic shit. It's way more draining than actually walking.

Duty done, we trundled into a dharamshala stunningly located right beside the raging Bhagirathi. Here're our verandah view reflected in a mirror (left) and the temple next door (right).

Ajay, Panda and I went to the office of Snow Spider Trek & Tour, our support staff and equipment providers, to pick out six pairs of mountaineering boots in our sizes for the pass day (they insisted we'd be better off with them although it was just about possible to do the snowbound pass in normal hiking boots, and they were right) and talk about an extra stove, kerosene et al. We then grabbed dinner and drifted off into much-needed sleep.

(Part 2)

Sea-level is at 4000m :)

2006-07-29T02:32:00.000-07:00

That, at least, was the recurring joke on our just-concluded trek across Kalindikhal (5947m), a glaciated pass connecting the pilgrimage towns of Gangotri and Badrinath in the Garhwal Himalayas. It's hard, long, beautiful, and strictly not to be tried at home. Am back in Gurgaon now, and there's definitely too much oxygen in the air here. More pictures and report coming in a week.

(Update: The broadband is finally here, but certain personal matters will keep me from Blogger for a couple more days. Apologies to all who've been waiting for pics. They'll be here soon, I promise.)

Group at Kalindikhal
L to R, Back row: Ajay, Vladlen, Vishnu, Happy, Vishnoi, Panda, Chandru, Panditji
Front row: Me, Chhote Govind, Bade Govind, Balbir, Gagan, Narendra
Not in picture: Mahavir

2006-07-09T15:04:00.000-07:00

I am deeply troubled.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/world_cup_2006/4991652.stm

PS: Auf wiedersehen, Oliver Kahn.

The prodigal returns

2006-06-12T04:05:00.000-07:00

Firing all booster rockets, I have made a successful re-entry to the blogosphere. While still in orbit, I made a trip to Sedona, Arizona, supposedly for this, but actually for this. I have come to the following conclusion: Arizona is hot, dusty, and littered with large red rocks and small scrubby trees. Trees so small, in fact, that it's easy to believe you're looking at them from much higher than you actually are. These pictures illustrate the aforementioned.

I also ate rattlesnake. Strips. Deep-fried. Tasted like a small, chewy version of kurkure. Something more substantial was expected. Anti-climax.

On to better things. In 1952, Henri Cartier-Bresson published a small book called "Images a la Sauvette" ("Images on the Run"), aka "The Decisive Moment". It had the following to commend it: a cover by Matisse (below), a short introduction that is still the last word on the philosophy of the camera, and 126 black-and-white photographs. For some unknown reason, the book is out of print and copies (usually in tattered condition because of the substandard binding) are hard and shockingly expensive to come by.

Cover of "The Decisive Moment" by Henri Matisse

For the sake of us mortals who do not have potloads of shekels to dish out on a wad of paper, a great soul has scanned the entire book and uploaded it on the web. I have no idea how long this will remain online, and my sincere advice to you is to read it asap. If there is one book of photos you should ever look at in your life, this is definitely it. As a human document, it has never been bettered.

Il n'y a rien en ce monde qui n'ait un moment décisif
-- Cardinal de Retz, quoted by Henri Cartier-Bresson

Sing, sing and sing

2006-05-09T21:46:00.000-07:00

"He had been told to sing for just one hour," reminisces Srinivas. And after one hour, he peeped into the side wings and pleaded: "Just one more piece." Even as Dr. Talwalkar was saying a firm "No", he had resumed. Mansur wouldn't stop even after two-and-a-half hours. "Talwalkar just walked on to the stage and switched off the mike and took him away."

"He had overcome the fear of death completely. The only thing he longed for was to sing, sing and sing."

Read the full article here.

Minishpot

2006-05-07T01:58:00.000-07:00

Waterfall Cove
Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park, Big Sur, California

Don't try this at home

2006-05-01T05:18:00.000-07:00

This has got to be one of the craziest and most bonehead things to do, ever. Dan Osman climbs 400 feet of vertical 5.7 rock in less than 4 and a half minutes. Without a rope or any climbing aid. It's called speed-soloing, aka lunacy. I'm nuts to even post this video link, but I'll do it all the same.

http://broadbandsports.com/node/203

He jumps up for inch-wide holds 300 feet off the ground. Yes, jumps. As in both hands off the rock. Sick, isn't it?

PS: For the record, Osman is no longer with us. No, he didn't die soloing. He went trying to jump 1100 feet off a cliff tethered only to a climbing rope. The rope broke. So did Osman.

PPS: Here's a discussion regarding Osman's death (and life) on a rock-climbing forum. The comments can be extended to the ethics of free-soloing (climbing alone, without protection) in general. I'm not picking sides here -- your opinions are invited.

Here's one reason...

2006-04-25T22:32:00.000-07:00

... why you should go to Sikkim.

Gocha Peak and the south-east face of Kanchenjungha, from a viewpoint near Gocha La, May 2005
(IIT Kanpur Adventure Sports Club trip)

PS: For a sense of scale, the S. Summit of K'jungha (in jetstream) is a little over 3.5 vertical km above us.

Photo courtesy Alok Sharan

Shreyansh has lots of other good reasons.

Rob McFarlane's recent book, Mountains of the Mind, tries to answer what exactly about mountains draws people to them so strongly. Judiciously mixing personal anecdotes and well-researched historical accounts, he presents an enthralling narrative, albeit slightly dated in its scope. The best part of the book is the section on the author's trip to the Tien Shan, camped on a glacier surrounded by unnamed peaks and utter desolation. McFarlane ends in slightly cliched fashion with a chapter on George Mallory, who died during his third Everest attempt and has come to symbolize man's obsession with the high mountains. Expedition colleague Noel Odell recalls that on June 8, 1924:

"The entire Summit Ridge and final peak of Everest were unveiled. My eyes became fixed on one tiny black spot silhouetted on a small snow-crest beneath a rock step in the ridge; the black spot moved. Another black spot became apparent and moved up the snow to join the other on the crest. The first then approached the great Rock Step and shortly emerged at the top; the second did likewise. Then the whole fascinating vision vanished, enveloped in cloud once more."

Neither Mallory nor his climbing companion Andrew Irvine were ever seen alive again, and whether they reached the summit or not (29 years before Hillary and Tenzing) is the greatest open question of mountaineering history (to add fuel to the fire, Mallory's petrified body was recently discovered on the talus slopes of Everest above 8000m).

A very good book, and unusual in its objective.

Kaun?

2006-04-16T22:53:00.000-07:00

They're nice guys, really...

... but they sometimes go onstage too.

Indian Ocean, Live at Foothill College, Los Altos, CA.

Random snaps

2006-04-09T03:11:00.000-07:00

From San Jose and Stanford:

And today I finally sold my soul to the devil and photographed the tourist "ishpot" in Stanford -- the Oval, with the Memorial Quad and the Memorial Church beyond it. This place is filled all day with click-happy tourists (mostly, for some reason, South-East Asian) and sunbathers. It's not uncommon to spot a wedding party either. And that phallic symbol is the Hoover Tower, named after Herbert Hoover, one of those US presidents who didn't go to war in Iraq.

From the concert hall

2006-04-05T20:28:00.000-07:00

Padmavati Shaligram, 87-year-young doyenne of the Jaipur-Atrauli gharana, performed at the ITC-SRA Sangeet Sammelan last November. I know certain readers have reservations about this institution, but there's no disputing the fact that they have excellent concerts and put some very fine stuff online. So do check out the videos of this still amazing singer -- Nand (the traditional favourite "E bari sainyan sakala bana bana ke"), Jaijayanti ("Kahiye sakhi shyam sundar so"), Pilu and Pahadi. Listen to those pinpoint, soaring aakar taans and remind yourself (possibly with some difficulty) that this lady has spent seventy-five years on the stage.

In my last years of school, our house got an extension and I got the resulting room on the roof. I had scrounged up enough cash from birthday money et al to buy a cheapo double-deck music system, and that sustained me for many many solitary hours. There used to be this radio programme on Monday mornings which played classical songs and popular numbers based on them -- and it had this incredibly irritating host whose voice I couldn't stand. So after recording everything I used to painstakingly clip out just the track announcements and join them with the songs themselves. If you've never done deck-to-deck editing of raw radio recordings (or physically transferred entire reels from one cassette shell to another) you haven't lived :). There were also a couple of boxes of gramophone records and a cranky player with speakers which frequently had to be banged hard to stop a strange humming noise whose provenance I have yet to discover.

After long evenings usefully spent examining the ceiling of that room, Padmavati's Nand was pretty much my standard bedtime music. Switch off the lights, turn it on, wait for oblivion. The voice has lost a little of its mellifluity now, but who's complaining?

Just another song

2006-04-03T08:59:00.000-07:00

Abhishek Singh of UIUC recently sent me a recording of Ulhas Kashalkar singing Nat Kamod at a SPIC-MACAY concert at Urbana-Champaign in 2004. Ulhas also sang Kaushi Kanada, Shankara, Kafi, Desh and Bhairavi that night, but the Nat Kamod is the piece de resistance, and brought back so many memories. The classic bandish "Nevar baju re" with its dramatic octave-spanning gamak leading up to the sam has seen many great renditions in the past. Laxmibai Jadhav's drut version is busy, sparky, with little pause for thought. Mallikarjun Mansur takes a more relaxed approach, his trademark gamak-laced bol-taans highlighting the region around the sam. Kesarbai Kerkar produces probably the classic rendition, a masterpiece of warm, fluid waves of sound washing over one another with the nyas on individual notes and the prolonged aakaar taans going just that little bit further than seems humanly possible. Ulhas' version follows the Kesarbai mould, not quite in the same class but seeking the same sense of delayed climax and drawn-out, modulated sentiment (he also has a very pretty drut, "Sachi kaho tum", but let that pass).

But the rendition that sticks in my mind most is from the Agra fold, by Sharafat Hussain Khan. I first heard it on a tape of the AIR National Programme broadcast a week after Sharafat's death in 1985, sandwiched between, I think, a Kafi Kanada and a Khamaj thumri (the classic "Na manoongi"). I have never heard anything to equal his attack on the sam in this bandish: the andolan on the word "nevar" has to be heard to be believed. And really, other than maybe Faiyyaz Khan himself, only Sharafat could have pulled it off without reducing it to machine-gun chatter. It's been a long time since I heard that version, locked away on a cassette at home, and my current three minute mp3 is probably a different recording.

Here's a link to the Kesarbai version, if anyone's interested.

Some sam!

2006-04-01T10:35:00.000-08:00

Ustad Allauddin Khan (sarod), Ustad Ali Akbar Khan (sarod), Shri Nikhil Banerjee (sitar), Pandit Kanthe Maharaj (tabla), Shri Ashutosh Bhattacharya (tabla), Shri Aashish Khan (tanpura)
Tansen Sangeet Sammelan, Calcutta, 1952

Photo courtesy Shen Flindell

CA-1 and Santa Cruz

2006-03-27T19:26:00.000-08:00

Day Two of Spring Break. At 2am, we sauntered out from the cinema hall after watching "Inside Man" (the 2006 one with Denzel Washington, Jodie Foster, Christopher Plummer, Willem Dafoe, Clive Owen... not to be confused with previous flicks with similar names), animatedly arguing over whether this was a good or a bad movie (I enjoyed it, btw). To all my desi friends, please please please watch this flick :P. I swear you'll have your money's worth in the first five minutes, and I refuse to tell you why. Just trust me, and don't read the reviews in case of spoilers. Again, GO WATCH THIS MOVIE!!!

Since I am nocturnal these days, I stayed up the night doing nothing, planning to crash in the afternoon. Afternoon arrives, and I find myself packed into a car heading off to the beach. "We'll only be there a few minutes," I'm told. Oh well. Since it's best to be prepared, I have armed myself with a polariser and a car charger for the camera batteries.

CA-1 is the classic drive in California. It runs parallel to the coast, with mountains on one side and the Pacific on the other. To get there from Palo Alto, you follow CA-84 as it winds through the mountains until you run into the sea. Unfortunately, the night-out takes its toll and I am fast asleep inside the car as the rest of the party check out our first stop at a lighthouse. The view from Stop Two is so stunning, however, that I somehow jerk off the sleepiness and waddle out with the camera. Here's what we saw (CA-1 is the sliver of road to the left of the picture, running all the way down the coast).

So we drive on and on and on down the coast, checking out bikers and parasurfers and kite-flyers...

... until we discover we're 11 miles from Santa Cruz. Seems a shame not to go all the way, we opine. So southwards and onwards!

This, by the way, is Santa Cruz...

... which has insect life, bird life, inscribed benches and a casino.

The crazily dressed women were having their photo taken, btw. We had snacks from a stall on the beach, where there was a rollercoaster and this crazy thing that was like a seat that bounced up and down 50 feet or so vertically. The sort of thing that makes your tummy hit the top of your head in free fall. There were people sitting around...

... and people winding up for the day, such as Shaheen, a caricaturist, and Kara, who sold juice or icecream or something.

Samantak is to be credited with spotting Kara, who is by far the cutest (though not necessarily the hottest) girl I've seen in some time (if certain people are reading this, "some time" does not include pre-yankland days), and bringing our attention to the matter with the words: "I've just seen a girl who looks exactly like Natalie Portman". So I went up and asked her if I could take her pic, and she grinned and said yes, and I was probably so kicked that I blurred the first shot, and overexposed the second by a stop (without noticing it until later). The second was salveagable, though.

Long drive back, followed by homemade chilli chicken and much-needed sleep.

Haight-Ashbury, SF

2006-03-26T04:21:00.000-08:00

Spring Break started today, so we drove up to San Francisco via I-280. We had planned to go to Union Square, but stopped over at Haight-Ashbury on the way (were very lucky to find some parking, on a steep slope!) and never quite made it to the square. Wikipedia says:

The Haight-Ashbury's elaborately detailed 19th-century multi-story wooden houses became a haven for hippies during the 1960s, due to the availability of cheap Victorian properties for rent in the district and the bohemian subculture that subsequently flourished there.

It gained a reputation as a center of illegal drug culture, especially with the use of marijuana. The area was thus sometimes known as The Hashbury, but, ca. 1967, its fame chiefly rested on the fact that it became the neighborhood of choice for a number of important psychedelic rock performers and groups of the mid-1960s. Acts like the Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin, who all lived a short distance from the famous intersection, not only immortalized the scene in song, but knew many within the community as friends and family. Its mystique was further enhanced by the 1967 Scott MacKenzie hit "San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair)," written by The Mamas & the Papas member John Phillips.

Today the district has lost little of its status as a center of alternative lifestyles, though much has changed. The area still maintains a lot of its bohemian atmosphere, it has become a major tourist attraction and has experienced the effects of gentrification to some degree. Perhaps the best illustration of the district's slide into the mainstream is the presence of a Gap store, a major international retailer that (ironically) started in San Francisco in the late 60's, now fallen to mixed reviews by the city's trendy inhabitants. Though the Gap and Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream are now located at the famous Haight-Ashbury intersection, the neighborhood remains a thriving center of independent local business. It is home to a number of independent restaurants and bars, as well as clothing, smoke, and record shops, including Amoeba Music: San Francisco's largest new and used record store, as well as shops catering to anything retro, nuevo, or strange. The cohabitation between throw-backs to the fifties lounge scene, organic and spiritual new age, the hardcore punk of the 70's and beyond is one of the neighborhood's most interesting and endearing aspects.

We wandered around, had a cup of coffee, went into some crazy little shops. Took a lot of pictures, and had a a couple of interesting encounters while doing so (one of the subjects thought (mistakenly!) that I was asking her out, and informed me very sweetly, pointing to the first floor of a shop, that her boyfriend was "up there"). Here are a few pics, then -- all taken with a 50/1.4, in available light, mostly at ISO 1600.

Echoes?

2006-03-22T02:30:00.000-08:00

Rodin

Magritte

Say hello to my little friend

2006-03-18T02:17:00.000-08:00

"Self-portrait", Pentax *ist DL, 2006

(And now for the subtext. This is the cheapest (non-eBay), the smallest, and nearly the lightest DSLR on the market. That's the good. The better is, it feels right -- as compared to the Canon Rebel XT (both the name and the construction somehow feel substandard) and the Nikon D50 (the handgrip didn't fit my hand as well and the viewfinder is smaller). My old screwmount lens works fine on it with an adapter. It takes AA batteries as well as NiMH and CR-V3's. Image quality is acceptable. The new lens, a 50/1.4 SMCP-FA scaled by the crop factor to a portraitish 75mm, is very nice. All in all, it's clean, unobtrusive, down-to-earth and definitely not scary, unlike this or this.)

A Certain Sense

2006-03-12T02:21:00.000-08:00

(Image courtesy Payel, words courtesy Jibanananda Das)

Sights and Sounds #1

2006-03-05T13:38:00.000-08:00

Since we think clicking little buttons on little boxes is a good thing, whether to take a picture or to jump to a webpage, here are some new photography links.

Mike Johnston's blog is updated daily and keeps up a running commentary on photographs, photographers and (sigh!) gear. He's currently listing his choices for the Top Ten Photos of all time -- count down one every Tuesday, with #9 expected tomorrow (#10 was Edward Weston's classic "Pepper No. 30"). Mike doesn't pixel-peep -- thank God for that. Plus, he likes small, simple, reliable, unobtrusive (and cheap? we wish, but he likes Leicas too) cameras, and the candid snapshots that are usually associated with such boxes. More power to him.

The Candid Frame has podcasts of interviews with photographers. There are only two so far, but it's an interesting project and we hope the list will grow. Meanwhile, a well-established institution is The Digital Journalist, a wonderful online newsletter of photojournalism across the world. Humanist, quirky, disturbing, bold, these are the pictures which tell the everyday story of the world we live in. The current issue features, among other things, a tribute to Olivier Rebbot, killed on assignment in El Salvador in 1981, and a review of a documentary on Henri Cartier-Bresson.

David Burnett, a veteran photojournalist who worked with Time and Life magazines before co-founding Contact Press Images, has an enviable been-there-done-that portfolio, with the true master's nack of being at the right place at the right time. However, what really stands out is his distinctly individual and striking sports photography from numerous Olympics, both summer and winter. Oh and he's apparently doing quite well shooting with Holgas nowadays :).

And while on the subject of Holgas and other such extreme machines, here's what might, if you will, be called the Digital Holga. Or how about Holga 1Dz Mark III?

Sebastiao Salgado: Concerned Photography

2006-02-23T16:07:00.000-08:00

Sebastiao Salgado's work embodies, perhaps more than that of any other contemporary artist, a social conscience. Salgado is one of the truly great living photographers -- not just because he takes aesthetically pleasing pictures but because he has chosen to document humanity as a mobile, stratified, working, conflicting, suffering, regenerative entity with a talent for both self-destruction and survival. The names of his projects indicate the nature of his work: Man in Distress, Other Americas, An Uncertain Grace, Workers, Migrations. "What I want in my pictures is not that they'll look like art objects," he says. "They are journalist pictures. All my pictures. No exceptions."

They are, however, art objects. Sombre, insightful, desolate, rooted poetry in black and white. Such as this picture of a Rwandan refugee camp in Tanzania.

Or this one from Bosnia.

In the introduction to Migrations, he wrote, "More than ever, I feel that the human race is one. There are differences of colour, language, culture and opportunities, but people's feelings and reactions are alike. People flee wars to escape death, they migrate to improve their fortunes, they build new lives in foreign lands, they adapt to extreme hardship..." Salgado's camera has documented deprivation, displacement and labour like no other. He does not revel in the incisive flashes of wit of a Cartier-Bresson -- instead, he stresses thematic unity and the humanitarian angle. He can shock and disturb (see, for example, his photographs of famine in the Sahel), but he is never didactic or sentimental.

Here are some more of his pictures, from Brazil, China, Sudan, Ecuador, India and elsewhere.

Online exhibitions of Sebastiao Salgado's photographs may be found at:

Stretch Less Down Under

2006-02-12T00:42:00.000-08:00

In my neverending quest for universal brotherhood, world peace and free beer for all, I have come across this remarkable product that "prevents and even cures unsightly stretch marks", whose "natural, herbal formula goes to work instantly on problem spots, revealing your healthy, glowing beauty". According to the advertiser,

The key to our extraordinary formula is EMU oil. This is the same natural ingredient used for centuries by Australian aborigines in the scorching, harsh climate of the Australian Outback. We combine it with the healing, moisturizing effects of Aloe, avocado oil, squalene and vitamins A, E and B – all pure ingredients with the transforming properties that give you smooth, supple skin, resistant to the ravages of pregnancy and the extreme stretching of weight gain.

Incredible, but true. Whoever knew the emus had it in them? Or, for that matter, the aborigines? David Beckham may have hung up his "kangaroo boots" but there's fight in the ol' outback yet!

This, by the way, is an emu:

Ultra StretchAway is 100% guaranteed to work!
Try it for yourself! You and your partner will delight in the results.

Indeed. Perhaps I should relocate to Australia and make my millions in koala-sweat or cassowary-guano. Ever since the Gold Rush got rid of half the swag and the dot.coms took care of the other half, California has been feeling a little, uh, empty?

And his ghost may be heard as it sings in the billabong,
"Who'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?"

The Strings Broke Long Ago...

2006-01-27T22:21:00.000-08:00

Photo: Ira Landgarten (C)

On January 27, 1986, the world lost one of its finest musicians at the young age of 54. Pandit Nikhil Banerjee, the quiet, unassuming sitar virtuoso, passed away two days after he had played Darbari Kanada and Hemant at the Dover Lane Music Conference in Calcutta despite severe illness. It was his younger daughter Devdutta's birthday -- a relative had arrived with a cake for the little girl. Panditji got up to greet the guest and collapsed immediately. The fingers that he had punished into unreal command over his instrument would glide over it no more.

"Mr. Banerjee", as he liked to be called, was a musician's musician. Uncompromising in his performances, he brought to the stage an unparalleled level of commitment, focus and tayyari (preparation). His leisurely alaaps, elaborate gatkari and blinding taans have rarely been equalled. But he also maintained a strongly individual presence, distinct from his illustrious contemporaries Pandit Ravi Shankar and Ustad Vilayat Khan. In the words of Ustad Ali Akbar Khan:

"The style of alaap of our gharana -- unhurried, steady -- has always been present in his alaaps. But the truly personal element of his playing was his "feeling". Music is essentially sa-re-ga-ma, there is nothing beyond it. But that "feeling" is a truly individual achievement. And Nikhil had just that. You could call it his personal "touch" or "behaviour" in his playing. Of course, the road has to be shown by the guru. So one can say that by travelling on the road shown by Baba [Ustad Allauddin Khan] Nikhil has found his own road."

Mr Banerjee's few recorded interviews give us a glimpse into the life of a man who devoted everything he had to the singleminded pursuit of music, elevating it from a performing art to a profound spiritual quest, far beyond commercial concerns and gharana rivalries (perhaps his most unique achievement was that nearly every performing musician loved him). In one of these interviews, he says:

"In India, [music] was practised to know the Supreme Truth. It is not only for the entertainment of the people, no. When we play for the people -- perhaps I cannot play that beautiful music, but I try -- but idea is to lift up the mind of the listeners, and place them in front of the space, or you know, you can say God, you can say power, you can say energy... You have seen perhaps, specially in Western music, Western musicians in their old age, they take their instruments and go to church and play. It is not the church or the building. He is playing not for the public, but for something else. Because through music you can earn lot of money, fame, but that cannot give you satisfaction of mind. Your mind can only be satisfied when you play for the something else and tell that, you know, this is what I want to express through my music. So it is said in India that my music cannot see Him or touch Him, but my music touches His feet."

Nikhil Banerjee passed away long before I had the remotest interest in classical music. I first heard him in a concert recording of Hem Behag, with Pandit Kishen Maharaj on the tabla, a performance so astonishing that I was hooked for life. Years later, during the festival of Durga Puja, I was travelling in a taxi through the jam-packed Calcutta streets when I heard it again, floating above the milling crowds from some unknown source. I have not forgotten that sound.

Mr Banerjee, it is twenty years since you left us to play closer to the feet of the Something Else. Thank you for the notes you left behind.

********

Throughout the weekend, Nikhil Banerjee will play on Besur Betal Betar.

For more on Mr. Banerjee, the following websites may be useful:

John Cosgrave's tribute page
John Wilton's Raga Records, with a long interview by Ira Landgarten.

Also, Swapan Bandyopadhyay's biography of Nikhil Banerjee, "Taar Chhnide Gechhe Kobe" ("The Strings Broke Long Ago", Ananda Publishers, 1994) makes good reading, albeit in a very overdramatic style. Only in Bengali, I'm afraid -- let's see if I can post a translation.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

2006-01-23T01:48:00.000-08:00

All India Radio's archival releases of Ustad Allauddin Khan now playing on Besur Betal Betar. Jaijayanti, Emni Bilawal, Gara, Paraj Basant, Malhar ke Prakar, Chhayanat, Puriya Dhaneshree, Alhaiya Bilawal, Basant and Bhairavi. All recordings are from 1959-60, and most are approximately half an hour long.

Went skiing over the weekend at Lake Tahoe, as a rank novice. Fell over a number of times (which was fun) but also managed clean runs and very gentle parallels on the easy slopes (which was better). Nice drives out and back, with some hairily skiddy stretches on thin snow (esp. at night when the dividers on the road were well-nigh invisible). Carson Pass was high, cold and snowy. Our cabin porch was overhung with a row of long icicles and everything pretty much everywhere for miles around was buried in billowing piles of snow.

Spotted

2006-01-13T02:34:00.000-08:00

... on the cover of a DVD of "Mr. and Mrs. Iyer":

... One Is a Married Traditional South Indian Brahmin Mrs. Meenakshi Iyer. The Other, a Suave Single Wildwife Photographer...

If you've seen the film, I guess the typo is even funnier. I wish I was Rahul Bose.

New York, New York

2006-01-01T06:50:00.000-08:00

My New York pictures are here! Woohoo! Got them developed and scanned at Wolf Camera, which far exceeded my expectations (my last roll went through Walmart) albeit at a price. Here are some of the tolerable ones:

The film was Kodak black-and-white 400 ASA, processed in C-41 chemistry (and no, it was not T-Max, it didn't seem to have a name, in fact). I'm quite pleased with it. Here are a few more shots, of my cousin's family -- please note the beautiful behaviour of the film both outdoors (first two) and indoors (last two):

And finally, this is the Memorial Auditorium at Stanford, shot in evening light. Grain? What grain? :)

More new odds and ends, in both colour and black-and-white, at my Flickr page. Mostly portraits, some street shots.

PS: Ho ho ho I have this crazy Pentacon glass
At 50/1.8 it's an old normal with some class
It's razorsharp yet smooth on skin
And fills the greys from thick to thin
It's twenty-five years old and yet, it's not for sale, alas :P

Same Great Menu (Since 1988)

2005-12-29T04:28:00.000-08:00

The first page of the menu at the Palo Alto Creamery, at the crossing of Emerson and Hamilton Streets:

Welcome to the Palo Alto Creamery! In 1923 the Peninsula Dairy opened this place, and through the years it has managed to survive. Although the faces of our servers have changed, the original concept remains the same: Great Food... Great Shakes... Reasonable Prices. We know you all miss the grumpy old waitresses who used to bicker all day long. Somehow we just know this place never would have made it without them.

There are a few things we would like to set the record straight on. Please don't ask how old the girls are, you know the ones, because we don't know. And about those 15c shakes: Get real! Chances are we don't remember "way back when" you first started coming here, but we're glad to see some things never change.

The bathrooms are now downstairs and no, we don't have a pay phone, never mind a FAX. About the music, well, the records are so old they play at different volumes, sometimes loud, sometimes not so loud. Oh well, as they say at the counter, that's life. Maybe we don't do everything the way you like, but we'll do our best. If that's not good enough make us an offer we can't refuse!

We love to see all of you, but you could come in a little more often.

P.S. If you're not from Palo Alto this probably won't make any sense.

I had a massive brunch (three scrambled eggs with diced ham, bacon and sausages, home fries and buttered rye, washed down with coffee) here today. Yum yum.

Radio Jaijayanti

2005-12-16T01:50:00.000-08:00

Ladies, Gentlemen and Beloved Children Below the Age of Three,

The "Tolly Nullah Bachao Andolan" (est. 1972) is pleased to present a fundraising programme dedicated entirely to Raga Jaijayanti. The programme will be beamed directly to your homes via Besur Betal Betar, whether you like it or not, if you click this link to open the stream in your music player.

Some notes on the raga and short samples may be found here (scroll down the page).

The artists who have kindly consented to take the stage are:

Akbar Ali Khan, Ali Akbar Khan, Allauddin Khan, Asad Ali Khan, Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, Bismillah Khan, Buddhadev Das Gupta, D. V. Paluskar, Faiyyaz Khan, Ghulam Mustafa Khan, Gundecha Brothers, Hariprasad Chaurasia, Imrat and Nishat Khan, Pandit Jasraj, Krishnarao Shankar Pandit, Mallik Family (Darbhanga Dhrupadiyas), Nikhil Banerjee, Purnima Sen, Rajan and Sajan Mishra, Rashid Khan, Shobha Gurtu, Siyaram Tiwari, Subhra Guha, Sultan Khan, Umrao Bundu Khan, Veena Sahasrabuddhe, V. G. Jog, Vilayat Khan and Vinayak Rao Patwardhan.

We thank members of certain disreputable educational institutions for persuading these musicians to be here with us tonight. We deny all reports that excessive force was used in some cases.

The programme will last approximately 16 hours. If you feel the need to leave before the end, you may do so only by leaving a substantial monetary contribution to the cause in the lunchbox by the door. Please switch off your cellphones before the concert starts. Thank you.

We now invite the chief guest to light the ceremonial lamp. (Applause.) Miss [Tumpa/Jhumpa/Rumpa] [Sikdar/Sanyal/Ghosh Dastidar] will present a momento (sic) to His Excellency.

And now, please welcome...

Besur Betal Betar

2005-12-13T20:15:00.000-08:00

(Attention: The procedure for accessing the station has changed. The station is still available on the SHOUTcast Yellowpages but the playlist file available there has an IP address dependent URL, and my IP changes regularly: the feed will stop and you'll have to re-Tune In from the Yellowpages every time this happens. With the new system you'll (hopefully) need to merely stop and restart the track in your music player.)

Frustrated by my moojikally-isolated existence in sunny California, I have started an internet radio station called "Besur Betal Betar" for Hindustani classical music. It's a SHOUTcast feed: to access it, open this playlist file in your music player (Winamp or equivalent). In some players, you can simply open the URL "http://expiring-frog.hopto.org:8032". For more info, visit the station's homepage. If you can't access this page, the server is switched off: refer to the first caveat below.

Caveat 1: When the server is switched off for long periods, the feed will also (obviously) stop, and will probably not restart unless you restart it in your music player. If you see the feed is silent for a long time, click Stop in your player. Wait for some time (listen to something else :)) and click Play. If the feed has started again by then you should get some sound. Else click Stop, wait some more, and try playing again.

Caveat 2: The feed is not guaranteed to be 24x7, since my laptop is not always networked (e.g. when I travel between office and home).

Requests for tracks and artists are most welcome, subject of course to my having them.

The flavour of the day is Sharafat Hussain Khan (courtesy SCTR@JU) and Ali Akbar Khan, and my current playlist consists of about 23 hours of these two. Nice long pieces, mostly old, so do tune in if you're interested.

Samvad! Samvad! Samvad!

2005-12-09T19:13:00.000-08:00

Until yesterday, I had no idea the Films Division of India has a website with freely streamable documentaries. I came across the link while flipping through Jim Kippen's tabla site. This is what Kippen has to say:

A spectacular archive of films sponsored by the Government of India. Regarding tabla, look in particular for the 1971 film of Ahmedjan Thirakwa (14 mins) and the 1970 film of Alla Rakha (13 mins). Other films are available, such as Mani Kaul's excellent Dhrupad (70 mins) featuring Z.M. and F.M Dagar, as well as documentaries and dramatizations of the lives of Birju Maharaj, Amir Khan, Malikarjun Mansoor, Bhimsen Joshi, Siddheswari Devi, Girija Devi, Begum Akhtar, Ravi Shankar, and Amjad Ali Khan. The best way to access these is to choose "Music of India" [or "Indian classical series"] from the Category field, then click on the search button.

The collection is truly outstanding. In fact it's more than outstanding: if you're a classical music buff, it's incredible, epiphanic and overwhelming (and I'm sure many other subjects are equally well-covered). So far, I have watched documentaries on Ud. Allauddin Khan, Ud. Ahmedjan Thirakwa (the Farukhabad tabla nawaz), Ud. Amir Khan, Pt. Bhimsen Joshi (directed by Gulzar), Pt. Ravi Shankar and Pt. Mallikarjun Mansur. I had watched Patrick Moutal's copy of the Amir Khan earlier. DD and I are in agreement that the Mansur is the best by some distance. Let's start with the stats: the film is 73 minutes long. Of these, less than a couple of minutes are used for narration, around 10-15 minutes for silence and background noise (correction: well, perhaps that should be a bit more for the former and a bit less for the latter), and the rest for singing. The director evidently appreciated the fact that the soundtrack for a film on sound is best provided by its own subject. Mansur sings all the usual stuff (Multani, Chhayanat, Paraj, Ramdasi Malhar, Bhairav, Jait Kalyan...) plus a vachana or two. And there is NOT ONE stage performance for the usual genteel urban audience. The closest we get is a bunch of neighbours (?) or a bunch of monks. There are a number of songs sung in temples, sometimes alone. The Ramdasi is sung in semi-darkness beside a window. There's a huge number of shots of (I presume) rural Dharwad. And throughout there's this impression of a man who, in the end, sings for something beyond his listeners. I can think of only two other people who consistently give this impression: Nikhil Banerjee and Amir Khan.

The Bhimsen is excellent, as is to be expected, the Amir Khan is a minor gem (and technically perhaps the best of the lot), and the Allauddin, though not the best film that could have been made, contains enough classic clippings (Allauddin teasing his wife on the violin, Ali Akbar with this absolutely fantastic clean, quick fingering of his salad days) to be fascinating. The Ravi Shankar clip is interesting -- concert fragments interspersed with questions from the audience -- the questions (and, I must admit, the answers) are eminently skippable, but the music is good.

At this point let me mention Allauddin Khan's autobiography (dictated to Shubhomoy Ghosh), "Aamar Katha" ("My Story"). It's a lovely little book about a completely unreal person. I know of no Hindi/English translation that exists.

Siddhartha is a football that inflates balloons!

2005-12-06T21:22:00.000-08:00

And that was my freaking first attempt here. There is a God! (and now it's confirmed His initials are ZZ)

To BW or not to BW

2005-12-03T00:44:00.000-08:00

Why do people like black-and-white photographs? Why do we convert run-of-the-mill colour shots to BW to make them look arty? Why the hell, if at all, is less more?

A friend brought up the topic, so I thought I'd jot down a few ideas here. These thoughts are very much under construction so I might update this in the future.

1. Old-shtyle ishtyle: The least charitable reason, but not entirely devoid of substance. "Old" is a pretty good excuse to say "classic". And a sense of history, a hearkening back to the good old days is always a nice feeling. For instance, how about this swingin' 70's concert pic? Ah, what a time it was, it was!

Actually, the picture was taken in 2004. The guy's called Eddie Roberts and he was performing with his band The New Mastersounds in Chicago. BW insidiously warps our minds again.

But now on to more intrinsic things:

2. Emphasis: Sometimes, the dominant forms and patterns in a scene are most strongly defined by shades (lightness or darkness) and not by colours. Most significantly, the three-dimensional structure of objects is conveyed entirely through shading -- if you've ever cross-hatched a pencil drawing of a vase or a face you'll know what I mean. Bright colours distract our eyes from these patterns -- a bright yellow flag in the background can ruin a sober portrait, and colourful designs can obscure the roundness of a vessel or the clean lines of architecture. BW emphasizes just the shadows, highlights and contours, which is where the communicative forms of a photograph frequently (I would stick my neck out and say "usually") lie, and strips away the chromatic junk.

3. Clarity: With just two colours (or strictly speaking, just one colour -- grey) our visual language is immediately restricted. So the messages we manage to convey through our images are likely to be simpler and more direct. Result: a much greater chance of effective and unambiguous communication.

For an example of 2 and 3, here's Ansel Adams' "Aspens". There are three visual elements -- tree in foreground, treetrunks in background, and dark forest beyond. There are three dominant intensities -- bright white for the tree, medium white for the trunks, and dark grey for the forest. And that's it. End of story. The sparsest possible language is chosen to perfectly separate all three elements and the impact of the resulting image says a lot for economy of expression. Colour would be unnecessarily verbose.

Ansel Adams, "Aspens", New Mexico, 1958

4. Coordination: A camera allows you plenty of control over exposure, i.e. over the darkness and lightness of objects. What it can't do is give you any sort of control over colours in your image -- filters or exotic films limit your options to colour casts or weird fixed palettes, and extensive digital post-processing is... umm... not really photography, is it? So that brilliant bazaar shot you thought you nailed the other day turns out to be a dud because Mrs Ray and Mrs Ghosh, the chief protagonists, wore hideous pink and blue saris respectively. Shooting BW keeps your colours (dammit, you have just one!) nicely matched. In fact, many excellent colour photographs use small, well-coordinated palettes.

Here's something that works in BW but would definitely NOT work in colour if the clothing and the umbrella were of different hues (which is quite likely). Note that the colours wouldn't necessarily clash, but the picture would still lose unity in the foreground.

R. Gardiner, Wollman Ice Rink, Central Park, New York

4a. Shadows: Cutting out colours introduces interesting resonances between objects and their shadows. These pictures say it all:

Garry Winogrand, Los Angeles, 1969

Andre Kertesz, "The White Horse", New York, 1962

Marcio Ferrari, Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro, 2001

5. Rawness and Simplicity: A much-heralded quality of BW is its capacity to render stark and gritty images. This is probably why so many urban photographers use BW -- the clamour and grime of a big city is an ideal BW subject. The favourite film of these street shooters used to be Kodak Tri-X, well known for yielding somewhat grainy images. This feature contributed to the slightly raw and rough-edged look we've come to associate with classic street photographs.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, "Taxidrivers", Berlin, 1932

More philosophically, life in the city was tough, and the primordial instincts that governed your survival were somehow mirrored in the elemental simplicity of monochrome. Even now, conflict, grief, struggle, insanity and other deep-rooted emotions find a sympathetic medium in BW.

Let me reiterate this: BW is essentially simpler than colour. We associate simplicity with the past, with rural life, with congenital traits, with our primitive instincts to be happy or sad or combative, and so on. And BW excels in capturing these aspects of our world.

6. Abstraction: Verisimilitude is never the principal purpose of art. This is a nuisance for photography, which is burdened from the start by the fact that it mimics reality by default. So over the years, photographers have looked for ways to express themselves through their pictures, to make us look at the world through their eyes. BW immediately distinguishes between the real and the virtual by discarding colour, and thus in a way establishes the communicative credentials of the image -- it sticks out and hence seems more meaningful.

Of course, at this point we must admit that BW was not devised because of its potential for abstraction -- it was a consequence of the limitations of the technology of the time. And when colour film was invented, BW's exit seemed preordained. But that didn't happen, and even today many many people who shoot to tell stories stick to BW.

Links:

Biplab makes a case for small palettes and strong separation of elements in "Why I both like and dislike Ansel Adams...". Clarity of expression does show clarity of thought, and the argument is convincing.

A few quick plugs

2005-12-02T18:07:00.000-08:00

Tony Dummett's poor imitations of Cartier-Bresson. Not HCB, but not that poor, you'll notice. And this one from another folder is a scream.
David Malcomson has a lot of consistently good portraits.
Bill Hocker's photo.net gallery and his homepage: among the best travel photographs I've seen online.
Zishaan Hayath's photoblog (check the archives). I really like this sort of slice-of-life photography, and hey, he likes 50mm too :). He also has a nice article on how to get started clicking photos, but since I'm going to religiously avoid linking to tutorials here, you can find it yourself. I envy the bugger clicking away in Bombay -- the places in Kanpur which I found really photogenic (the ramshackle stretch from Parade Chauraha to the station and some other nearby localities) were also the places I was too nervous to shoot in.

And finally (shameless self-promotion) I've uploaded a lot of new photos to Flickr, specifically the last 30-odd in the People photoset. These were taken during a very cold trip to Kausani, near Almora, in early 2005 (some are from an arbit little station outside Kanpur on the return leg when our train had to stop because someone had messed with the fishplates). We took along a ton of equipment to shoot the range in the full moon, but clouds scuppered that plan and I consoled myself clicking people. An off-season trip like this is highly recommended for a very different, raw, ochre-russet-and-mist look of the hills, by the way.

No comment

2005-11-16T21:20:00.000-08:00

I have just read this and this. The world stinks. That's an understatement.

We're all responsible: running away from these realities won't help.

Incidentally, I believe some lady claims (in response to the first article) that "this would never have happened in USA or london". Please read the reports on looting, shooting, killing, raping and, yes, mutilation in post-Katrina Louisiana. But this is hardly the point.

Sobriety

2005-11-16T08:51:00.000-08:00

I have realized, at 8:00 this morning, that I'm a stupid, gormless, garrulous, narcissistic, self-important, irresponsible pig.

I am also very old.

I assume this is common knowledge, but it suddenly hit me extra hard.

A Case of Identity

2005-11-13T04:05:00.000-08:00

During the last two weeks I have watched two wonderful films. Films about things I can relate to, either through direct experience or indirectly, through the pervasive intangibles that we call history and culture.

The first of these was Aparna Sen's "36, Chowringhee Lane" (1981), a film about an ageing Anglo-Indian schoolteacher in Calcutta (at Pratt Memorial School -- for the sake of Pratt people reading this I will refrain from using the unfortunate acronym :)). The script was originally a short story which Sen asked Satyajit Ray to take a look at. Ray read it and told her she should make a film from it, and a remarkable film it turned out to be. Throughout, Sen impresses with her sensitive and intelligent handling of her three protagonists: the schoolteacher Ms Stoneham (Jennifer Kendal) with a deep love of Shakespeare and an eccentric invalid of a brother (a delightful ham by, appropriately enough, "Shakespearewallah" Geoffrey Kendal); and a young Bengali couple (Debashree Roy and Dhritiman Chatterjee) whose main object is to make out chez Stoneham. The three are mutually dependent, the couple needing the old lady's apartment for sweaty workouts and the lady depending on the couple for friendship and a break from her daily monotony and loneliness. I won't tell you how this symbiosis resolves itself (watch the film!), but I was very impressed by the excellent acting, sober photography and strong script.

So much for technical appreciation. More personal stuff: I studied in a school in Calcutta run by Belgian Jesuits, where I was taught by many Ms Stonehams (well, Guzmans, Misquittas, Browns, Millars and Viannas at least!). My school is on Park Street, in an area of Calcutta that is home to many Anglo-Indian (we used the term rather vaguely to include just about anybody with some European blood :)) families, and the most common surname in school was Gomes. I spent twelve wonderful years there with many good friends from this community. I remember the Jesuit priests, men who had left their native lands to spend their lives in our country, working for the poor and working to educate us, men who had taught my father, old men in white cassocks who lived for God -- and for once that doesn't sound corny (though one of those men thought God's benevolence was frequently best dispersed through the business end of a cane :) -- he was, believe it or not, extremely popular). I was entirely comfortable reciting the Lord's Prayer at the start and end of each day's classes (one teacher of Bengali made us say it in the vernacular!) without any feeling of religious imposition (I am not Christian). In short, we were a product of an intermingling of cultures -- not the outlandish Stephanian/Doonish Raj hangover but something which I like to believe was more understated, social, intertwined and humane, representing innumerable diasporas, large and small. And for me, Ms Stoneham exists here, although she is a genetic relict of the Raj. Visit New Market and you will see many like her, as Calcuttan as me or anyone else yet not a part of the Bangalikhana that we like to pretend defines our city. A change of name (to "Kolkata", to satisfy our insecure Bengali egos) cannot rob Calcutta of its complex identity.

I'm sure cleverer people can construct complex theories of identity for Ms Stoneham. I'm not sure how effectively her story allegorizes the larger cultural picture. I'm not even sure whether the film's main focus is on such issues (rather than on the ones of human relationships and exploitation). But the context struck a chord and reminded me of something which I formally left behind many years ago but which remains implicit in me.

And on a not entirely unrelated note (?), the film has these brilliantly-placed lines from, appropriately enough, "King Lear":

Pray, do not mock me:
I am a very foolish fond old man,
Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less;
And, to deal plainly,
I fear I am not in my perfect mind.
Methinks I should know you, and know this man;
Yet I am doubtful for I am mainly ignorant
What place this is; and all the skill I have
Remembers not these garments; nor I know not
Where I did lodge last night. Do not laugh at me;
For, as I am a man, I think this lady
To be my child Cordelia.

Have you seen Kurosawa's "Ran"? A brilliant Lear.

The second film was Sudhir Mishra's "Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi" ("A Thousand Dreams Such As These", 2003), a story about three young people from Delhi during the Naxalite movement and the Emergency, technically nowhere near as good as the Sen film but remarkably genuine. Mishra provokes thought and skilfully avoids making political statements in a highly political film. Shiney Ahuja's character is brilliantly conceived -- a clever twist on the cliched supportive-friend-who-hides-his-love theme. And some scenes cut me so deep that even the memory touches something down there. If "36, Chowringhee Lane" reminded me of school, "Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi" brought back things from college -- dreams and ideologies and action that is spiritually satisfying and eventually futile. And the 70s -- a decade we yearned to reach through enough classic rock and kishore/rafi and daydreams and late night bulla, the decade of India's political dark ages while the flower generation urged us to make love not war. And the many faces of freedom, from exhileration to self-destruction. And cities and friends from far away corners of the country and the immense heartland of India that trains rumble through under cloudy skies in swirling rain, or in blazing, parching heat, or in pitchdark broken by the occasional pinflicker of light -- a land we know yet never know. Indian Railways ensured that the train would occasionally stop in the middle of nowhere, and I would get down and walk around, for a minute or so, on a little patch of grass in Bihar or UP, somehow content that I had made contact with this expanse of lonely countryside, although I knew that it and its people would, in all likelihood, remain forever alien to me.

And I discovered connections at a more personal level that will remain personal.

Rivers mountains rain
Rain against a torrid hillscape
...
Her body wrapped itself around me
Like a summer without end.

I have bought three rolls of black-and-white film today and am happy.

Who the hell!

2005-11-09T21:40:00.000-08:00

Interesting people are into blogging these days. Anybody ever checked out this guy?

Take a peek. It's worth it.

The novel itself seems pretty awful. The autobiographical (?) parts are readable, though.

Lines from a Canadian backyard

2005-11-08T20:55:00.000-08:00

Ian MacEachern, the Canadian black-and-white poet, maintains a wonderful portfolio on photo.net. There's a sense of humour lurking behind each photo and no trace of the maudlin. His framing is bang on every time and does a great job snipping away the inessentials. And he is, somehow, respectful, and that's a peculiar word to use considering that he does a lot of in-your-face social statement type of work. I think Bert Hardy's work in the Gorbals slums of Glasgow had that same basic humanity, as did Kertesz's early shots of rural Hungarian life.

Check out classics like Looking, Children in Wales, Sharing, Asylum #2, Boy with a Bottle. And that's not counting his candids of people inside pubs and cafes, which are probably the best of the lot.

Oh and this one is hilarious.

While on the subject of "snipping away" stuff from a photo (metaphorically of course), take a look at this snap by HCB: what do you think the kid's doing?

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Valencia, 1933

The upturned face and that ecstatic skip in front of the surreal background have nothing ethereal about them, actually -- he's waiting to catch a ball he's thrown into the air. HCB just chose to leave the ball out. End demonstration.

I'll start this off without any words...

2005-03-15T23:45:00.000-08:00

... of my own.

Can I view thee panting, lying
On thy stomach, without sighing;
Can I unmoved see thee dying
On a log,
Expiring frog!

Say, have fiends in shape of boys,
With wild halloo, and brutal noise,
Hunted thee from marshy joys,
With a dog,
Expiring frog!

(Charles Dickens, "The Pickwick Papers")

I had forgotten how the frogs must sound
After a year of silence, else I think
I should not have ventured forth alone
At dusk upon this unfrequented road.
I am waylaid by Beauty. Who will walk
Between me and the crying of the frogs?
Oh, savage Beauty, suffer me to pass,
that am a timid woman, on her way
From one house to another!

(Edna St. Vincent-Millay, "Assault")