I have been really traveling over the past couple of months. It started after I joined my new job. First it was Silent Valley. I took 2 weeks to recover from a 4 day trip. It was like touching my purest and deepest self within and then letting go to come back to this impersonal, mechanical and polluted world. Thats what being in nature, and away from humans generally, does to me. Thats how I felt staying in Kemmanu during my college days and I missed that so much after coming to Bangalore. The fact that I missed city life when I was actually in college is a different story, but the point is, I have lived that life of silence. That silence has enabled me to hear myself, my faintest whispers, the pulsations of the umbical chord to my higher self, the time between the blink of an eye and the spaces between the past, present and future. I have felt so connected that everything these days doesn’t get me any higher than I have been. And Silent Valley was like a mental refresher in drowning within. Within, without….actually makes no difference when you are so surrounded by nature. But that apart, I have really been wandering – and as some might say, living it up.

After Silent Valley, Hampi happened. And that was a totally different trip. Those 200 rupee cottages overlooking the river. The great food, the ruins….those efforts to shoot starry long exposures….all magical and one of its kind. Of course that trip also meant that Sandeep, Rajith, Kien and myself somewhere had the same chromosome in our blood – the one that makes you want to get out of the mundane and feel new places. Many a times I have wondered what kind of escapism it is to always looking around from the eyes of a traveler – distanced from the actual boredom, misery and drudgery of the lives we see through our cameras and by referring to our guide books. Its like the movie The Notebook I watched and felt so much in love with. I know I can never have a house over looking the lake with no one for miles around. I know I can never go on a boat ride with someone I love truly – but its so nice to watch it when projected on a screen – its so nice even though its distant. And this distance is what makes traveling so very appealing. The real distance covered by road v/s the distances between people. Between people you see around you everyday. Everyday – what a boring word. Its like prison. And the prison need not only have four walls. The prison can be because its the same people you see, the same distances that only seem to grow between you and them and the loss of wonder, curiosity, beauty, creativity. Familiarity breeds contempt.

After Hampi, we did couple of small trips – Mysore, Auroville, Jog….and next week I am off to Mumbai. All by myself. And I wonder – compared to my previous trips, whom am I really going to have for company on that trip? I am going to be on my own after a long time. Thats something I haven’t done in ages. Actually thats something I was so comfortable many years ago and which has changed with circumstances over time. Circumstances that make you want, but not get. The chasm of desire to connect that grows deeper. The connection you confuse with other connections….glimpses of which I have had in places like Silent Valley and before that in Kemmanu…The connection and the disconnect lived in one life time….

This desire to connect…this reason for hope…this hope that makes you get out of bed each morning…this pacemaker that ticks an ailing heart and make people confuse things that are with that which is not….these are the malaises of our times…and somewhere what I really need to build immunity against. But oh, time….its not on my side because I procrastinate…and I procrastinate because my eyes really open only when on a trip….rest of the time its just half open….another disease of the times….we have too much electric light…too much caffeine….information overload…and we don’t even notice our lives go overboard…

Ok, I suppose you get the drift.

One day the wind will change and blow away your wonderland
Blue skies will soon be overcast
One day the tide will turn and wash away your castles in the sand
And you’ll find peace ¡­ at last 

Alan Parsons Project – Ignorance Is Bliss

Wow, its been so long since I blogged. And so much has happened meanwhile. Let me summarize (in no particular order):

• I finally built a successful Hackintosh. From wanting a real Mac to building my own Mac. Went through lot of troubled times but victory tastes sweet now. OS X just rocks. Can’t imagine going back to Windoze. All I need is to get Leopard working. Meanwhile also upgraded to a Core2Duo, P35 chipset based board and Viewsonic 2025wm LCD monitor. My computing experience is nirvana now. And oh yea, the computer gallops.
• Successfully WiFi-ed my  house. So let me just say that my computing experience is pure nirvana. All I need now is a Macbook Pro.
• Visited Silent Valley and Hampi. Both trips were extremely satisfying, soul-wise and photography-wise. Updated Pixelshooter.net with photos and travelogues. Now my website has significant content. That is satisfying too.
• Won a photography competition at work. Stood first in fact. Got a lousy gift (a magnetic dart game in which the darts don’t stick), but felt good nevertheless, thanks to all the visibility winning the competition gave me.
• Sold my Tamron 28-75mm and monopod and got a new 35mm f/2 and OC-E3 (Off camera shoe chord) as recent as yesterday. The 35mm f/2 is simply awesome.
• Repaid a huge portion of my credit card debit. But have an equal portion that I recently piled up.
• Planned to get a 40D but ditched the idea because of the above point.
• Crashed my (office) laptop’s hard disk. Dell replaced it within a day. Dell is good.
• Four months into my new  work and I really enjoying it. Looking back, I wonder if I made a mistake of sticking on to my earlier work place for4 years. But as they say, hindsight is always 20/20. Which reminds me…
• Changed my spectacles. My power has increased too. And the best part – I have Nikon lenses in front of my eyes now

                                                      
Before                                                                               Now

Since the death of TV and new exciting music in my world, I haven't quite been inspired or blown away by any other's creativity in a long time. I picked a book – Life on Planet Rock by Lonn Friend recently and this post is a result of that. After reading the book, I revisted GN'R by watching some videos (like Estranged and November Rain), but the feeling I used to get some years ago did not come over me again. My hair didn't stand on the back of my neck, and I didn't play the air guitar. Instead, I started recalling those Axl worshipping days and tried to see what I knew then, that I seem to have forgotten now. What did we see in these musicians? Why did we place them on a pulpit? Why aren't there new heroes to replace the ones who have faded, thanks to Time and the general spinning of the earth? What is the brainfeed I seek now?

If there is any one stagnant thought I can pick up from the many running in my head, it would be what I described above. Yes, the nostalgia associated with our teen years and rock n' roll is something very stagnant, and little has happened since then although we have grown in years and stacked up abundant music on our hard drives. The feeling has long gone and around us, the generations are becoming shallower and art is becoming bleaker. My radar yearns for new creativity, new brainfeed, but there are are hardly any blips (even when there are, it is surprisingly from our own Eastern music). And since music and creativity is what I have lived off, I now have a choice of gasping to survive, or submitting myself to the darkness and embracing what comes with it. In fact, I have nearly done that and discovered something new. Enter Photography.

Yes, Photography is my new brainfeed in these times superficiality. I once had my hands in my pockets and whistled tunes carelessly while the winds blew my hair. I could do that because my pockets were empty and I could feel the winds. These days I drag myself to work to put some wind into my sails and money into my pockets. All that money I offer at the altar of Photography where I pray for salvation and an all-access badge to the kingdom of creativity. But the so called 'hard work' is not without expectations so there are strings attached. The very same brain that was once freely injected with the rush of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and the like, is now most of the time running full throttle calculating for that telezoom or macro lens or attending stupid meetings to stay on the job. So there is no time to indulge in gay abandon or lesbian voyerurism (;)). Instead, when the calendar presents a holiday or the evening comes with a breath of fresh out-of-office air, I try and go out to shoot. I do it because that is all I can do. For everything else, I depend on friends. I hope to get by with a little help from friends. But too bad I belong to the Lonely Hearts Club Band. And so life has managed to fuck with me again. But hey, there is always some nostalgia and rock n' roll to fill in. 

So this is how it is. That was how it was. How will it be? Where do we go from here? Let's just wait n' see….

Since when I can remember, I have rebelled against being moulded by my surrounding. And for this reason, I never learnt to speak colloquial Tamil although I grew up in Chennai, I never stayed for long in the hostel when in college and I didn't become a software engineer after graduation. People at home always had a problem with what I chose to do or be, not because they understood my thought process, but because I didn't confirm with their notions of 'being normal'.

Of course, now I understand that everything evens out when your life is all about making and saving  money. Your hobbies, interests, pastimes and everything that YOU ever did is spoken of in past tense. And it is this past tense that is links you back to what you are. Because from the confines of like minded friends and smoke filled bachelor rooms, you are thrown into a world of managers, deadlines, responsbilities and everything that they can make you do while holding your job for ransom. That is the first do-or-die situation you encounter. And it is the first agent of change. 

But this phase of confusion for most slowly dies down. Because some day you are gonna have people under you. Some day you'll have people snarl at you, talk behind your back and curse you for making their life miserable. Some day you gonna hang your gloves, get married, have kids and all that. And by this time, the memories that link back to what you are no longer make sense. Because you are not what you were anymore. Suddenly, the 'you' has changed. Or in other words, life has changed you. 

Life has inevitably changed a lot since the days of college, and for that matter the first few months of work. For a long time, my ideas, fantasies, castles et al where intertwined with my age. But it is not so today. Many of the things I do now, because of where I have reached in the process of change, don't make sense. And when your actions seem redundant, and don't make sense anymore, you gotta move on. Moving on is something I have been very good at. 

But suddenly moving on doesn't sound easy. And this is because the castles I have built have their pillars on the ground. So it is not easy to move to new ground. Hell, it is not even easy to find new ground anymore.

Then there is the variable called 'growth'. As long as you are a student, growth happens pretty much by itself. Whether it is academics or otherwise, you are constantly learning and hence growing. But after graduation, growth suddenly stops being something that comes naturally to you. Growth becomes a matter of survival. You are forced to show growth. You are forced to prove it. Else there is someone else ready to replace you. But growth is good right? Yes, it is. As long as you are growing at your own pace, and in the direction you choose. How many can claim to have this built into their jobs? This is the second do-or-die situation that you encounter. The second agent of change. 

Right now what's happening to me is the exact opposite. Can't say that I lack oppurtunities to grow. But the means to the end everywhere else but here suddenly seems shallow. And the more I hold on to what I think makes more sense than being a number in some manager's excel sheet, the more I realise that this is not what I want. This is not what I want because I have always been averse to mediocrity. And mediocrity is what I am surrounded with. Yes, as long as you had the choice of chosing friends and as long as you had the luxury of getting away with being selective, you didn't mind the world. What happens when you no longer have this choice? This becomes the third agent of change. But I don't know what will this bring. 

I did something very impulsive. I sold my camera to my cousin for 35k. Although impulsive, I think there's sensible reasoning behind this move.

Advantage to buyer:

• Buying from a trusted source
• Buying at grey market price, but with a year's warranty (I bought mine with a 2 year warranty)

Advantage to me:

• Sold at a good price. Once Canon's new camera, the Rebel XTi hits the market, prices of the younger Rebel will hit the ground. Anyway, my cousin was in a hurry and didn't want to wait for the XTi
• I get worthy upgrades when I go for the XTi – dust cleaning feature, faster focus and better accuracy with faster lenses. All things that make sense to me, but not a novice.

Now I have to see where and how to get the new camera The hunt never ends….

I wish I had a book that explains how to not get run over by people. If I had one, I would have given it to a few people I know. Of course, in the times we live in, you could sleep with the person whom you want work done if you are not big enought to run them down (being bisexual helps). I get this particular thought after reading "One night @ the Call Center", where Esha does just that.

Anyway, coming back to my point, I cringe when I see people who a) Wish to run over others b) Choose to get run over by species a. C’mon, there is enuff for everyone. Why dwell in the myth of scarcity and not move on from retards and hopeless situations? Why do you want to be either of the kind? Yea, now I am thinking of the character Shyam, from Chetan Bhagat’s book.

Luckily I have been quite a loner in life, and I have been able to see abundance, although lately I feel like the walls are closing in. Yes, when you start working for a fixed amount of money that you expect at the end of every month, scracity start creeping. The more the money, the more the scarcity of time, original thought and choice with people. The more the scarcity, the more the need to run over, or the chances of getting run over.

Time will tell where this leads to. But deep inside, I yearn to get back to a simple life.

There was this period in my life when a friend and I were dissecting life-patterns in great detail. Given the time and circumstances, this dissection was time better spent. Better than some inane things others with the same time and lack of anything else to do indulged in.

We started off by first identifying patterns. For this, we had to look at our own lives. It was like a discovery. Wisdom gained. Then we began naming the patterns. Naming helped identify not just our patterns, but patterns in others. And this pattern identifying also helped see through people. Some folks shallow and cheap. Some deep and profound. Some shallow and simple. Some deep and complicated. As time passed by, pattern-identifying came easily to us. And it was saddening to know how limited in thought, character and action people got.

But then, man is a pattern seeking animal. Sometimes and for some people, it is too much to leave things to chance. The loss of control can severly hamper people’s judgments. It is safe to know. And to measure is to know. Thats why we have interviews, reviews, arranged marriages and all that.

Great many things have been achieved by intense planners. And great many things have been achieved by happy-go-lucky souls. Seldom do these two kind of people understand the other, and this has been the crux of many a marital discord (which I want to avoid talking about). And somewhere along the way, I soon lost track of what actually was happening – was I only coming across people whom I could put into boxes for which I aleady had labels, or was I only looking at people through the limits of my measurement.

To put it simply, just after gaining knowledge of patterns and people, I stopped meeting interesting ones. Interesting = someone who could blow away my yardsticks. Someone who came as fresh, genuine and with a story I had not heard before.

I am begining to accept that it is not a coincidence that this happened after I joined work. Joined the software industry, in particular. Hell, let me rewind back and say I am not suprised this happened after moving to Bangalore.

Smug in this wisdom, I was taken by suprise when I met an old friend recently. He not just smashed my pattern of trusting a known devil over an unknown angel, he also showed me that there are things as sorrowful as losing a friend to the emptiness of an escapist attitude. Our frequency mismatch was quite high. I was hardened by the daily routine of project deadlines, status updates and 9-5 mental stiffness. He hadn’t known home, and only hostels for 5+2 years. Oh yes, I easily found a pattern for him too. But he exposed mine big time. And that had not happened since college.

I don’t want to patternify living things around me. Modern life, dull and drab as it is, doesn’t need any more forceful discolouration. But then, how can I take it as it comes?

I rather pick up my camera and go looking for something nice to shoot.