Dreams of migration.
Migratory birds on dead power lines. Ajmer lake, Rajasthan, India. January 2021.
The art of long silky threads.
Rooftop views in Pushkar, Rajasthan, India. January 2021.
A long silky thread is glorious in the afternoon sun across the sidewalk. It is finer than a shaft of sunlight, sunnier than the sun. People walk across it and just when I think it broke, I see it floating again, as if a new one was shot as soon as the last one was torn away.
Wikipedia says:
A dragline silk’s tensile strength is comparable to that of high-grade alloy steel (450−2000 MPa). The combination of strength and ductility gives dragline silks a very high toughness (or, work to fracture), which equals that of commercial polyaramid (aromatic nylon) filaments, which themselves are benchmarks of modern polymer fibre technology.
People who walk across it all have varying degrees of blindness that is not physical. They walk across this lustrous work of art and step on it, like critics. And the artist continuously remakes the art. No one knows why.
It’s never easy being an artist, it cannot be: this is a precondition. Your talents are nothing. You must persevere every day so that what you create does not come to an end without ever beginning. For there is no beginning in art, only an end. Art or no art.
Walking, walking, walking.
When you have not left your bed for days like a mental patient because you’re so busy working, where you’ve become ok with the idea of using a bed to work instead of a desk and a table like normal people — because you’re not as smart as you think you are — then how wonderful it feels to walk, just a few steps back and forth, eating a chikki on your terrace overlooking the Himalaya, how wonderful to walk and see the Rohtang Pass mountains — a beloved sight — and the Seven Sisters peaks.
How wonderful that we can walk.
In praise of terrible first impressions.
I never made good first impressions. I was never interested in impressing someone I meet or talk to in the first meeting itself. It feels wrong and against my will, as if I had to make a good first impression — otherwise I was doomed. I’m not comfortable with the level of judging that is involved and the fact that this is all normal. So, I prefer to bomb, I let them judge me and appear underwhelming in my performance. It’s a theatre, it’s a worldly play. I prefer to not play along.
I let myself sweat through the shirt and let my voice choke and tremble and my face go as if it was thrown into a washing machine. That is, until the examination comes to an end, when I realise that I do not care about this at all — and yet that’s what I go through. Not always, not with everyone. It’s anyway strange and funny as hell.
I’m a try again > fail again > fail better kind of Beckett genius.
The left river.
Last night, I slept on my left arm and now it is paining, as if an overflowed river in bones is trying to slam through the flesh, such unbelievable force of water, such unbearable pain in my arm.
Last night, someone slept on my arm and now it is paining. Perhaps it was me.
Chilled people from space.
Summer Grass. A poem by my favourite poet, Tomas Tranströmer.
Tomas Tranströmer
Dhauladhar overshadowing Dharamshala.
The Dhauladhar range of the Himalaya at dusk and the town of Dharamshala, Himachal Pradesh, India. December 2019.
Serebriakova.
In praise of the self. In praise of mirrors. In praise of being able to see oneself.
An extinct memory.
Ever since moving out of cities and into the mountains, I realised that the memory — of birds wiping their beak on branches — had gone extinct in my modern brain.
The Rohtang Pass mountains near Manali, Himachal Pradesh, India. April 2021.