Don’t get time to sit and indulge myself in drawing the ideas that pop into my head, but today I took an hour away to make this quickly.

Election season is here and the BJP lovers are claiming their blind love.

Olympus SP 35

My constant lookout for a handy size camera with manual controls has been a never ending one. Earlier this year, the question for such a camera brought me to Olympus SP 35. A slightly battered piece of this camera was stocked at Mr Prabhu’s store. I fell in love with it as soon as my hands rested on it. Compact in size, good wide aperture, manual controls for aperture and shutter speed. It’s a rangefinder, and I am still not confident of getting the focus right at all times. On top of that the light meter was not working on it, so it left me in some doubt, but I brushed it aside and picked it up anyway. Mr Prabhu told me about the Sunny 16 rule for shooting without a light meter. On a sunny day, when shooting out in the sun, you keep the aperture at 16 and shutter speed a fraction of the ISO. I had an Ilford 400 film, so I decided to shoot on 1/500 with aperture set on 16. From there on I shot the entire film with calculated guess work. Adjusting the aperture is far more straightforward, but lowering the shutter speed requires more careful adjustments. 

The results came last month, and I am pretty happy with my work on shooting without a light meter. The roll in places had misbehaved in winding, so some shots have come only half-exposed. A pity because it ate up one good shot of Sufi. Lately the Ilfrod 400 films are not giving results the way it used to. Too much grain in many of the shots. Hoping for better results in the few remaining rolls from my Ilford stock.

Sufi at Sakleshpur.

Shots of Atal Path, Riverfront, Ahmedabad.

Shots from Paldi, Ahmedabad.

You can see the rest of the shots on my Flickr page.

Turning 37

I turned 37 few days back and Sufi gave me the loveliest gift in the form of a set of cards (picture book, graphic novel). Call it whatever, but it was such an adorable thing to get from your child. Sufi had been working on it for more than a week, trying to hide it from me as much as possible, but also letting me bind the pages. I did so pretending that I haven’t seen what the pages contain. Nidhi has done the art direction, and I can see all the love Sufi has put into it. It’s such a warm, fuzzy feeling to get such unadulterated love from your child. Love her to bits.

Why do we need to be so consistent all the time?

It just occurred to me one recent Monday that I have been quite hard on myself, demanding that I perform every single day with the same consistency. I felt this way more after returning home from taking a course for almost two weeks. Being away from home feels tough because I miss Sufi, and while it’s nice to come back home, it also brings a barrage of things on my to-do list that I need to tend to. I love making lists. It helps me organise my day and to know what has to be looked into in the near and distant future too. While it’s good to have lists, it also repeatedly nails down the fact that there is so much to do every day. The enormity of lists can be a crippling factor to my own efficiency when it’s staring me back so closely. But then one day a switch turned and a voice erupted within my head asking why I am trying to be consistent every single day. When our days are not the same because of the so many uncertainties revolving around it, then why must be ticking all the boxes too. I remember last year around this time Chelsea was struggling massively to play up to everyone’s expectations. Chelsea, a Club that has had a winning legacy in the last couple of decades has had a downward fortune lately. Change of ownership, staff, manager (nothing new about that), and players leaving had removed the core structure of the club. Then the long injuries of many players didn’t help the cause much. With all this going on one would ideally temper down their expectations, but the narrative I saw from football pundits always went on the same tune of how winners find a way to perform no matter what. While it’s commendable for people and teams to do well even with ongoing adversities, why does it have to be made a yardstick to beat everyone else with it? I had been doing the same to myself. I am not a guy in my 20s-30s anymore who could just roll out of bed each morning and start working with nothing else to attend to. My list of responsibilities has increased too with my age, and that’s a normal thing because this is what adulthood means. I had been still looking at my work efficiency model from a younger version of myself, and I won’t be able to match up to that age and effort because I just don’t have that kind of time anymore. I am trying to understand that I have to allow myself to be okay with things slipping away from my hand. I won’t be able to show up for each and everything to the best of my abilities because I should allowed to be inconsistent. I had read a quote by Ed Smith that every good process needs an anti-process. Similarly, to be consistent, you need to be inconsistent too. But it’s also the social media trap that has made this idea of consistency a painful reminder. The experts keep going on about how on social media you need to be consistent to get traffic. You need to post every single day, you need to be consistent with your tone. Maybe for a business that makes sense, but as an individual, we have good days and bad days. On good days, I am happy to share and interact, on bad days I need solitude. This made social media a difficult space to navigate with my earlier inert demand for consistency. Self-improvement is a trap, and we should be allowed for our inadequacies as much as for our abilities. I tried too hard to understand why we need validation because social media depended so heavily on it. It does feel good to me when I something I share resonates with someone. Seeking validation is not always a sign of downright narcissism. There is the negotiating space of balance. You tow this line of getting validation carefully. Maybe don’t deny validation vehemently, and definitely not gorge on it.

Illustration at NID

To start things off this year with teaching, I had a ten and half day course at NID with the Animation, Masters students. I taught them illustration as departmental elective. Somewhere my illustration course and basic graphics course tend to have a very similar objective; how to come up with visuals that are intelligent, have a conscious understanding of the creator’s gaze at the subject, and what are the alternative ways of representing a subject instead of a direct and bland approach. Illustration like design borrows a lot from the problem finding approach. There are contexts and constraints that guide your decision, and the limitations itself bring out the fun and challenging aspect.

The batch I taught was quite small; six students regularly seen in the classroom, and I was happy to have such a tight manageable bunch who were open to looking at illustration more than just drawing. Thank you for putting up with all the cutting and pasting. It was delightful to spend the time with this dedicated bunch.

I finally finished the literally long-drawn school intro part from the Patna chapter. Last year was not a very good one for the novel. The work was slow, often barely moving, burning a hole inside me. I planned for dedicated time towards the end of the year, but like most things in life, it didn’t go as planned, and some of the blame is on me, or my lack of being driven towards my book. The time I could find a few years back has become elusive, and some of it is down to the rising expenses, and being more available at home. I have made peace with the fact that this work will take time. I may not be able to find dedicated pockets of time to get a lot of work done. In fact on most days, finding dedicated time to work in itself has been a challenge. Making elaborate plans also hasn’t been of much help on this. The idea is to work on it as and when I can. It’s like making a kite fly, you have to know when to tug and when to let the string go. As long as the kite is afloat in the air, it will also keep my spirits afloat. Hopefully one day it will get where it has to be.

Nikon F50 and an ode to Girish

Early this year, I got Nikon F50 as a spare camera body to use it as parts for my NikonF80. The F50 was in a bit of rundown condition, and its shutter wasn’t releasing. The display kept showing errors, and once I put a lens on it, the error was resolved, but it was still not a functioning unit. I opened the back of the camera and tried cleaning the shutter leaf with a brush. I kept at it, hoping that it would help in getting the parts moving. To my surprise, it did the trick and the sweet sound of a film camera’s shutter releasing with the film advancing sound soothed my ear. I was overjoyed to have brought a camera back to life. After a few months, I finally loaded it with Arista 200 film. I had never used this film before, and I was hesitant to use a lford film on a new camera body. The results came back today, and I was pleased with a few shots, but most of the shots didn’t have a good contrast, and there was a lot of shake in shots that should have ideally been crisp. Not sure if it was because of the camera, but I was pretty certain that I would have got these right on my Nikon F80.

I am glad to have got two shots of Girish somewhat right. As a person with a camera, the only way to shoot people well is when they feel comfortable with the camera being pointed at them. I can’t say that I have made Girish comfortable, it’s more of a resignation at his end. I don’t have a lot of photos of Girish. In this day and age where our phones are flooded with photos with facial recognition categorising them conveniently, I barely have a few photographs of a friend who is very close and holds importance in my life. 

Girish was one of the first people I interacted with when I joined college. Even before I had landed there, Girish had written me an email asking if I would like to share the PG room together. It didn’t materialise in the beginning, but in a few months, Girish became our housemate. The early years of my college were when I was finding my feet in a world that was drastically very different from the world I had come from. Srishti was an antithesis of whatever I had known and understood the world to be. Girish helped me anchor myself focus on what mattered, and do so without any gloss or high-headedness. Girish lived like a monk. He owned what was needed, and did things that had a sense of delayed meditativeness. Whether it was his Adobe Illustrator files or his neatly two-columned handwritten journals, there was a mindful frugalness to his existence. He inspired me to the extent that I copied him. And the societal sense of my relationship with work is largely attributed to him. I still wish I could be more like him. Girish has no social media existence. We talk on the phone or meet in person more than we exchange texts. His emails are hearty and flow like he is speaking with you as if you are there on the other side of the screen. The saplings that grew on the side of his terrace were replanted at a farm outside of Bangalore because he chose to care deeply. To do things that you love, without a care for who is going to see it or react to it, is a sense that I would like to have towards the time I have. Because social media can be a trap. You shared what you loved, and now you love because you have to share it, or you are more busy sharing it than loving it.

I am not Girish, but I can say that there is always going to be a lasting influence of him on my life. Thankful for it.

क्या मैं हताश हूँ?

शायद परास्त हूँ।

नहीं धूल सिर्फ़ जमी है,

उसे अभी चाटा नहीं है।

दिन दिन के कामों से

अपना कुछ चुराता हूँ।

फिर भी रात को थक कर 

यह सोच के सो जाता हूँ

कि समय निकाल पाऊँगा

मशक़्क़त के 

फ़ुरसत के।

फ़िलहाल तो बस झांकता हूँ

एक कुएँ में

जहां रोशनी झांकती नहीं

इस पहर को।

पर दोपहर बाक़ी है।

आज की नहीं

तो परसों की ही सही।

-

ख़ुफ़िया कातिल

सड़कें ऐसी ऊँची हुई,

कि दरवाजें घर के डूब गये

खिड़कियों से क्या देखोगे,

ये क़स्बे कब के छूट गये।

_

ख़ुफ़िया कातिल

यूँ तो मैं मकान नहीं ढूँढता

लेकिन लोगों ने इतना पता पूँछा

कि जवाब ख़रीदना पड़ गया।

_

ख़ुफ़िया कातिल

Tungsten 800T

I first tried shooting on Tungsten 800T last year. It’s an expensive film that’s good for shooting in low light. It brings out a special radial halo of red around light source. With all these high hopes of getting a few good shots out of the film, I finished a roll, and it was heartbreaking to get to know later that the entire roll went blank because my Dad’s camera Yashica FX Super 2000 had not caught the roll properly in the spindle. Maybe it was my lack of experience that had caused this oversight, but it dampened my enthusiasm nonetheless. After a wait of five or six months, I bought a new Tungsten 800T film, and this time I decided to use it with my ever so reliable Nikon F80. Now, one of the constraints with such films is that you would only want to use it for certain things, and that meant my Nikon F80 had to be used sparingly because I was waiting for a right moment to use the film effectively. In October I travelled to Banaras for Typoday, and my memory from 2003 of Papa shooting the Ghats of Banaras at night during Aarti made me revisit the moment with my camera. Low light, lit up Ghats, an Aarti procession, well, it was enough for me to venture out with my camera at 4 in the morning.

The results came out today, and I am not that impressed with how the shots turned out to be. The problem with high ISO is that the grain is often too much, and maybe I should have taken some shots on lower ISO than the given 800 ISO. Also, a tripod would have helped so much more in avoiding shake in the shots. Without the tripod, it’s not always possible to find a spot to rest the camera, and at times when you do find one, you have to compromise on the composition a bit.

Black and white but in colour

Sufi entertaining her crowd of toys

The annual birthday poster for Sufi making her wish of being a mermaid coming to life. Don’t think she understands what cannibalism is because she loves eating crispy fried fish.

In hindsight, my abstraction related course with form integration exercises fits Pikotaro’s PPAP perfectly well.

Good to be at DJAD for the annual round of teaching yatra. Thank you, 2nd year, CD students for suffering valiantly for the last two weeks.

SCBWI Graphic Novel Award Winner

Woke up to this email today morning that caught me by surprise. In April/May, Aparna (Kapur one) sent me this link of SCBWI to apply for their unpublished graphic novel award. Mine fit the category, but I was very unsure if it will go beyond the initial round. After my IFA grant dud, I have been hesitant to approach for grants, awards etc because of the fear of rejection. So, unlike my initial hard put effort for IFA, I chose to apply for SCBWI with bare minimum effort. I won’t lie, it does make me feel good to get this recognition. And I am looking forward to seeing if the exposure to agents and publishers help me in putting more dedicated time on my book. This is what I want the most right now, to work on my book in a stretch without worrying about the bills.

______

अस्पताल की क़तार

Ted, the truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.

Well, I can't be your mentor without occasionally being your tormentor.

Ted Lasso, Headspace, Season 2

कई दिनों बाद

रेल की यात्रा कर रहा हूँ

तसल्ली से खिड़की के बाहर

तारों और विचारों को उठते गिरते देख रहा हूँ।

कुछ पेड़, मकान, क़स्बे

पुल, झुग्गियाँ, कचड़ों के ढेर

और दूर इमारतों के आईने

गुजर सारे जाते है

इस जीवन के तरह।