Daughters of India

(1969)

Trying to rescue a very old and damaged negative, I was reminded of the poster for the classic film, Mother India, with Nargis shot from below, a vast sky looming behind her. These girls present a much more hopeful picture, pleased to be photographed.

Ice Cream Baby

The Fisherman's Child

Ennore, 1950

Sun-bleached

not snow-burdened

but sun-bleached

Search Within

1952

what is the path
that I want to choose

ahead
I see miles of silence

here
years of loneliness

what is the purpose
that I am

what will I give
what can I take

I can cry
tears of rivers
but can I swim in them

what is the purpose
why am I here
and not there

but where is there
where is, what is, there

nothing is mine
yet my eyes fill with tears
at losing it

if I cannot understand
why I am
do I expect to understand
to recognise, to embrace
  the place I do not know

where I am headed to

I am lonely
and I cannot see ahead
because my eyes are filled with tears

Symmetry / Asymmetry

I'm really not sure what I am looking at here; to the left is a piece of the Taj West End in Bangalore, while the right half looks like a cracked outdoor wall. Yet there is only one negative. So, is it one of those things where the tail end of a film roll accidentally joins half of one picture to part of another, because you wound the film over the camera's spool incorrectly?

At any rate, I like the way the curve of the sheer curtain on the left almost mirrors the curved crack on the right. Symmetry-assymetry of form, of refinement and harshness, of delicate carvings and mud.

I tinted it sepia because I could.

Eye-Catching

At an outdoor restaurant in Bangalore, sometime around 1980

For more on the girl in the picture, see my earlier blog post, Familiar