There are some songs that you hear (or watch) once and they cling to you like an annoying child- no matter how much you try to coax them off! One such song is 'Oh hip-hopper mujhe pyaar to kar'. Damn! And now that I've pointed out the afore-mentioned song its already playing in my head full blast!

I had the misfortune of chancing upon a song on youtube by Alisha Chinnoy called 'Abhi Toh Mein Jawaan Hun'. It's a remixed version with full dhinchak booby video and all. So anyway, the song was watched out of my confounded curiocity and BAM it got lodged in my brain. And Thats not the worst of it!
The other day my aunt was visiting and ,as has been the recent trend with my extended family, sat me down to talk about how I should be open to the idea of settling down and getting married. I had the greatest difficulty in keeping a straight face through this conversation because guess what was playing out, full HD video and all in my head- "ABHI TOH MEIN JAWAAN HUN, ABHI TOH MEIN JAWAAN HUN!

Here's the video... its a riot! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5b-TxgPbDkw

A sculpture I came accross in Bhubaneshwar, Odisha.

I took this picture while walking along the Dal Lake, Kashmir. I find it amusingly picture postcard-like.

I love the feel of this picture. Took it in Rajasthan..

Preludes- A poem by T.s. Eliot (one of my favourite poems)

I

The winter evening settles down


With smell of steaks in passageways.


Six o'clock.


The burnt-out ends of smoky days.


And now a gusty shower wraps


The grimy scraps


Of withered leaves about your feet


And newspapers from vacant lots;


The showers beat


On broken blinds and chimney-pots,


And at the corner of the street


A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.



And then the lighting of the lamps.


II


The morning comes to consciousness


Of faint stale smells of beer


From the sawdust-trampled street


With all its muddy feet that press


To early coffee-stands.






With the other masquerades


That time resumes,


One thinks of all the hands


That are raising dingy shades


In a thousand furnished rooms.




III


You tossed a blanket from the bed,


You lay upon your back, and waited;


You dozed, and watched the night revealing


The thousand sordid images


Of which your soul was constituted;


They flickered against the ceiling.


And when all the world came back


And the light crept up between the shutters,


And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,


You had such a vision of the street


As the street hardly understands;


Sitting along the bed's edge, where


You curled the papers from your hair,


Or clasped the yellow soles of feet


In the palms of both soiled hands.


IV


His soul stretched tight across the skies


That fade behind a city block,


Or trampled by insistent feet


At four and five and six o'clock;


And short square fingers stuffing pipes,


And evening newspapers, and eyes


Assured of certain certainties,


The conscience of a blackened street


Impatient to assume the world.




I am moved by fancies that are curled


Around these images, and cling:


The notion of some infinitely gentle


Infinitely suffering thing.




Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;


The worlds revolve like ancient women


Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

- T.S. Eliot

Thoughts at a traffic signal

Order is such a whispy fleeting concept, seemingly grounded. Chaos on the other hand can break out like a tidal wave with the smallest nudge. It can sweep over our realities and wash over our beliefs in a blink of an eye.

I think about this while stuck in the midst of a traffic jam. All those metallic machines with automotive parts, grinding and halting, fuming and impatient- my auto seeming feeble and fragile compared to the bulky Land Rover or the glistening Merc right next to me.

You also realize how vulnerable you are in that huge crowd of strangers. What if there was a person who came confidently, grabbed your bag right out of your hands and dissolved into the busy street right nearby. What can one do in such a situation but watch dumb-founded, stuck in that messy human-machine mesh.

Or when an apparently irrelevant discussion between two people is taken one step to far with a communal tinge. That one, mad spark between two people can collate into a communal catastrophe, a city burning, life-long friends turning against each other in the pretext of upholding a certain man-made identity-pride.

Chaos titillates Order in such a way- waiting behind a seemingly normal façade to jump out from the cracks and crevices when least expected. After all, Order is just a man-made concept, designed to make life run smoothly. But in whose mind was this or that order dreamed up and who has to bear the consequences of its fragility? Which made-to-order Order are we living by and at whose expense?

Deserted spaces in our backyards


Deserted spaces of our lives

Deserted places of our dream worlds

The deserted spaces of our minds



deserted spaces



Deserted spaces of our cities

Deserted spaces of our streets

Deserted spaces of our doorframes

Deserted spaces of our childhood fantasies



Deserted spaces



Deserted spaces between our bodies

Deserted fingertips, deserted toes

Deserted footprints, deserted mindsets

A deserted space that nobody knows



Deserted spaces…

 
-V.C.

"And don't forget who in you, in this dense forest, was lost and found"

-'Fados' by Carlos Saura

Stop-motion animation

I have been working on a stop-motion animation film for a while. It is such an interesting yet challenging process because it demands a lot of patience. Stop-motion animation involves taking many photographs of moving inanimate objects or figures and putting them together in order to create the illusion of movement.


We have been working on the script in detail and I’ve come to learn a great deal about the nuances of script writing- each loop-hole and dramatic element is considered and worked on if necessary. The craftiness of this medium makes it unique in the field of animation. It involves 3d miniature sets and figures made from a range of materials.

The last short stop motion film a group of us made for a curtain raiser of a film festival was made by trial and error. It turned out to be pretty good but by the end of it I was having dreams about the million tiny movements we hadto make of the figures before each picture was clicked. each of those pictures, when edited together created the illusion that those figures moved around on their own. Stop-click, stop-click was all i dreamt for the next few days!
The results are usually amazing though!

Why must the little buds fold over
                                   each other,
The white sheets of the bed crumpled
                                       and restless,
Listless sleep and the nights' mind so full
                               of fear, love, doubt.

I am many things, I am nothing.
at once lovely, at once fearful,
at once a bickering lover.

I want to question, to go forth into
the lonliness of exploding life
and hold That in my arms and caress it.
But it is fleeting, it runs...

Thoughts

Life has so many twists and turns... It's like a whirlwind of confusion- a glass of chilled champagne with thousands of bubbles struggling their way to the top only to burst into the atmosphere with amazing zest!

How does one make sense of this world? Life is amazing for sure... but how do you go about it in a fulfilling way, is the hard part.
Being sad is just an emotion that can be dealt with like a spoilt child; give it enough attention and it will leave you alone for enough time to live, love and experience yourself for just a fraction of time, though once it's back you have to nurse it no matter how much you hate its presence.

The past and the present don't seem to agree with each other but they try hard to ignore each others presence... it's almost funny to see their obstinate beings not daring to stare each other in the eye.