The Circle Of Life

Recently my F-I-L was upset over my B-I-L. Usually a man very reserved, he suddenly poured out his feelings with the repressed anger of an ageing man shadowed by the tenderness of an ignored father. I knew he was disappointed with the fact that his son hardly spends anytime to even recognize his presence around and this feeling of emptiness was making him feel more and more less wanted. This incident happened when he was watching me play with my 9-month-old. He said, "I used to take my son everywhere I could, spend as much time teaching him everything I could, get him as much as I could and I was a hero too once."  I looked at my kid, knew what future had in store for me too and I told him, "Today, the hero; tomorrow, the villain; then, the zero... I know its coming my way too." 


Often I have people asking me, "Will your son grow up to be like you?" and I wonder. With every reason to ponder, I realize that as I get pulled into the enigma of my child's presence-that innocence, that simplicity, that spontaneity-those 3 I am struggling to relearn, having lost it in the path of life that he is just stepping into, he is learning in the meantime from me-that necessity to be complex, the need to be manipulative and impossibly corrupted-those 3 I learnt encourse survive, that which I am fighting to unlearn. Now, who is growing up to be whom?! 


This is an interesting circle of life: 
Stage I: I am complex, manipulative and corrupted. He is innocent, simple and spontaneous. I want to be him and he needs to be me. We are full of mutual admiration.   
Stage II: We meet at crossroads. He calls it teenage and I call it mid-life-crisis. We have conflict of values. He is something I don't want to be and vice versa. We are each others villains who can't accept eachother's values, morale and everything that defines who we are and we bite eachother's very crux of existence. 
Stage III: I am fed up of fighting and call for truce. He is keeping himself busy with all the bruise. I am tired running the path of life and am moving slow. My thoughts are innocent, my living simple and deeds spontaneous-something I have been craving to be that my son was born with. In the meantime, what my son is busy chasing seems meaningless to me now and he is as much a zero to me as I am to him. We find eachother's existence worthless... yet, I love him.


Life ends for me thus as his begins... when he makes a home on his own and has a child of his own and sees the innocence, the simplicity and the spontaneity in that child of his and craves to be that. Yet again, once again... I will smile gently at this circle of life.  


By the by, in the pic is John Aariyar Fredjeev, my son.

Depth Of Field Illustrated

“Distance lends enchantment to the view.” 

― Mark Twain

 “While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.” 

― Dorothea Lange

“Child, you have to learn to see things in the right proportions. Learn to see great things great and small things small.” 

― Corrie Ten Boom

By the by, these are photos clicked from my bedroom window

Mask Series VI

Shuttling back to the Mask Series I had started earlier, clicking masks I have stuck to the Mask Wall in my bedroom and coming through with a reflection that emerges with it, here is one more mask to the series... an Abandoned Mask. This is a mask I could not find a place in the wall to fit it in and hence lies around as dead as its natural self. Found lying for quite sometime now, it has started adding a character to the room and would be missed if I do dump it someday and thus lies once here and sometimes there. At times we too let a persona lie around though unused, though unusable, yet for some strange reason and for no reason, just let it lie around. Maybe it has a purpose to fulfill and I must borrow Shakespeare's  “O time, thou must untangle this, not I. / It is too hard a knot for me t’untie” to wonder and leave the rest to ponder when the time doth come. 

Roadside Fight

This is a typical scene we get to see in our country... traffic, crowd and roadside fights. Whose mistake? No one knows; yet everyone will have their opinion. Mostly the decision of who is right and who must be wrong is decided even before a fair enquiry is made. The bigger the vehicle, the more probability of him/her driving it to be assumed, accused and condemned for making the mistake no matter how innocent s/he might be. Smaller vehicles are usually the victims to the onlookers eyes; one of the several benefits in driving one. This is one such situation I got a chance to click in Bangalore when a heated argument was going on.

Busy onlookers watching with an uninteresting interest emerging suddenly out of nowhere to play the role of concerned audience is something offered within seconds of any incident happening. No matter whose fight it is, there are always these kinds that gathers around like scavenging crows to pass their opinions at the drop of a hat. These are people who have seen more than they would have, heard more than they could have and talk more than they should have. They know everything! The lines they drop in may not be true at all yet as many other things said by strangers are presumed, this is yet another assumption made for roadside panchayats to render judgement at the earliest. Life moves on before the next traffic jam thus...

So What Are You Reading Now

This is how organized chaos looks like after clearing my bag revealing what I am reading right now. The rest I get in between reading is by shifting between genres rather than stop reading completely. Variety makes reading more diggable and maintains consistency. A notebook and pen in hand helps preserve interesting ideas, quotes and strong words I wish to remember intact and for later follow up nevertheless register thoughts emerging from those "Aha!" moments that will sure be gone just the way it came in-from nowhere... those thoughtless thoughts has a significant priority in this list for later gathering. Besides these reading, editing and constant (ab)use of my eyes has gifted me with some solid frames I cannot do without these days. At the end of the day, I do believe that a thinker's mind is like a magician's cap... only if you put something in earlier can you take something out later.    

Untitled

Clicked this a while ago in Tamil Nadu. As usual there is a story behind this... yet I would refrain from saying it this time. By the by, the plate does not contain milk and was not meant for the child. Now guess the hunger...

Toys Toys Toys

This is a picture of a one of my son's toys that I clicked lying in his play pen-a military jeep miniature with accessories and even bullet holes on the sides... (wish he doesn't see these and gets to see only the open top and four wheels.) These days its really hard to find toys without hints of violence; its as if children need an every day dose of violence in some form or the other and the world is out there to commercialize on this strange emerging factor-the need for violence. The other day I decided that I am never ever, ever never going to get toys resembling guns for my son... instead I should probably teach him to fire a real gun asap. Shooting a real gun develops a skill whereas playing with a toy gun, innocently pointing and shooting at every passerby and expecting them to pretend to get hurt and die, develops an attitude... an attitude I wish never seeps into him. Developing a skill is my duty and snapping a not-so-positive attitude, my responsibility and I really don't want to pamper him too much, over protect him and prevent his ability to survive eventually like many family-dominating women have, effiminating children and molding them into sissy-boys for the world to mock. Period. 

Who Decides How Good You Are

Why does anyone need someone to recommend how good another person is? I have seen people uninterestingly ask, "Are you religious? Which place of worship do you go to? Who is the priest there? Can you recite a verse? Can you say a prayer? Can you sing a song? Can you sing a song and dance along?... blah! blah! blah!" Very few are able to digest the fact that one can lead a spiritual life-far above anyone can ever imagine, have a personal relationship with the good one above and still manage to stay off the madenning crowd of religious fanatics and misleading clowns in cloaks and find liberty sans getting shut in conditional boxes and be threatened with guilt if anyone begs to differ. 
Can values be tested and marked? Can we say how honest a Man is? Today, institutions (both religious as well as academic) think they can. Probably an essay competition can be held on 'honesty' and the best essay may be handpicked by the priest/teacher and the bishop or headmaster who heads the institution may give a big trophy for the one who wrote it and the audience may be enthralled and applaud and may consider "that someone" who receives the trophy as the most honest in the crowd indeed... yet I ask, "What if no one knew that the whole essay was actually written with a stolen pen except he who wrote??? Would he who wrote the best still be considered honest by the rest?! Who would know except him how "honest" he really is?" 
Spirituality stands tall then, rising far above religion, by being good not for someone else or for others to see yet for oneself even when no one is watching. This being the difference of being good from within for oneself than to covet and pretend to be good for others on the outside. So how spiritual are we really to ourselves?! 

pic: this was a photograph I clicked in Bangalore of a temple priest getting ready to do something he thinks only he can do-get people married.

The Big City Moves

Sometimes I wonder how the big city manages to accommodate everyone who walk into it in search of the "promised land" and all its promises. This is a picture I clicked in Bangalore, where I am currently hanging out in the verge of completing the books that I had started. Every pitstop I make around here, I find a story that I can run for a few pages... mostly about agony, anxiety and above all, abandonment. I believe those are the curses that comes along with the other blessings of living in a city. Everyone checks for anyone's vulnerability and want to optimize on it. Be it an interview where they think that the people who have applied for a particular position can be asked anything just because they are assumed to be desperate for the position or be it an employee who is asked to let go his dignity and bend his back just because his boss thinks he is not worthy of anything humane or be it a compromised pay scale that he is called to work for just because someone in the management wants to show his higher authorities how good he is in bargaining... there is so much of hidden truth behind those whole lies. We do not need a foreigner to trip us any more; tripping is one thing we can do to our own fellow-beings, our countrymen, the one's we claim to be our own especially-remember our national game of Kabbadi-of who is the best at pulling each other's legs?! Despite all these games of survival, life moves on and like the traffic that shuffles like a deck of cards in the traffic signal. We stop, we get set and we go sans time to think... life is but a dream.   

Plastic Man

 

As the rest of the world was busy protecting the environment, criticizing the few they condemn as people without any concern for it while sitting in their air-conditioned/climate-controlled chambers blowing out their share of carbon emissions, this man in the picture clicked recently in the "Garden city" of Bangalore was found selling plastic bags during high noon. Interestingly stacking those plastic bags, he looks for customers-unbothered of the environmental implications. Afterall, he must be wondering... first they said, "save Earth, do not cut trees" and thus began the campaign to say "NO! to paper; use plastic instead" and we did so. Then came they with sudden enlightenment and said, "well, you see, err... plastic kills, say "NO! to plastic, use (bio-degradable) paper instead" and we agreed too. Now, when will they reach a conclusion or atleast us?! 

In the mean time lets leave this poor man alone who tries to scrape past all this, unscathed, as he tries to sell as much as he can in the scorching sun to get something to quench his thirst and maybe if luckier add a few morsels to it, have it and curse the good one above for this life on Earth, sleep and wake up for another day to kill the Earth just as much as the Earth awaits to kill him too-just another day.