Thursday, January 28, 2010

Monotonic Darkness

Last week was one of those weeks where you look back and say to yourself: What on earth was I thinking. Out of some impulsiveness and some sense of compulsion, and in an extremely geeky way, I started a blog. Impulsive because I felt is was a good idea at the time; compulsion to find an arty escape from my extremely analytic daily life before I go totally nuts rather than my current state of just mostly nuts. A little bit of artificially generated digital social interaction. A way for my suppressed right brain to push back on the left brain.

Now that the blog is started, I am faced with my first big test: What if I don't have a life that is interesting enough to talk about?

Then I started thinking - regardless of how boring life is, it is nevertheless a life. I doubt that most people who carry a full time job with part time studying on the side / in the evening are faring much better. They do not seem to share the resentment of "the daily routine". Hell, come to think of it, the way I see it, no one but oneself can say that one's life is boring. So it is not particularly interesting in the sense that it is routine that I split my day between 9 hours in the office, 2.5 hours on a train/bus, 3 hours in front of the home computer supposedly working on a thesis, 6 hours in my bed and the balance on unimportant things like eating. Uninteresting maybe, but certainly not boring - at least for 9 hours a day I am faced with the challenge of making up excuses to my non-existent boss of why projects A to Z are not yet completed - it doesn't get much more creative than that.

It is not a glamorous life by any stretch of imagination, but not an overly dull one neither. It's all a matter of perspective you see: If I had to choose between my current life and that of a typical generation Y, I would pick mine. Yes you know the type, the ones who spend the whole day everyday thinking about where and how they will be getting pissed that evening and the next. The ones who want to be different and unique but then rush out to buy the same but different jeans that hang around their ankles just so that they can walk in a different but same I-am-about-to-trip-over-my-own-pants Hip-Hop way.

Yes, there is a lot of middle ground between these two and a lot more beyond them. I will get there one day, when the thesis is done and dusted.

Life is what you make it to be, and irrespective of how uninteresting it may seem, it is nevertheless a part of life. It's about time I embraced it.

So on that note, here is the uninteresting place where I spend three hours every evening. Sometimes browsing the internet, seldom working on what I should be working on: the thesis. Can photography make a boring place seem infinitely more interesting? You bet. The trick is to focus on the interesting aspects of life and leaving everything out of focus. Who said art and intellect cannot co-exist?

(Click on image to see it in full res.)


PS: Getting pissed tomorrow night courtesy of the people who passed their exams. Should be fun.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

The Beginning

In the beginning, there was THE GUIDE.

The Hitchhiker's Guide, in fact, to the Galaxy.

In The Guide, a group of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings demand to learn the Answer to the "Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything" from the supercomputer, Deep Thought, specially built for this purpose. It takes Deep Thought 7½ million years to compute and check the answer, which turned out to be 42. Unfortunately, The Ultimate Question itself is unknown.

Like the hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings', my Ultimate Question is unknown.

Unlike the hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings', my Ultimate Answer is unknown. (I might be wrong, but I don't think that it is 42.)

Here, I attempt to answer my Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. I do this using my battered and dropped but nevertheless trusty Olympus E-510, through the apertures of a small battery of lenses.

Why? Because I can. Because the moment the shutter clicks, I capture the details that people rarely see and the vastness that people rarely appreciate. I see the World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower.

This is my story. This is my window to the world. Window to my life, my universe and everything else.