Spring is nature’s way of saying, “Let’s party!”  ~Robin Williams

February is synonymous with lovely weather and the eagerness to welcome Spring. The beautiful season where flowers blossom and  everywhere we turn all we see is lush greenery. Though in India, we don’t have specific seasons like they do abroad, we rejoice this season nonetheless. Here is Shrinidhi an IT professional who is passionate about Travelling, Blogging and Photography sharing a few words on what Spring means to him…

Spring often means joy- liberation from chilling winter, an opportunity to venture out, an opportunity to celebrate. These peacocks are doing just that. Clicked about an year ago at Karanji Kere, near Mysore.

Karanji kere is a place wherein tourists are allowed to enter an enclosure that houses many birds, including peacocks. We had a chance to get close with these birds and watch them walk around freely and spread their wings- a moment to cherish, when you’re used to seeing peacocks in zoos, kept in small enclosures behind the mesh.

Chandrachoodan takes us along on the journey around the Streets of Chennai, capturing moments and moods of what makes the city it is today.. Walking along the streets, the people, the activities are all so vivid and unique to this city that one needs to experience it to understand it.

In T. Nagar, that bargain hunter’s pleasure central, is awash with gentle evening light. I am in a park – world famous Panagal Park – an island of green surrounded by trade, commerce and human activity. Two auto-rickshaws, one going and one coming. Two cycles, one just starting to go. The other mid journey. A moment of perfect symmetry and arrested movement. I release the shutter, and a permanent trace of this light is made.

Meanwhile, we humans were learning to read other traces. Traces that we ourselves were creating. Like photography, these traces are ephemeral. Only a lot more so. Traces so fleeting, on a surface so stable and receptive of further, additional traces.

Michael De Certeau, in a much-referenced, seldom-understood volume “The Practice of Everyday Life” talks of the flaneur – the idle, lazy walker – creating the city in his (it was a much less politically correct world back then.) image. “Their intertwined paths give their shape to spaces. They weave places together. In that respect, pedestrian movements form one of these ‘real systems whose existence in fact makes up the city.’”, says he. The question was, and is, does the city exist and are we merely walking it? Or are we creating the city, and creating different cities, as we walk our paths?

Cities. The story of man, is the story of city living. Carrying our scarce resources, we left our ancestral homes in Ethiopia in search of fame, fortune and everything that goes with it. It was no pleasure cruise, as Freddy Mercury put it succinctly. Grain, when we had it, rotted quickly in the heat and the damp. And so some of us had to settle down, clear large tracts of land and become full time farmers. And some of us had to become soldiers and policemen to protect the farmers. Specialisation set in. Division of labour. And some became artists, artisans, photographers. The city is where professionals live. All humans are professionals.

And today, it is this city, Madras, which caused this professional to turn photographer.

Another Sunday, another locality. This time, it’s evening and I am restraining myself. I will shoot with just one lens – a lovely Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 D lens. And only 36 photos, one exposure for each motive.

The Napier bridge, also called Iron Bridge, is brilliantly lit. It allows a jazzy, blinged-out carriage – a Tonga – to cross over the near-stationary, faintly malodourous Cooum. Colours, light, and a vehicle not seen often. Click.

Stories. Linear narratives, but oh so easily choppable. And every play on the linearity creates another, newer story. Walking the city, with or without a camera, is telling a story. And as you walk up and down, retracing your steps, stepping over and obliterating previous steps, previous stories, you are creating a new story.

That we, as archaeologists and anthropologists, as sociologists and photographers, writers and story tellers, can read these traces, these footsteps on the sands of time and tell the story, step back into the river of time, is proof of the extra-ordinary depth of the human intellect.

When we see something that captures our attention, we are drawn towards it. there are times we have no logic as to why that happens. Similarly, there are so many things during the course of our day that mesmerize us, and transport us to another world. Sangeeth, an avid photographer shares some shots that held his attention and made him wonder, digging deeper..

The lone bench in the neighborhood park seemed to stare at me, inviting me. Almost all other benches were taken, with people busy catching up, gossiping or simply giving their feet some rest. But this bench was forlorn, longing for some company. As I walked along, the bench seemed to fade away into the oblivion, just like the words that I heard floating in the air.

The lamp, burning brightly at the temple altar. While on a holiday with my parents, I wandered around the temple, trying to understanding the architecture, and the various sculptures. There were little nooks around every shrine with a lamp lit in them.

There were many women praying , walking along the narrow corridors, and every now and then one would stop by a shrine, and light a lamp, say an extra prayer and move on. It amazed me to see the amount of power FAITH has , and how people seemed to rely on a single PRAYER even when all else failed.

The things we see in our daily lives, the people we pass by and the moments that capture our mind.  Chandrachoodan, the man behind the Chennai Photowalk concept shares some of the snapshots from his photowalks across the city and the myriads of lives that make the city what it is.

IT’S 7 AM on a Sunday, and Madras is already sizzling. I am perched patiently on a pile of bricks on a corner of a busy street. Eye to the viewfinder, fingers testing the trigger, I scan for signs of human activity.

As on many Sundays, I am photowalking. Trying to improve my photography, break the routine and hunt for the strange, the beautiful and the inspiring in the streets of Madras. As is common to those who wait long minutes, hours, for their prey, I too speculate.

Imagine, I tell myself, having to walk the world on four legs. Stooped. Bent. What a tragedy that would be, for we would never hold in our hands tools, such as an Oldowan stone chopper. Or the Nikon D80.

We, the people, have got to walk on our legs. Our species, the Homo-Sapiens-Sapiens evolved, survived and flourished entirely due to a simple accident: bipedalism. While quadrupeds – deer and other game – could outrun us in the short term, they quickly lost stamina, and had to rest. Just about long enough so we the bipeds, slowly walking up to the resting animals, could hunt them, eat them and survive the violent cradle that Africa was and is.

Why bipedalism evolved is a question best left to palaeontologists and archaeologists, such as David Jordan. Perhaps because trees, in a world that was younger and fresher, could now grow taller and further out of the reach of our primeval primate fathers; who had no choice but to stand up and be counted if they had to eat. Perhaps we took to our feet because food was scarce, and energy had to be conserved; standing tall meant less surface area exposed to the harsh climates of middle Africa.

Whatever the reason, Bipedalism gave us a singular advantage. Our top/front limbs could be freed to manipulate tools, giving rise to our species’ defining characteristic: creating resources rather than just consuming them. Creating art.
The sun’s climbing steadily up the sky, a path mirrored by the mercury in the thermometer. An old man shuffles by, finds the only spot of shade in an otherwise boiling pavement: the shadow of a lamppost. He huddles himself there, and resumes watching the street. Click.

ART ON MY BRAIN

Photography: Grecian economy of words, it describes light leaving its ephemeral traces on paper. That our species can read these traces, that we can read meaning into these traces and look for, in the words of Roland Barthes, the Punctum among all the Studium, is an accident.

The early hominids’ (the large biological khandan that humans are a part of) brains were getting bigger and bigger, and before long, our heads were almost too big to go through our mother’s birth canal. We had to be born earlier. Premature. This forced us, then and now, to look up to someone bigger, better and benevolent, for our safety. Perhaps one logical reason for the birth of religion and spirituality.

In any case, the larger brains that humans inherited meant greater processing power, acutely developed senses, and wired up, highly connected, abstraction-metaphor-pattern seeking intellect. The human eye, one on each side of a forward looking face, could perceive colour, depth, motion and edges. Our visual system became closely connected to our emotional system. We could see all.
The religion and spirituality caused by our near-death birth experience, and the 3D world of our visual perception, potent forces each, when they came together, boom!

Art.

Caves exploded in colour, stones whittled away into sculptures. Sculptures that were tools. Tools, in their perfect symmetry, pieces of art.
Wait. Wait. What’s that there? Oh, brilliant. A “sastrigal”, white dhoti flapping, crosses the street, stopping the traffic with a nonchalant, disdainful little wave of his arm. HAS TO BE PHOTOGRAPHED.

There are times when we are busy with our lives that we fail to notice the people and things that pass through our journey. First in the series of sharing moments from day to day life, we bring to you Kolkata based Sukanto Mukherjee‘s snapshots. An avid photographer, he has managed to capture such simple moments and share them with us.

Walking on the road, taking shots of people along the street is one way of capturing the myriad of life in a town. This picture was shot on a small traffic intersection in Kolkata. The man in the frame seems to be one of the self-appointed ‘traffic guards’ of the city – something very common here that predates the likes of citizen activism and civic police. Irrespective of the fact whether the vehicles obey his instructions or not, he seems to be holding his own, with the cap and sunglasses making him stand out literally. Maybe very few know where he is from or what really drives him to do such a thing on a summer afternoon. But one thing is clear: he clearly does not seem to care. The reason why I shot this in black and white is that Kolkata is a city which in many aspects seems merrily stuck in the past. Adding a bit of charm to the man, the photograph speaks quite the tale.

Life in Kolkata is quite predictable. You will find a lot of people relaxing on a balmy weekend evening at one of the watering holes in Kolkata. I took this shot at one of the more popular places in the city. As is typical with Bengalis, no conversation is complete without a few puffs, and the old world steel ashtrays complete the picture. As some of us were pondering over world-changing issues, a friend put his cigarette on the ashtray, and it made for a perfect frame with the beer bottles in the background. Again, the black and white matched the nature of such discussions – which tend to colour views in either black or white.