Clouds with Rainbow colors-A vision

Yesterday I saw a vision in sky. I have seen several Rainbows in my life; sometimes double and/or triple. But these were clouds with rainbow colors. I was in awe. Looked so beautiful. I asked Bhupen to take some pictures, as I was on my way out.



Uninspired

Feeling absolutely uninspired.......................for anything, everything

Butterfly



Butterfly





Le Quattro Volte

I believe the title means Four Stories.

The scene opens with a ground full of smoking holes, reminiscent of lava or geyser vents.  The camera pans onto the small Italian village countryside and into a small spartan room where  an old man, ready to retire for the night, is mixing something in a glass of water. He is coughing  away while stirring the mixture. He drinks it and retires for the night.

He is the hero of the first of four stories; a goat herder making living delivering goat milk to locals. A sweeper of the church pays for the milk with the dirt collected from the floor which she herself has blessed. The old man drinks this dirt as a remedy to his hacking cough every night. The nightly routine is severely disrupted when he one day loses the package in the mountains while still herding. When he realizes it he runs to the church but it is too late. Nine p.m. The sleepy village is already abed. The man dies next morning.  

Next story, one of old man's goats delivers a kid. The kid is separated from the mother and the herd and freezes to death in mountains.

Third story is about how the people of this sleepy town, even during the day time,  entertain themselves by logging an extremely tall tree. They erect this tree straight up again in the middle of town square. A man scales the tree and shows off his valor when people topple it with him in it.

After the town square show, the tree is sawed off and trucked away by the people who convert the wood into the charcoal for the locals. The process of converting the wood into charcoal was quite interesting. The wood pieces are arranged in a circular shape, thatched with hay, wood sticks and old charcoal bits. Now it looks almost like an igloo, except not of snow. It is ignited from within and the center. Eventually, smoke comes through the vents. That is how the movie had started.

The stories are simple and human. There are absolutely no dialogues. Music is barely audible but very pleasant to ears. When there is no conversation to distract, one notices more details in the film. I could see a red ant crawling on herder's face and he was too old to shake it off his face. The Italian Town is a lazy sleepy town. The countryside is very mountainous full of mists. It is extremely beautiful and picturesque.

I remember David Lean, one of my favorite directors, once telling an interviewer that a good director pans the camera long enough for audience to keep wanting it more but not that long that they lose interest.

The photographer panned the camera long and wide. He seemed to have followed that tenet of movie making to a tee.

I adored this movie. I love the total silence. Because, to me............ silence speaks volumes.

Tantacles

I visited Photoshop after a very long time. I am very happy with the results.

Tantacles



Calcutta, now Kolkata

After a delicious Top Shelf Margarita at a dinner out last night our conversation turned to reminiscence. I talked a lot about my CAG school days. Mostly,  teachers and school friends. While they call the city Kolkata, it will always remain Calcutta to me. 

According to my niece who spent about six months with us, she has never heard anybody in our family talk about Calcutta as much as she has from me.

She is right.

Calcutta is almost never out of my mind.

I am going down the memory lane now. Somethings I remember very well, others not. I have always envied people with photographic memories.

I often visualize  the spacious road we lived on; the neighbors we had; the games we played. I map out the everyday walking route I took to my  school. I remember the way but not the shop keepers except a fabric merchant, Primus repairer and a snack shop owner.  I believe there was a pottery store at the corner of main road and the side street. During Monsoons, I remember treading the road in knee deep water mixed with sludge. Rains were so heavy that drainage system could not cope with water. Many times we would step on some crawly creatures we did not know what they were. An eeck would  go through my body. Most of the times we would be soaked through to the bones for the lack of umbrellas. Umbrellas were , often, ineffectual in torrential rains.

I remember some of my teachers; Sumita Sen,  Monjula Choudhry, Panna Bhatt, Padma Vaswani, Pankaj Mehta(?) , Devendra Dave. I do not remember who taught what in which standard. Class mates I remember are, Kalavati Coonverji Shah, Jaswanti Manek, Damayanti (?), Madhumati Shah. Other school friends were, Manorama Shah, Dipika Kadakia, Ranjan Surati(?), Rashmi Joshi, Manna Sheth(?). 

One of my fondest memories is, during  recesses one of the school guards, whom we used to call Darwanjees, would call me out of the line of hundreds of girls first and pour water on my hands to drink. We did not have water fountains we have here. There is an Indian method to drinking water; one pours and the other drinks. He always favored me over other girls. After many years, when I went back to visit my school once, he was there and still remebered me. I wonder if he is still alive!

I remember the street vendor, Mamoo, who sold Moshla Mudi, a local snack favorite. I often retrace the way to weekend outing destination; Victoria Memorial . But I do not remember how we went to Eden Garden. How on many Sunday mornings I, with my younger brother and sister, walked to Esplanade.

During couple of my college years I  took number six bus to my college, Shikshayatan. My favorite professor at the college was named Mrs. Pant. She taught Commercial Geography. There was another Professor I liked, Miss Mitra. She taught Philosophies of Francis Bacon, Renee Descarte, Emanul Kant and I forget who else. 

Then, I left Calcutta for good. But......... Calcutta never left me.

Sons and Lovers

Night before last I finished  'Sons and Lovers' by D.H. Lawrence. It is a tome of a book; but only in length. It took me some time to finish.

It was touted as one of the masterpieces of its time. Maybe.  I do not have an evolved sense of critique, but I do not think it was a masterpiece at all.

The story is about a Walter Morel's family with a wife, three sons and a daughter; Gertrude, William, Paul, Arthur and Annie.

When I took up the book with the name such as it has I thought it would be about the sons. It is actually about a son, Paul. Annie has been shown to have a small role towards the end when mother is dying. But Arthur is almost entirely ignored. After oldest boy's, William's,  untimely death Paul has become the center of his mothers existence, or shall I say mother has become the center of Paul's existence. He  develops relationship with two girls, Miriam and Clara, both willing and able, one after another, and yet  leaves them without due causes. He cannot form a lasting relationship because his mother does not approve of either girl.

Hundreds of pages have been written about Paul's intellectualizing and philosophizing during these affairs. But one cannot clearly understand Paul's mind. With all that romancing and intimacies with two girls, we do not know that he has even a mustache till the four fifths of the book. Many paragraphs started with "one day...". I do not consider this a good beginning for a paragraph from a very good writer. Lot has been written without saying much. And lot has not been said which could have made the book more understandable.

Mother eventually dies of tumor. Paul wants to kill himself but decides instead, on a long journey.

One thing I liked about the author's writing style is that he uses short sentences unlike his contemporaries who wrote paragraph length sentences. The concept of feminism was used which I thought was well ahead of their time.

This is the only novel I have read which is based on "Oedipus" complex. I think this novel could have been abridged and certainly with a more apt name.

UPS Delivery Service (United Parcel Services)

Week before last week UPS delivered a package to our door. Address on the package was ours but not the name. We thought we should look at similar named street in our area  and see if we can hand deliver it to the right individual. After several attempts we did not find the right address or the party. So I called UPS  last week and explained that package does not belong to us. The lady at the other end asked me to leave the package outside our door Monday morning and somebody will pick it up.

Nobody came.

This morning I left the package out again. While I was going for a walk late afternoon, I saw a UPS truck making delivery to one of my neighbours. So I asked the driver if he would kindly pick up the package for me; it was misdelivered and I had already called his office about it.  He said nobody had informed him to pick up any parcel from my home. I said, as long as he was here would he mind doing it. He said, he had to make deliveries, and perhaps he will come back, and he left.

I went on my walk thinking he is not coming back.  He just wanted to get me off his back.

Lo and behold, when I returned from my walk after hour and twenty minutes, parcel was gone. He kept his word.

This is what is so likable about America. I felt bad having doubted his intentions....

Apocalypse

Apocalypse

Since I am writing this, I guess Apocalypse did not arrive at its foretold time.


Faith defrauded us once again. God damn it...........sigh............a sigh of despair...........

More Beads

I have created a new Blog for my bead work under charu kaushik.