Feb/110
The Photography of Peddada Satya-Narayana Murthy
“If you cannot do the job, we will pay you five hundred rupees for your trouble...and you can go back to your old job” “Sir, if I can't do the job, you don't have to pay me anything...I will simply go back to where I came from.”
This exchange above, between the irritable managing director and my brash father, an interviewing wireless engineer in 1961, defined our life thereafter. He not only accepted the challenge, but, he did what the visiting German and Italian engineers had failed to do, establish wireless communications between the HQ and construction camps along the 700 plus miles of construction in the dense forests of Assam, in north-east India. [...] Continue Reading...
Feb/110
Nomadism Sires the Grand Narratives of History
I am an ardent devotee of the word. Just like seeds hold entire forests within, words pack entire histories within. Seed pods explode, dispersing the propagation engines of the next generation. Similarly, powerful sentences are like seed pods, with images and ideas dispersed onto fecund minds, engendering new worlds of regression or progression. [...] Continue Reading...
Dec/100
The Curative Literature of Art Shay
On a cold Friday, the third of December, with the festivities of the season warming us up, Art Shay opened his second photographic exhibit of the year, at the Thomas Masters Gallery, north of the loop. The framed black and white photograph of a cocky Cassius Clay, still, a chrysalis of a fighting machine, with his hands on his hips, glaring at us from the window, throws the gauntlet down, as if challenging us to enter the gallery and face the gritty realism of Art Shay. [...] Continue Reading...
Oct/100
Radicalism Begets Vigor, and Vigor Induces Valor
America was a radical nation in the beginning, but some where along the way, it has lost its radical vigor in politics, but vestiges of it can still be seen in the economy, where new radicals like Mark Zuckerberg recalibrate our civilization. On the other side of the world, rapacious radicals from the north-west, of the Turkish descent, have ruled India from the 10th to the 19th century. Some folks equate radicalism with barbarism and cruelty, but not valor, I agree, as well as disagree [...] Continue Reading...
Jul/100
Slow Down!
Let us stop for a moment and reflect on the astonishment expressed in statements like: “Unbelievable!” or “Holy shit!” or “Oh my god!” especially, when we see something that had been “slowed down” considerably by a speeded up motion picture camera, capturing the microscopic details of something beautiful or brutal unfolding in nature or elsewhere. [...] Continue Reading...
Jul/100
The Grand Species…My Ass!
The hallucinatory Sinai desert religions have made us to believe that we humans are indeed a grand species, for whom everything else was created. The earth was our domain. This delusional hubris is sadly funny in its claim. In the cosmic scale of time, we are a sliver of existence for the last ten millennia and of those ten only three and a half thousand years ago this snake oil of our greatness started being sold. [...] Continue Reading...
Jul/100
When Capitalism Looks Like a Tar Ball
BP's handling of the oil spill smudges an already scuffed free market system
Since the dawn of trading, the earliest type of businesses have been those that involved the exploitation of earthly resources. Thus began the territorial battles in earnest, for the resource rich lands. From the earliest settlements to the kingdoms to the modern nations, “conflict metals and minerals” as they call them, had shaped our lives for their exploitation. Today, just like in antiquity, the populations atop the resource rich lands never see their share of the riches, but for the middlemen and company bosses, often sitting hundreds of miles away, and often, with workers falling violently through the cracks between these high risk and high reward ventures. [...] Continue Reading...
Apr/110
A Repository of Magnificence
In the pantheon of "prose artists," none is a finer realist than Stendhal, yet, none is obscurer than him. He was that comet of authenticity that made only two passes over us, over a hundred sixty years ago. For those who cannot ingest empyrean metaphors, Stendhal stands like a lone Baobab, covered in dust, on an eroded plain, drained of all literary originality. How is it that the father of the "unheroic hero" manages to remain under thick dust, when vacuous writing on unrequited romances proliferate the landscape of fiction? This 21st century disquisition is an overdue canonic salutation for Stendhal, and also, to shake off that fine dust of our neglegence and ignorance of an author that gave us a new narrative etiquette. [...] Continue Reading...