I’ve been mostly out travelling these past few weeks (lots of photos and writing on that to come), but I am so glad to be back in Madras nee Chennai. I still haven’t fully gotten used to the heat and humidity though. But the more I live in the city, the more the eventual move from Bangalore is starting to make sense.
A few months ago, while cleaning out some storage boxes, I came across a couple of neatly packed lenses. Neatly packed, because of my father. Absolutely forgotten and hoarded, also my father. One of them was a Helios-40 in an M39 mount and the other was a Chinon 35mm f/2.8 in an M42 mount. The Helios sadly was beyond repair, with its front element cracked totally.
The Chinon, however, was considerably in better shape. All the lens elements looked good, other than some gunk and fungus build-up. The focus ring was also very tight. I hadn’t repaired a lens in a long time and debated for weeks in my head whether to do it myself or send it off someone more experienced. In the end, I decided that I want the challenge and that if I fucked it all up, I’ll still have other 35mm manual lenses to shoot with.
With Youtube as a guide, purchases at the local hardware store and Amazon, I went to work. The hardest part was the disassembly because it requires the most focus and I simply couldn’t find a stretch of time where I could just do it, so everything happened in very frequent bursts. To cut the long story short, I managed to pull everything apart easily, clean the lens elements (Hydrogen Peroxide, ftw), blow the dust away, clean surfaces etc. and put it all back together in about a few weeks.
To say that I love this lens is an understatement. With the way the Fuji X-T20 renders colours, photos from this lens have a dream like, painterly look. It has its imperfections, of course — the purple fringing is very bad, so is the bloom — but when you work around those and frame photos, the result is so full of character.
I’ve always wanted to be a painter, but lacked the required skill, but in ever so small terms, this lens is enabling me to act like one.
Maybe it is the season, or my mind, but something’s shifted in the way I look at the world when I photograph these days. Instead of seeing vibrance and contrast and texture, I am seeing a smoothed monotone. As if every part of the frame is collapsing into a singular, formless element.
I don’t know what to make of it, other than acknowledge it for now and see where it goes.
The sort of grey, monotone day in Bangalore where the default state of being is to wonder where the year has gone and reflect on a variety of things. I’ve been thinking of the past month or so though. It has a been a time of change, both expected and unexpected.
A lot of my energies went into personal and family matters. I won’t get into all the details, but as a family, we’ve been dealing with multiple deaths within a short span of time, a major health scare and seeking closure on a number of financial deadlocks. For reasons unbeknownst to me, I was thrust into the middle of many of these — to sort, convince, cajole and comfort others. Normally, I wouldn’t mind, but there was a giant, urgent gorilla occupying space in my head and heart needing equal or more attention at the same time.
That giant gorilla was work. I work in an industry that is closely coupled with how people spend money, and as everyone knows, prices have risen and spending has slowed in the past few months. That meant some teams at work needed to be restructured with a shift in focus on the things we do. The inevitable followed, as we had to ask about a dozen people to leave. Such conversations are never easy, and I have had my fair share of them in the past, but this time it felt different, and personal. Over the past year, the team had built a great product, but more importantly learned to deliver on time consistently, quietly and without any drama. It all felt very much like everyone was giving a shit and the needle was moving.
So it was a shock for everyone to process. I am still somewhat in shock, despite having a couple of weeks go by. Will I get better? In time of course, but I don’t think that feeling of unfairness of it all will ever go away.
The third thing that’s been on my mind has been my online presence. I haven’t been a heavy Twitter user for a while now, but despite that I am not immune to the all the drama surrounding it. That place occupies a special place in my heart. It bought me friends, jobs, love, and immense learning. I won’t abandon the place, until it does really go away. But these events did force me to think about my online presence.
I have this blog of course. I have had it some form of the other since the mid-2000s, switching platforms and hosts many times. The current incarnation in WordPress was primarily driven by my need to make it easier to share my words and pictures (which I think I have succeeded because I am one of those rare people who likes the new editor.) A second reason was also to slowly attach a store to sell prints of my work. That endeavour has gone nowhere mostly because of laziness and covid disrupting businesses of people I wanted to work with.
I intend to write more here, and keep tinkering with the format because WordPress now makes it really easy and intuitive to do so.
I have a presence on Micro.blog and Mastodon. The later I just setup, mostly to protect my user handle at the primary server. I’ve been on Micro.blog for a few years now and I really like it. It is an ocean of calm whenever I visit, and if the infrastructure that powers it is in the mood! And lately, it has been very moody. I get that the team behind the service is small and they are very deliberate about doing things a certain way, but as a user, it really does put a dampener on things when sharing takes ages, timelines don’t load etc… I don’t intend to quit it either, but perhaps may not visit and share as often.
The fourth and perhaps the least consequential and most navel gazy of all is use of software tools and services. Like a true nerd, I think about this a lot more than I should. If anything, these past few weeks have been worse!
I thought long and hard about my Setapp subscription and in the end, decided to follow through and not renew. The only app I that I was using regularly was Ulysses and PDF Squeezer. I used Noteplan too for while, which would have justified the subscription, but I switched to taking work and meeting notes on my iPad using Goodnotes because it allowed me to be present a lot more.
I also decided not to upgrade my Capture One 21 licence to the latest. Capture One is my preferred tool for processing photos, but the new features aren’t that useful to me. The existing version still runs fantastically well on my M1 MacBook Air. I did add Darkroom to my toolset because I find it far more useful and much more intuitive to use on the iPad than Capture One.
I still have some more ways to go before I optimise my current toolset and the costs associated with it, but it has been a decent start.
For a while, we talked. Then for another time, we just sat next to each other and read the books we were carrying. After that, we shared a large ice-cream.
Much later, we decided to walk the neighbourhood we were in. A place that had been once familiar to us — individually and together — now, almost unrecognisable. For her, these rain tree lined streets were about navigating heartbreak, a difficult marriage and finding herself as a person and the art that such discovery engenders. For me, these narrow lanes, leading into leafy cul-de-sacs, were an avenue for my hedonism and cavalierness.
We talked and recollected and laughed and shed some tears until we reluctantly left the area. Each wanting to dive deeper back into memory, the comfort of it, despite the sadness and indifference. Fighting the thing that Teju Cole once wrote about, “The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten.”
Some photos make you deeply regret losing them.
Last evening, I was looking at this frame deeply and noticed something that I should have corrected when I processed it. But I can’t. The original RAW file, along with a hundred others shot on that trip are lost forever because of my stupidity years ago. All I have left is this pitifully small sized version.
Sigh.
We’ve paused at a bend in the road.
It’s been a frustrating morning, with half of us on this side of the ridge, while S and A are on the other side. News came in at breakfast that a large male was spotted late last evening walking along this area of the mountains. So we split up, hoping at least one party might be able to spot it.
Waiting under a rocky overhang to escape the strong sun, I hear the phone buzz to life in the jeep. 5 seconds of excitement later, there are muffled disappointments from T and others. The other siders too have had zero luck.
I am exhausted and my neck, despite the protection is badly sunburnt. Speak to T. It’s an abort for the morning. We are finally back on the road to Ulley.
I’ve been walking for nearly two and a half hours now and I haven’t seen a single living thing since waving a bye to Sonam at the village.
The only thing that resembles life is the wind, which every now and then blows fiercely across the sky and floor. I can feel the cool dryness of it through my shemagh, before the sand hits me. Millions of little dots of grit, expertly weaving their way through fabric and pockmarking my face.
This turn in the road. From where I sit, I see it run flat for the two kilometres or so and then rise and rise until only sand is visible on the horizon. The altimeter on my phone says 14,821 feet.
Porridge and water and more sand. Breakfast.
It’s only when you are here do you really understand how the scale of things both makes you feel alive and intimidates you.
It was an expected death. The signs had been apparent for a few months and all (most, anyway) were prepared. But the news caused me some imbalance. It is a curious thing to know the inevitability of an event, yet still be very surprised when it does happen. That moment in time when firing synapses register, the brain processes and sends things back to the rest of the body to feel.
Behind me, grieving relatives. Some showing it outwardly, others silently and perhaps not yet in comprehension. She’s draped in white, tinted blue by the fluorescence of the light that bathes the glass box in which she lies. She was a good person to me. How many others in this room would agree with me?
There’s a constant buzz of ring tones.
The balcony looks over the edge of the city from the 19th floor. In the distance, the Bay of Bengal shimmers blue. A few fishing trawlers bob up and down. Towards the north, hulking ships at anchor, waiting for berth at the harbour. I make out some slim figures on the beach playing cricket. The coastal road below snakes around marshes, bikes and cars competing to get ahead. A red car brakes suddenly to avoid hitting a push cart and careening into the salty weeds.
I hear a relative order breakfast for the rest of us. I can make out “extra chutney” towards the end of his frantic call.
Chennai, even so high up, early in the morning and in the beginning of February is oppressively hot. The panting Husky next door has his head against the balcony railing, waiting to catch a breeze. My forearms are beginning to glisten and the back of my neck feels wet.
“You see those big ships in the distance? The ones that come from China have to be at anchor and be quarantined for 14 days before they can dock”, a relative who works at the port suddenly appears and shares this piece of knowledge. I nod. The converstation ends and he moves to another person for the same factoid.
The door bell rings loudly.
Below, on landscaped area, a father and son are playing football. The son seems to be not more than three or four and his kicks end well short of the father. Faint sounds of “harder” seem to carry up the floors, but maybe I am just imagining things. The ball is kicked and bounced around for a while. The father picks up the son and off they go inside, but not before some tickling and loud giggling.
Breakfast packs are passed around, with cups of coffee. It is hot and strong. The waves in the sea seem to gotten taller.
Some mornings are very alike, some mornings are very different.
I was reading something yesterday about lonely places inhabited by people who seemed to have ended up there not of their own volition, but by the fickle nature of chance and circumstance.
And I was instantly reminded of the guards at Chandratal. At the base of the hills over which the bowl of the lake sits, these guards occupy a lone tent, billowing against the constant howling wind, the canvas sheared a little bit each day, hastily patched by weak thread or ineffective electrical tape.
Each stay for three months at a time, absolutely alone, save for some summer weeks when visitors come up past the cleared pass. They walk the perimeter of the lake, ensure the nomadic shepherds with their horses and sheep and yak don’t wipe out the thin, green grass too early.
I imagine their walks and their daily life. I imagine what it must be to live without the anchor of even seeing another human for weeks.