purisubzi

Category: Photos

  • Reading John Berger

    What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower.) The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gravel. It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough.

    John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

  • Scenes from a Subway

    When walking along in subways feels like walking through a frame in a Tarkovksy film.

  • The Balladeer

    A portrait of a man

    ”When I was young, I was a balladeer”
    ”Oh, what did you sing about?”
    “Revolution, war and money. They put me in jail for 7 years”
    ”Now what do you do?”
    “Repair watches”

    Sometimes this is how watch nerds meet.

  • A Rajasthan Sunset

    Somewhere over Dhaulpur

  • Father

    Re-reading Barthes’ Camera Lucida when both of them are ill seems like an act of masochism. Perhaps it is. But in a strange way, the book is comforting. The grief in it is all consuming and blanketing, an adobe shell while everything inside me is liquid and churning. The more I photograph them, the more I am aware of their mortality and what I might do in the inevitable loneliness of it.

    I photograph these days mostly to combat my loneliness. A thing bought on by my continuing depression, a string of relationships unrequited and an inexplicable (perhaps not so inexplicable) abandonment of friends. I have found in the last few months a comfort in the sound of the shutter closing. A finality. A string of finalities. The significance of these finalities has begun to slowly dawn on me. I pointed this out to a friend a couple days ago, to which she replied, “Isn’t it obvious?”. Yes, to most. But for someone who is used to navigating with his heart, the dead end is same as the four-lane expressway.

  • Mahalakshmi Tiffin Room

    An underrated gem from among the old school places to eat in Bangalore.

  • Belur

    A street view from Belur, Karnataka

  • Chandrataal

    Chandratal Lake, Spiti

  • Waiting

    Wait, for now.
    Distrust everything, if you have to.
    But trust the hours. Haven’t they
    carried you everywhere, up to now?
    Personal events will become interesting again.
    Hair will become interesting.
    Pain will become interesting.
    Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
    Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
    their memories are what give them
    the need for other hands. And the desolation
    of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
    carved out of such tiny beings as we are
    asks to be filled; the need
    for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

    Waiting, Galway Kinnel

  • A Bench

    A bench on a platform, Bangalore Cantonment

    Quiet places to read and contemplate. Bangalore Cantonment railway station.