Faded Earth

Upanishad in stories

2017-09-13T10:32:00.002-07:00

Sometimes you find a book close to your heart, you read that book a few times, hoping to return to it again, only to lose it. No matter how hard you search for it, you cannot find it again. I am sure that things like this happen to all of us. Objects and people are similar after all- they disappear leaving empty smoke behind…
When in secondary school, at the age of twelve years, I had the occasion of reading a few books with stories from Upanishads in them, and two particular books struck me as especially interesting. Not having enough knowledge of Sanskrit, I could not read the stories in their original form, nor had I the patience back then to rummage through the entire Upanishads just in order to find a few stories. These two particular books, in all their lucidity of prose and yet not-so-dramatized retelling of the stories drew me to them repeatedly. One even had particular references of the stories being retold, and in this case re-written, so that if one were to search for the original text it would not be difficult. I did not remember the publication details or the name of the authors retelling those stories and the encounter with those two books remained as a pleasant yet foggy boyhood memory of mine. Alas, for years had to go by before I could have a glimpse again.
Last year, as I was taking a walk in the college street area and was looking at the second-hand books sprawled on the footpath (for sale), one of the books caught my attention. Lo and behold! It is one of those!
I remembered some of the pictures and bits and pieces of the narration, and as I kept flipping the pages a rush of school-day memories came in. Back then we had compulsory library periods on first, and third Sundays which spanned from around 1:30 pm to 4 in the afternoon. I was in hostel then, under the Ramakrishna Mission. The library was at the back of that building, behind the assembly hall, by a pond, which was surrounded by a fence. The library itself was surrounded by trees and there was an empty building adjacent to it which was used as the Table Tennis room in normal times and as a pox ward in the spring. I myself had the occasion of staying in that one storied building when I was afflicted with chicken pox in the 10th grade. It was in that particularly memorable library where I had the occasion of first reading this book:

The title reads as Galpe Upanishad, which means Upanishad in stories. The author is Sudhirkumar Dasgupta, M.A., Ph.D. and the publisher is A. Mukherjee and Co. Private Limited

I liked the fact that the stories carried references of certain keywords and also mentioned clearly where they could be found. As one can see looking at the title page, at a certain point in time, this book had been part of a syllabus prescribed in the secondary level but later it was removed in favour of (I suppose) easier and more secular texts. As far as my knowledge goes, this book is currently out of print and the only copies extant are either in second-had bookstores or in some libraries. Even the publishing house A. Mukherjee and Co. do not have any copy of this book if the clerks at their stores are to be believed. I wish I could provide a complete digital copy of the text but I am unsure regarding the copyright law in such cases. So, I decided to make my own translation of this book instead and make it available in parts for people to enjoy free of cost. Nonetheless I hope that this project would be interesting to certain readers as I translate the book over a series of blogpost over the period of a few months.

Story 1
Title: “Da”
Reference:
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
Chapter: 5
Brahman (Part) 2

Brahmaa created every living being on earth – be it a god, an Asura (Note: In Hinduism, gods are called Sura, their brothers are Asura which literally means ‘not sura’. For convenience, Asuras can be translated as demons but I feel that would not be the right thing to do, since the word demon has different connotation and a different history associated with it in the Western myth), or a human. Everybody being the son of the same Brahmaa, they are brothers to each other. For this very reason in Vedas, Brahmaa is called Prajapati (Praja means living beings, or son, while Prajapati means the creator) and in Puranas he is called Pitamaha (the Grandfather). Now, those three brothers grew up over the years and it is time for them to start studying. Not knowing where else to go all these three brothers went to their Father, (the eldest of all and their own Prajapati) Brahmaa and in his ashrama they started maintaining Brahmacharya. Without Brahmacharya, one cannot gain inner strength (tejas) and without inner strength one cannot attain proper knowledge.
Many years passed this way. The gods gradually felt that their nature is becoming purer and that their heart is being filled with inner strength. Thus, before anybody else, they went to Prajapati and said, “O God! (Note: In those days it was natural to call one’s teacher as such) Please, advise us, we are maintaining brahmacharya for many years now.”
But Brahmaa did not say a thing to the gods, he only uttered, ‘Da’; and after a while he asked, “Did you understand what I said just now?”
And all the gods replied together, “Yes, we did.”
Prajapati – “What did you understand?”
Gods – ‘Damyat’, you told us to suppress, to control.
Prajapati was quite happy to hear that and he said, “Yes, you have understood correctly.”
The gods were of pure intelligence; after maintaining brahmacharya for many years they understood correctly that control of the senses, of desire, is the basis for all forms of meditational practice. Hence, when they hear ‘Da’ from Prajapati they were only thinking that the Father is telling them, “to control, to suppress”
Thereafter, one fine day the humans went to Prajapati and said, “O God! Please advise us now.”
This time too Prajapati said only one word in reply, ‘Da’ and right after saying that asked, “Did you understand what I said?”
And all the humans replied together, “Yes, we did.”
Prajapati – “What did you understand?”
Humans- ‘Datta’, you told us to give, to do charity.
Like before Prajapati was happy to hear that and said, “Yes, you have understood correctly.”
Humans were by nature greedy, and after years of meditational practice they understood that. Hence, right after listening to the ‘Da’ sound from Prajapati it seemed to them that their Father is telling them “to give away, to do charity.”
Finally, came the Asuras. They too had performed brahmacharya for many years and they too told Prajapati, “O God! Give us advice.”
‘Da’ – Even to the Asuras Prajapati told the same thing and thereafter asked them the same question, “Did you understand what I said just now?”
The Asuras too replied together, “Yes, we did.”
Prajapati – “What did you understand?”
Asuras – ‘Dayadhwam’, you told us to show kindness, to be kind to others.
Prajapati was equally happy to hear this and with a pleasant smile told the Asuras, “Yes, you have understood correctly.”
The Asuras were of very cruel and violent nature. Hence, right after hearing the ‘Da’ sound from Prajapati, naturally they thought, Father is telling them, “Be kind, be kind to others! Be kind to other creatures!”
Those advised rules of Grandfather Prajapati is still present in our world. Even to this day, when the clouds thunder, those advice of Prajapati resounds in the sky, and the lightning makes the same sign – “Da! Da! Da! – Damyat! Datta! Dayadhwam!” Prajapati keeps telling us through the sound of the thundering clouds, “Da! Da! Da! Control! Give! Be kind!”
The Rishi told, “Hence, practice these three – Dam (controlling), Daan (charity) and Daya (kindness).
Dam, Daan and Daya – a great lesson from Grandfather Prajapati.

"Da! Da! Da!"

Excavation of a Forgotten Painter: The Moments of his Art

2017-08-13T06:03:00.000-07:00

In the earlier post I had tried to dig up the silken glow of Maniklal Banerjee, an eminent painter aligned to the Bengal School of Art, not so well remembered, who also happens to be my great grandfather. Like the familiar yet elusive beauty of his native village Sonaranga, he has remained less than fully tangible. He has remained somewhere amidst the luminous haze of family reminisces and the "ghost paintings"-as I call them- mere photographs retained of his best work on silk. I have received them archived on a CD disk, that came to me as a family heirloom.

Sonaranga of his younger days, drawn from memory and impressions.

I have decided to call him, at times, by the name of Manik Babu, even though the man is both, a great painter and my great-grandfather instead of the more endearing “Boro-Dadu”. I have accused him at times in my mind, for remaining like a myth in our household. It was as if everybody knew half-truths about him, yet he did leave pieces of his soul here and there- definite, full-bodied clues of his being displaced in time that would possess my attention for hours. I was not grown up enough to talk about art with him beyond a sketch or two of cow or crow that he was kind enough to draw for me. In his life, he gave a large family his name and his legacy, but he remained cooped up in his studio, growing old and wrinkled quite alone, while the world around him busied itself in frivolity. Therefore, there are only two ways I can see him again: through his art, of course, and through accounts of a few understanding friends, written or spoken about the man. When they talked of his art they called him Manik Babu, as common a name as any, as homely and as quaint.

Fortunately though, I have Manik Babu’s son, my own grandfather, to unearth for me the stories of the artist’s earlier days. And apart from the "ghost paintings", there are also a couple of sketches here at home which I can allude to- tiny, casually drawn on postcards, fragments of years of struggle, impressions of his wife and his mother, of the common folk who came to work, of ‘models’ who would take away a paisa or two to feed their kids after posing for hours at a stretch. These sketches are the only tangible objects available to me, as all the bigger, coloured paintings and the grander, more approved sketches are sold or displayed at places far beyond my reach.

From my grandfather, his son (blessed with a good memory for all things worth remembering), I would receive the stories attached to the moment of their composition. With these, I would know how similar are the ways in which his mother sat down to chop vegetables and fish on the bothi, and the way he sat down himself, to practice his sketches sitting on the floor. There are detailed sceneries of Sonaranga, clearly the place closest to his heart.

Mother, in her most characteristic pose. His wife, with her much emphasized chin.

Women engaged in their daily chores was a common theme.

He commonly painted models from the lower classes, they posed more readily.

I hear how he had moved here to study and rented a small flat in Calcutta before calling the rest of his family to join him as the intentions of the newly independent government became clear. Just before the partition, my grandfather, who was a child then, recalls coming to this city, to his father’s new residence, with only a few necessary things and some bundled up money hidden in the crevices between his foot and the sole of his shoe. Manik Babu was married and had children by then, yet he was a struggling artist with very little to sustain his growing family. His children, including my grandfather grew up closer to his grandparents rather than his parents. He was more Manik Babu, the artist than anything else. His wife was a simple woman who could not comprehend why scantily clad females would sit in his rooms posing awkwardly and kept mostly to herself seeking respite from heartache in her household chores or the gods. Little by little his fortune grew enough to comfortably educate and marry off his sons, but never enough to abandon oneself to luxury. He was well liked at the Govt. College of Art as a student and later, teacher of “Indian Art”, even though Manik Babu regretted the division of the department into separate departments of “Indian” and “Fine Arts”. He sadly remarks in a book of essays he authored, that it was extremely disturbing to see that Indian art was not considered of the same stature as Western Art.

Emphatically fond of the Bengal School of art, he reveres Abanindranath Tagore, "Aban Babu", and reflects repeatedly about the immense impact of his school on modern Indian art. Manik Babu was one of the earliest to recognize, in his college days, that modernity and Indian-ness in art do not necessarily bear conflict with each other. His style however, distances itself more and more from the well-rounded empirical realism of European art, he leans more passionately towards Vedic and Tantric themes, themes that cannot be perceived directly by the 5 senses but must include the manas (intellect) and chetana (consciousness). He emphasizes bhava (overall emotion, affect or mood) over everything else including form and verisimilitude. The three-dimensional art in oil, he wished to incorporate freely from the European masters but only so far as it remains true to the overall impact it creates in the mind of the perceiver.

In his book of essays and reminiscences called Aakaar Niraakaar Bikaar (The Form, the Formless and the Transformation) he expresses his views on Indian and Western aesthetics deeply. Some of his discussions on the nature of beauty, of the technique and ethics of art have given an entirely new direction to the way I perceive form and material. The book is long out of print and the few close friends and relatives who had read it in his lifetime, are long gone- what remains however, is the relevance they bear to the understanding of Indian art. I would not indulge into a discussion of his opinions expressed in the book at present, as that must be kept for later, but I must repeat from the last section of the book, a short discussion on the author Maniklal Banerjee, a delightful appreciation from a musician friend, “At places we may feel, it is the work of an adept writer who speculates about becoming an artist.” For one such as him, who received the highest honorary award in art (the Abanindra Puraskar for contribution to art in 1999), this appraisal is not a belittlement of his painting but an appraisal of his literary skill.

A short essay by Manik Babu about Janaka Raja and his enthusiasm to know the true nature of art happens to be my favorite:

One day, Janaka Raja decided to ask, to the one who knows the supreme truth of art, the most fundamental questions regarding the same. The questions would be framed by the greatest artists and exponents in the field, to whom, the one who professes his knowledge must answer. Acharya Neelkantha came forward as the sole willing professor and at once was subject to a dozen questions from numerous sceptics. Of them, an expert of nature study asked him, “What is the difference between essential (swarasa) aesthetic study and its converse, false art?” To this, the Acharya replied, “realistic imprints or mere copies of the visible present, that which can be named by man, interpreted in the human mind or experienced through the senses, the substance of which can be analyzed, whose rasa can be relished only grossly- that is the converse of true art. And that, which is omni-present yet ever-existing, natural yet metaphysical, form-less and unchanging, yet filled with eternal knowledge and sweetness ‘amritatatva’- that is true art”.

Manik Babu’s works, whether texts or paintings, are suffused with this quest for an elusive instant of art that would bathe the most familiar and mundane moments into the luminosity of beauty and knowledge. Perhaps its not possible to garner radiance out of the day to day without immersing into it. One can try and dig the lost time, but can one also immerse in it? If my amateur attempts at excavation is even partially successful to conjure up those bygone days, the readers may expect more posts on this.

A Visit to The Pen Hospital in Esplanade (Dharmatala)

2017-07-31T21:53:00.004-07:00

…I answered "The smell of old people's houses". The question was "What do you really like the most in life?"
– Jep Gamberdella in The Great Beauty (2013)

A few days back I had a chance to visit the Dharmatala area with a friend of mine, who was soon leaving for US. We strolled around the footpath amidst the bustling crowd of buyers, sellers and bystanders, and looked round. As we came near the Metro Gate no. 4, behind the stalls selling modern day clothing, we were able to find a shop not so modern- The Pen Hospital.

On the wall by the shop

Mr. Riyaz in his shop

The shopkeeper of The Pen Hospital

Pens on display

The dusty rack

Some of the pens I bought. I had to return the green coloured Parker England though since that one had a crack near the nib. Later I bought a Cross instead.

For those who are fountain pen aficionado the existence of this shop is not a breaking news, for this shop with its dusty old displays has existed for more than ninety years. As, Mr. Riyaz the shopkeeper told me, he is the third generation involved in this family business and although ballpoint and rollerballs have pretty much replaced the fountain pen for the crowd, he sees no reason to not stick to his passion and profession.

“Do you think fountain pens will eventually become extinct like prehistoric animals?”, I asked. “I don’t think so”, he replied with a smile. “Fountain pens are still being manufactured and used. It has become more of a luxury item now... you see ballpoints have no character. A good vintage fountain pen has its own character and it also reflects the character of its owner.” And then he warned me, “Beware of modern fountain pens though. Unless you are investing in a significant amount of money and doing thorough market research before buying a pen, modern pens might disappoint you. They no longer make it like the older ones, when you could pick any fountain pen and be pretty much satisfied with the way it wrote.” He further complained how the modern day Pelikans are either super-expensive or of much poorer built quality compared to older ones. “Also”, he added, “more often than not, you would surely be unable to try a pen these days before buying it. In contrast, here at my place you can try any pen before buying.” Under the old glass panel of his display and the dusty racks on his left side I could see a horde of vintage pens from Waterman, Parker, Pelikan, Pilot and other brands. There were a lot of cheap Chinese fountain pens as well, since, according to Mr. Riyaz people on a lower budget would often buy those. While was I talking to him and looking at the pens in his collection, another customer came in. Like me it was someone young, possibly in his late twenties and he came here in this shop in Kolkata all the way from Asansol to get the nib on his Sheaffer replaced. Since, he did not have this pen with him, and that specific pen being an old family heirloom, he could not tell the name of the model as well, Mr Riyaz advised him to send a picture of the nib on his WhatsApp number. And then, Mr Riyaz turned to me and told me, “See! I get customers like that all the time. People come from long distances here, since nowadays it is difficult to get those older pens repaired and there are not many people left who can do it.” “Sadly though”, he added, “the new generation of fountain pen users are not often aware of the pens they own. I get hordes of complaints from people who have bought a fake Mont Blanc and then it did not perform really well. You see, a genuine Mont Blanc if bought new would cost at least 30000 Indian Rupees and vintage Mont Blanc fountain pens in good condition is not always that easy to come by.” We were again interrupted by another customer, a thin old man, in his late seventies. He came here to get his Parker Vacumatic repaired and asked if any Mont Blancs were available to which Mr Riyaz sadly replied that he did not have one at the moment.

One of the pens bought by me. A Parker.

Close up of the nib

Close up of the nib feed

The pen came with a squeeze converter

Seeing a younger person by his side, he turned to me and said, “See, I myself am 'vintage' now, and may be that is why I prefer vintage pens. I don’t like the newer Watermans, or Parkers. They don’t make pens like Parker Vacumatics anymore. All the pens in my collection are vintage ones.” Mr Riyaz, told him that he should label the pens in his collection with their prices or he should make a list of all his pens stating the prices, so that the unaware youngsters would not throw them away thinking them to be junk. To this, the old man proudly told us, “You see, I told my daughter a little about pens. She lives in Bristol and when she completed her PhD thesis, she signed it with a Parker Duofold from my own collection.” Before leaving the old man told me that, his best experiences were with Wahl Eversharps and I should get one if I may. Mr Riyaz, showed a couple of Eversharps to me, and although I do not like lever fillers, I ended up buying one, which quite possibly have one of the best fine nibs in my collection of pens.
“Do you know Rabindranath Tagore’s (The Nobel Laureate poet) favourite pen was also a specific model of Eversharp?”, Mr Riyaz told me. I certainly did not know that!

The Wahl Eversharp lever filler which I bought

Close up of the nib

I bought a bunch of pens from Mr Riyaz and as my knowledge of vintage fountain pens are not extensive I could not identify the name of the models. Hopefully, some kind reader of this post would be able to identify some of them.

A Sheaffer. This one too came with a squeeze converter. To me this looks like a relatively modern one

Close up of the Sheaffer nib

The only Sailor that was available in the shop at that time. The barrel texture feels like leather.

Clos up of the nib which says it is made of 23K gold. The Nib however is as stiff as a nail

Engraving on the nib

Another Sheaffer

Close up of the 14K Sheaffer nib. The smoothest fine nib in my collection

Filling system of the Sheaffer

A Cross

Close up of the Cross nib which gives a really pleasant velvet like feedback

I had to go to the nearby ATM, leaving my friend, Sayan, standing there who was a silent spectator throughout the series of events. When I came back, I found that Mr Riyaz had put the pens I bought in an envelope and Sayan was telling him how he has read in novels about shopkeepers putting pens in envelopes and of having seen that for the first time. You certainly do not get to see that in regular stationery shops.

We bid farewell to Mr Riyaz and went to the Nizam’s fast food centre nearby in order to treat us to some kebabs and on our way looking at the old shops we were talking about how these shops looked much like Ollivander’s dusty wand shop at the Diagon Alley in the Harry Potter series, where things are tucked in dusty little boxes, things which someday some customer would come to cherish.

Listening to Erosion at Gangani

2017-07-20T08:37:00.000-07:00

It is difficult to dig up faded stories of the earth or make up a story that both looks faded and smells earthy. My friends have shown great ingenuity in overcoming this impasse. Myself having none, must rely on the recollection of past before it completely fades away.

My memory of Gangani goes as far back as my memory of picnics and hazy wintry mornings. A stretch of laterite with patches of cashew trees dips into a gorge with numerous caves and crevices before sloping into the river shilavati. We would cross the river barefoot and my Chhotka would spread his gamcha to catch a fish or two. There was no stair made yet to assist my trembling legs in descend on the yielding soil that glistened like gold in the sun. It was long before we read about soil erosion. For me every crevice was a haunt of stories etched on the soft yellow walls, a maze of figures, human, animal, demonic. Once down I had to stretch my entire neck to look up the ridge at the red rocks sitting tenuously on the eroding curves of yellow.

One of the red rocks on eroded yellow soil

My visits to this place would not become half so interesting had I not been accompanied by Malindadu and his tales. He was originally from Purulia, did various jobs at various places since childhood, stayed at our house and managed our poultry farm. I remember him having three chilies in the morning every day, without which, so he claimed, he could not wake up properly. It was difficult to guess his age. He had a sturdy body with a wrinkled face.

Cave of Baka

Mouth of the Cave

During a visit he showed me the exact cave in which Bakarakshas lived and how the place was once called Betrabati, the capital of his kingdom Bakadwipa. The nearby village of “Ekara”, he suggested, was the famous place of exile of the pandavas- “Ekachakranagar”. “Why do we call him ‘baka-rakshasa?”, I asked him. I had seen him on the pages of Upendrakishore’s “Chhotoder Mahabharata” as a huge pot bellied monster and always wondered why his name echoed the sleek naked white egret of unusual patience when he was just a bad tempered glutton. He was silent for a moment and the creases on his forehead thickened. “For that you will have to know the story of the ancient Bagdi kingdom that stretched across charsho jojan”, his booming voice resumed, “The entire place was a thick forest of sal, piyal and mohul back then and leopards and elephants roamed freely and killed people from the adjoining villages, well until the arrival of the great leader Baka”. This Baka was a great hunter and warrior and established peace and order among the warring tribes of this area. He was also a man of wisdom, a Vidyadhara, who could assume any shape and the flap of wing and measure the land and the water with a pair of feet. I could not believe my ears as I have always known him to be the embodiment of gluttony and greed who gobbled up entire villages, human and cattle, in insatiable hunger, from the stories of Mahabharata. It was only because of Bhim who wrestled him to death that the villagers could live in peace. There was a sad smile on Malindadu’s face. It was already dark down the ridge and we had to move while the river still had a tremor of red. “Stories never die even when they are buried alive. Time lays bare their skeletons that can become swords”, Malindadu broke the silence and I sensed the coming of another story…

The Excavation of a Forgotten Painter

2017-07-08T03:25:00.000-07:00

Now that we are talking about things old and (not quite) forgotten, I’d like to tell you a story about an Indian painter, and not an ordinary one at that, for he was aspiring to do something new and difficult. More extraordinary was the fact that he was trying to do something beautiful in troubled times.

Maniklal Banerjee was, to begin with, an ordinary village boy at Barisal. He was born in pre-independence India, in 1917, at a swampy but beautifully green place that now falls within Bangladesh. His father, a big man with a sweet humor and knowledge of worldly things almost as large as his moon-shaped belly, allowed his son to go after his heart’s desire: to study art.

Father of Maniklal Banerjee, Jintendranath Bandyopadhyay, as painted by son.

So, our young man quickly acquired his degrees from the Govt. Art College, Calcutta, and went on to win the first Indian Govt. Scholarship of art. This was a big deal for a new nation striving to build its own cultural identity in every possible medium, the fine arts being more and more defined by a strange and experimental mix of Indo-European form. What could our young man bring to this new terrain? Why, he had silk on his hands, of course!

He specialized in water-coloring and took his art to great heights when he colored on silk. This was way before we had silk paints in the market. This apart, his paintings have a typical silky glow which made them resplendent in a mystic sheen even when they were not done on silk. The man became philosophically more and more intent on the mystic. There were numerous little occult signs and symbols that detail his works, Vedic and tantric images, difficult to understand, but unearthly and attractive to behold. His subjects were nothing transcendental though. They were real men and women, village scenes mostly.

He often did the usual deities of Hindu mythology, Shiv and Parvati, Kali and the like, deities most often worshipped in Bengali households, but they were seen engaging in dance and revelry, like ordinary men and women, in settings very akin to his home and his place. He was a true excavator of history: dug out myth effortlessly from the mundane.

"Shiv-er Vivaha", marriage of Shiva.

Scene from the Mahabharata, advent of the Pandavas to Swarga

There were a large number of monkeys near his house, all of which got transformed into bits of art, now sold scatteredly for nominal amounts of money, or thrown away to fade into earth. The hundreds of birds he drew, likewise, flew away.

This man served as an art teacher in the Govt. College of Arts and Crafts from 1939 to 1977, when he retired. Thereafter, he changed his style quite a lot, having a lot of time on his hands and endless ideas in his head. The forms became very modern and colors brighter; the themes more mystic. When asked, what he thinks of M.F Hussain, the now old man smiled and refused to comment on Hussain’s themes and opinions, then softly mumbled, “it is remarkable how powerful that man’s strokes are!” Manik Banerjee went by almost unacknowledged, which makes it difficult for me to provide you peeks into his works as I intended. But I promise to do so, as and when I find copies and prints of his work. Like many Indian painters who gladly dissipate into the very earth which feeds their soul, he left very few traces of his life indeed. This is in spite of having had his works travel far in galleries in India and abroad; probably because he was too immersed in his art to bother about the afterlife of his works.

This seemingly romantic man happened to be my great-grandfather, very old and barely there when I visited his place for the first and only time. He was known in his household to be a stern and rather uninterpretable old man, mostly cooped up in his own room, by this time. He would stick to his routines, keeping his medicines, his paintbrush and his spit-bowl close by. They said he used to make sketches in the air even in sleep. I was scared, for I did not know at this time, that most sensible old men keep to themselves best of all. When they took me to see him, in his room, they introduced me to him with a perfunctory “We have heard she takes after you, she draws well”, I cockily asked him in my squeaky, childish voice, “Can you draw a cow?” The man very genially drew for me the sketch of a cow, to which I approvingly remarked “Ah, I see you manage to draw pretty well!”

An afternoon walk in Chandni Chowk

2017-07-01T02:00:00.002-07:00

An alley opposite the Subodh Mullick Square

Is there really a graveyard of memories beyond our hearts? Or is it just the way our memory functions, turning the outsides into a vast scene of mourning?

A graveyard is not only the place for the dead but also for those who are related to the dead- the living, who mourns and remembers a time which would not be coming back. A place of remembrance and forgetting… May be in that sense, archives and museums are more akin to graveyards.

On a rainy afternoon, my visit to Chandni Chowk, evoked the sense of visiting a graveyard to me, a graveyard of technology that is. In retrospect, it seems may be such comparisons are not fair. For it is a place that holds an array of repair shops for both presently existing technology, very much in vogue; and slightly older technologies (and also sometimes, ‘disappearing’ technology)- a place for the ‘lost and found’. Also, I have seen, people obviously have different degrees of extremely specific nostalgia regarding different technologies and technological equipment. Yet, I could not help myself comparing these repairmen to doctors who transplant body parts from the dead to the living, in order to keep them away from the land of dead.

On a regular day when the pavements are not wet, and the sky is not overladen within dark clouds, these alleys bustle with activity. The crowd is formed by people with broken technological parts and pieces, hoping to revive them, the repairmen dismantling both new and old technologies and not to mention shops selling equipment pertaining to both- present technology, and obsolete ones. The day of my visit to these streets, the afternoon rain had already thinned the crowd, although it was still quite lively. I too was there to procure a piece of electronic equipment and had to visit an alley opposite the Subodh Mullick Square, by the entrance to a bank.

Hind Inox near Chandni Chowk

Rainy afternoon, tram near Chandni Chowk

As the evening grew, on my way back, across the Hind Inox multiplex and the tramline, I noticed previously empty teashops now gathering a few customers. They sure know at what time the day starts here!

Tea Shops in Chandni Chowk

Empty alley way by a small park in Chandni Chowk

I visited the same empty alley ways, and crossed the heap of broken refrigerators and heavy machinery to the bazaar where motorcycles lined up after before building both old and new.

Motorcycles lined up before buildings

Heap of heavy machinery

Broken Refrigerators

The rain made it harder for me to take pictures and as I looked at the small roadside temple (the likes of which can be found in many places across India) near an old, rundown building, while simultaneously, the long drawn out, mystical sound of Azaan from a mosque nearby filled the evening air.

The sound of ancestors praying, the tinkling chimes of new metal mixed with the scrapes of rusty old bits- an orchestra of life and death in this bustling street! The bright blue plastic sheets put up on pavement-shops starkly contrast with everything else on the streets- droopy eyed vendors, workers dilly-dallying with dying metal, muddy leaves of lonely trees that seem to have grown since ever on cement.

As I walked out of the alley, I noticed one of those glass covered electronics shop, which among many other things sell televisions. There was a cricket match and the India team was playing and the crowd gathered round the shop to watch the match, even though it was raining.

A crowd of people standing on the pavement watching cricket match in rain

How the living celebrate their lives even on a heap of disintegrating scrap. And they say, old technology gives way to the new. They celebrate their deaths, just like soldiers of science. Maybe, their death is real, but not real enough for the living.

When you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something.

- Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Beginning Digging

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Three of us had bonded at university over shared love of the past. Now that we work at different places, canteen tables cannot serve as the best place to generate ideas. Something more virtual, yet something more lasting must take shape. Hence, this blog for ourselves.

But what for you? How do you make things last? Through living in places and deeply imprinting the soil, perhaps. Through home, through language and song, perhaps. A patchwork on a quilt or a soiled boot, perhaps? Stories, or photographs? Through the eyes of your grandfather or the hands of your grandmother? All of life is a remembrance of a life already lived. Our blog would talk about memories and places that pin the past to the earth. Places that cannot be subdued, just like the people who died while refusing to die out forever. We shall post about faded yet persisting stories. Ruins, objects, texts- 'vintage' if you must call them so, but far more than collectibles.

Our blog is not a personal blog. You can expect articles that interest a casual traveler; or if you are interested in folk culture of India, history or architecture, literature of a bygone century, handicrafts, ancient traditions, objects and rituals, or plain philosophical musings of old-souls like us. None of us are professional photographers or travelers- our vocation is humanities, and that is what we have designed our blog to incorporate and express best.

So, fellow nostalgists, return and remember.