I have a special penchant for photographs.The way they are.Without a past .Without a future.But only a present.Trapped in its frames in all shameful nakedness.A couple of days back i came across such a couple of shots by a photographer by the name, Soham Gupta.Brave shots of faith and hope.of Life .of Death.

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Its winter again.Time has flown by quite unknowingly for the past couple of months. Just didnt even realise when i flapped over the September and October pages of my table top. Like the frozen mornings outside, i am finding it difficult to resume writing.











Winter.A strange beautiful season.You can’t trust the sun this time of the year;it’s bright light outside but holds a bitter cold within. Perhaps when i still think of this season the first image that comes to my mind is of a furry white sweater which my aunt gifted to me in the winter of 1989. No clothing i ever had later could ever match the magic that that piece of woollen had on me.I used it year after year, in the most special of occasions. Catch any photograph of any wintry birthday or marriage in the early nineties and you would catch the tiny nawaab in his same white sweater, a little less fury with every passing winter.One year finally, when my Mom opened up the suitcases on the onset of winter and took out the sweater, i found that it would no longer fit me. I had grown up.









Those days we lived in a very beautiful setting in Tezpur where there were huge ponds in front of our house and migratory birds would fly in every morning from the Himalayan foothills.My Mom , sister and me used to go morning walk besides the ponds everyday. My mom would mark the calendar day every year when she saw the first migratory bird in the pond. I would generally not bother myself with such observations. I would rather play by smoking my breath into the window panes and write my name on it. Or chase aimlessly some already lost puppy and give him a good morning run for nothing.









Morning walks were soon replaced by bicycle learning sessions. That would be around winter vacation 1992. It was a chic read Hero Hansa , a few inches taller than i could stand. A ladies model. My sister was my cycle coach. She would hold me from behind and poor thing would run the whole field teaching me how to balance. I fell on wild flowers and conrete roads. Bruises piled up.Many days elasped till one morning, after a few minutes of ride i heard my sister cry out from far away …”Hey look back once”..and i saw that i was on my own.It was such a nice feeling of independance i cant describe. Its a different thing that while looking back and jubilantly waving to my sister i fell down once again on a roadside gutter. It hurt a lot but who cares by then? I learnt cycling.









I got my first bicycle on my seventh standard birthday .It was a BSA Photon which my dad gifted me. It was another possesion which had kept my company for a long long distance in life. I remember going to six o clock tuitions in the morning through the empty streets of tezpur, not missing a single day of it for the sheer joy or riding.Morning tuitions in winters used to be fun again.We use to reach ten minutes earlier or the teacher started ten minutes late i dont remember, but we always managed some time for gossiping. We had an all girls batch before ours and Tezpur’s whos who were in that batch.Oh now i remember who created that ten minutes of cushion time:) We were a batch of funny things, half of the batch was latoo on the teacher’s wife and other half on the daughter.No wonder my excellent marks in CAT quants has some significant historic background too:)









When i returned home during my first semester engineering holidays for my sister’s marriage, my dad told me he had given my bicycle to a neighbours son beacuse it was eating up unnecessary space in our house. A couple of days later i saw my neighbours son breezing past our house in MY bicycle. My mom told me, Look thats your bicycle. A not very happy feeling passed though heart.







And today its the middle of winter 2007 that i realise its winter and i havent smoked my breath into a mirror and written my name on it, or taken a bicycle ride, or sipped morning tea at road side stalls, or even chased behind a cow.







The simplest joys in life sometimes hang so high. Really, lifes funny.













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The Photographs: I ve clicked the first pic near Mulshi Lake,Pune.The second one is in the lobby of a building during Diwali time.



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The other day in the course of a chat with Srikanth, he suggested that I add a few pics to spice up my blog. I declined saying it’ll be akin to using “item numbers” in movies. However in order that I try something different, I have chosen to have a photoblog, a la musical. So i present to you a few photographs taken during my recent visit to a couple of hill stations in northern India.





India’s answer to the Golden Gate. Considering we have answered every other gate like Watergate, Camillagate. Monicagate etc this was only due.





What you see in the picture plain rice kept in the vessels being cooked in the hot water springs at Manikaran, a place revered by Sikhs and Hindus alike. This cooked rice is the served at the Gurudwara. The pic below is the Shiva idol in the temple. The rising steam can be clearly seen. The associated legend can be found here.







Wherever you go traffic jams follow. A clear illustration are the photographs below. This one was due to a landslide the previous day which had transformed the already single lane roads into half lane ones at places.











In the above picture focus somewhere in the middle. You’ll see a line of small white dots. Those aren’t rocks but cars and buses. The advantages of almost all vehicles belonging to travel agencies being white, they present a great picture even during traffic jams.



And while the human beings were suffering from bouts of hunger arising out of staying stuck in the jam for 8 hours, the horses had their fill.



Talk of each photograph speaking a 1000 words, the following speak a million and in turn leave you speechless. (atleast for me. lol. )











And while most of our activities usually begin with a prayer to Lord Ganesha this blog will end with one. Fondly labelled, by myself, as the Kit Kat Pillayar, this is what arose out of fiddling around with a kit kat wrapper.

We started out on one hot sweaty evening, with high hopes of rest and relaxation at beautiful Kodaikanal. And what you see on your left was our means of transportation. I have heard of Air Buses and stuff, but this definitely was a first.



The journey was bumpy. The bus was small and cramped, it just about held 47 of us. But the ride wasn’t as bumpy as my friend’s nose to your right.











We were all very tired and some of us were not used to the altitude. Like my friend here.

We finally reached Kodaikanal at about seven in the morning. We stayed at “RJasmine Gust House”. Surprisingly, it wasn’t really windy!



We rested a while and got ready to see the sights, and as the Kodai tourism people put it, the “Seeneries”. Come to think of it, it was my second time in kodai, and i had already “seen” most of the stuff there…













And we went to the following places, among others:

1. Pillar (or is it “Piller”) Rock.

2. Suicide Point: Here, we were requested to “Put the waistes in the dustpin” and avoid smoking to “save the forest fire”!



The other places we visited were not as eventful so we returned to the gust house. We played rummy and bluff until after midnight and went to sleep. The next day we boated and then returned to college in our spare bus. I could not find any more images to reminisce the trip with, but it was one awesome experience. And the rest of us couldn’t agree more…