New and growing obsessions – age old impulses

For the last few years, I have found that I am hardly ever without a camera. Whether I am at home, dropping monkey off to school or fetching her from it, shopping for vegetables, paying bills, going out, working, or at an event, some form or another of photographic equipment is never far from my fingers.

I used to be, until comparatively recently, one of the “occasion”al photographers who make up about 90% of total camera sales around the world. When we travelled, and we did travel a lot, we took a lot of pictures, or when there was an occasion – like a birthday or a wedding – but that’s largely how it was.

Part of the reason, back then, for not being a totally obsessed shutterbug was cost. Film photography is expensive. Cameras were expensive too. Add to that the cost of film, as well as the cost of development and printing, and the recurring expense became almost prohibitive, especially for a student, or someone just starting out in life.

At this stage in life, photography was mostly event based, whether that event was a trip or an occasion, a party, wedding, or Durga Puja. Like with most people, the albums were filled mainly with the pictures of people and monuments. Although, as early as age 12, the odd still life had made its way into the shots I took, by necessity, most of the shots were of the relevant occasion.

Over the last 15 years or so, the frequency and type of shots have both changed. As I became more able to afford development and printing costs, I took more pictures, outside of the structure of events. As I took more non-event pictures, I clicked more of the everyday things – skyscapes, still life, interesting faces, anything that appealed on the spur of the moment. But still, it was not a constant activity. I didn’t walk around with a camera all the time.

Digital storage, and photography studios making CDs of the pics I took added another layer. Now I didn’t have to worry about printing costs, and I didn’t have to get shouted at, all the time, about how much space my negatives and pictures took up. I didn’t have to worry about damage to the negatives, I didn’t have to worry about fading quality, I didn’t have to stress about losing all my pictures every time we moved. I could just dump them all on to a hard disk, put all the CDs into one of my massive CD tins, and forget about it.

Then came digicams. What a boon! Now I didn’t have to worry about any development at all! Click and download! The small digicam became an almost regular companion, but for occasions or trips, things I particularly wanted to record photographically, I still reached for the big guns… the EOS, loaded with film. Until I could afford a Digital SLR (not the cheapest thing on the planet).

Today, there is the cell phone camera, that always travels everywhere with me (obviously), and can be whipped out at a moment’s notice to record anything that catches the eye… from an interesting cloud formation to a bird drinking out of a discarded tyre by the roadside. Then there is the little digicam, a much more advanced version compared to the first one I once owned, with numerous interesting settings, and much more chance to tinker. This sits in my purse, constantly. Wherever I go, it goes, and is reserved for those shots where I feel like I need a little more precision, resolution, or more pixels.

And, of course, there is the big gun. The digital SLR which travels on opur trips, participates in our occasions, and yes… gets whipped out of its case everytime something interesting catches my eye out of my bedroom or living room windows. From catching every nuance of expression on my little one’s face, to freezing the egret on the neighbouring rooftop for posterity, it serves all purposes.

Unsurprisingly, I find myself more and more behind a lens, at everything, almost to the point of actually experiencing discomfort, and vague distress, when I am without a camera. And I can trace that distress, maybe, to a theory advanced by one of my favourite thriller writers. Photography is a distancing mechanism, he says, a way of putting something between you and the world, of becoming the observer rather than a participant. It is also an exercise of ego, putting yourself in the position of commentator, albeit a silent one, of the beauties as well as the foibles and ugliness of the world.

As I have grown older, and progressively more cynical and disillusioned, my attraction to photography has increased exponentially, keeping perfect pace with the growth of this disillusion. As I find myself more and more withdrawn from the world, from the grating ugliness, selfishness, and sheer stupidity I see around me (there's the ego again, thinking I am any better), I also find myself more and more constantly behind a camera. My frequency of taking pictures has gone from one roll of film (36 shots) per trip to over 6000 shots on my recent US trip (not counting the ones from my cell phone cam). I am so much more comfortable now when I am just recording rather than reacting, making my silent comments – nasty or nice – rather than saying it all out loud.

Silence is becoming so much a larger part of my life, that words are no longer enough of an outlet. I engage too much when I write, put too much of myself into it, words are too from-the-gut. Photography is more my “meh”. The coment I toss out, the things I say not-so-emphatically. But it is also where I probably unwittingly and even unwillingly reveal more of my real personality, my soul, things even I don’t know about myself.

Maybe that is why I am comfortable sharing my words with the world so easily, through books, blogs, and more, while I cringe at sharing my photographs with people I don’t know and trust. 

Devout Assault

Trying to work in the privacy and personal space of my own home-office is an impossibility today. Through tightly shut windows and almost-hermetically-sealed doors I am assaulted by wave after wave of loud, raucous, ear-drum-blasting waves of sound. It has been going on all night, and with most of the day gone as well, it shows no signs of abating. Four different sets of loudspeakers are playing four different – but equally loud and offensive – sets of something they think is music. The resulting ripples and cross currents and clashes are almost more than I can bear!

It happens to be one of the millions of pujas, or days of worship, of the Indian calendar. Given an estimated 33 million gods and goddesses, it is almost a miracle that it doesn’t happen twice a day, everyday. In addition to the major deities and their holy days that most of the country celebrates, there are the many smaller local or class/caste specific deities who come in for their fair share of adulation every year. Depending on where you live, this sort of public puja celebrations can be an almost daily occurrence.

And what does a public puja celebration mean? It is a bunch of people deciding to infringe on my rights to peace, the right to not be treated to inhuman levels of noise, the right to unblocked roads, the right to not have to deal with drunken louts dancing obscenely in the streets, all in the name of religion. And, because it IS in the name of religion, no one dare protest, the cops wont act, and the people having to bear the brunt have no choice but to go on bearing it.

In my lane, and within roughly three minutes of walk from my apartment building, there are some six of these shindigs going on full blast. This is a celebration after all, and in India what that means is loud, loud film music – often of the more raunchy sort – played to all willing and unwilling listeners via loudspeakers. There’s a little bit of actual worshipping going on, sure, but that’s hardly the most important thing. A lot of money has been collected, via door to door voluntary (read give or else…) donation collections, sponsorships, and more, and since a large part of it has been judiciously saved by the organizers, it is their right to spend it on what they want (read huge boom boxes and lots of booze).

Why they should assault their deities, and everyone within a 3 mile radius, with way higher than acceptable decibel levels of the trashiest of trashy music is beyond me. And if you have to have such inappropriate music… for whatever reasons… leave the rest of us out of it! Why must worship involve getting mindlessly drunk and dancing in the streets? Why must it involve misbehaving with women, children, the elderly? Is this what religion, devotion, spirituality is supposed to be? And even if it is… for you… leave my eardrum, my body, and my kid out of it!

Of course it is immature and unrealistic to expect them to think of others, that’s not how this nation works. We rather like rubbing our religions/devotions/beliefs/opinions in other people’s faces whether they want it or not. We like showing every reluctant neighbor and disturbed muhalla person how much we revere our gods, never mind the ill, the dying, the pregnant, or simple the lover of peace and quiet. And, what is more, with our cultural ethos and our strange brand of secularism, we have full rights to assault everyone within hearing range for 72 straight hours with ear piercing renderings of ancient hymns, mantras, or simply the worst songs from 10 yrs ago. And – and this is the best part for them, the worst for everyone else – no one else has the right to object. If you do, you are infringing on their rights to practice their religion! The cops are not likely to be very forthcoming controlling the noise either (half of them being part of the CELEBRATIONS).

This is a free country after all, and a secular one, and apparently everyone and their uncle has the right to bring their religion into the streets and parade it in your face, LOUDLY, all the time! This I do not get. To me, secularism would mean having the right to believe or not believe, worship or not worship, celebrate or not celebrate, within the confines of one’s own home, or place of worship. How can blocking traffic, encroaching on a public road to turn it into a temporary kitchen for the jagrata, keeping everyone up all night because I am up (saving their souls, making sure of their entry into heaven with so many bhajans), assaulting them with Sheila Ki Jawani, wolf whistling at them when they pass, surrounding them in a drunken wolf-pack and molesting them, and in general acting like a total SOB be a religious thing? How can it be celebration? How can it even be secular or democratic?

Take it home damn-it! And keep it there! 

Rude seems to be the new cool

And no, you don’t need to have any special powers to be able to see that. Watch any of the new, popular, “youth” type movies, look at any of the new ads, or watch any episode of the dozens of “Reality Shows” that are airing on any and every channel. The first and most obvious thing that jumps out at me in any of these things is how rude, badly behaved and unethical everyone is.

For years I have been cursing and ranting about how progressively ruder the world seems to be getting. How people NEVER turn off their cell phones in a movie or a play; how they insist on being loud and obnoxious in public places like movie theatres, malls and restaurants; how they push and shove and run people down on the sidewalk, in supermarkets, and everywhere else; how they never offer seats to ill, pregnant, or older people anymore; how they yell and curse and are rude to people regardless of age etc; and so much more. Now, it’s gotten to a point where I’ve practically stopped going out, and completely given up watching TV because of how angry these things make me.

Getting out of the house, going anywhere and doing anything has become so much of an irritation generator, that I would rather spend time at home, with my friends, books, music, or a good movie, rather than go OUT for something. Luckily urban living also means not having to step out for necessities or luxuries. Most things come to your doorstep at the end of a simple phone call.

As for TV, where do I start? When each ad seems to be about lying to, cheating, or manipulating your girlfriend or boyfriend; about sleeping around and stringing people along; about snatching, and greed, and shortcuts, and cutting corners, I am hard pressed to figure out what to let my five year old watch. What are the values she will imbibe from these images? No matter what I try to teach her at home, I cannot deny that a huge amount of influence is exerted by these images and subliminal messages she imbibes and absorbs from that fascinating screen.

And its not just ads! A majority of the cartoons that are on air these days are horrendously rude and abusive! And these are programs for kids! The worst culprits seem to be the Asian ones, especially the Japanese and Korean cartoon series, which seem to be populated almost entirely by shrewish mothers who are perpetually screaming at and beating their kids, bullies who are forever tormenting and beating up other kids, and a weak, spineless, and totally unethical protagonist. Moreover, most of the six and seven year olds in these series seem obsessed with the opposite sex, dating, girlfriend, boyfriend, etc.  what this says about the structure and values of the societies that produced these cartoons, I shudder to think. What does concern me, though, is what kind of things my daughter is picking up from them. In spite of rigorous screening and control of what and how much she watches, I find my monkey behaving in ways that apes the behaviour of those characters. I have to keep reminding her not to be rude to friends and family, especially those older than her.

Reality shows are another whole layer of rudeness and abuse. Normally I wouldn’t watch any of them if you paid me a million bucks. Recently however, teenage cousins were staying over, and seemed to be addicted to these programs. With them watching these series practically all day, I ended up having to see quite a bit, whether I wished to or not. The common denominator, as far as I could see, was the fact that all the people on screen were perpetually screaming at, abusing, cursing, and generally being unbearably rude and uncouth to everyone else. Whether it is you current or ex boyfriend or girlfriend, just other contestants, or the world in general, the only desired action or response seems to be cheating, unethical behaviour, and highly uncivilized language.

Orchestrated and scripted as these programs obviously are, they seem designed and made only for the purposes of seeing how rude and uncouth it is possible to be on TV. And the growing tweens and teens, the biggest audience demographics for these shows, are lapping it all up! The ruder, louder, and more abusive the program, the higher its ratings. No wonder then, that this entire generation thinks its cool to be disrespectful, and rude. Parents these days don’t seem to wish to exercise any control over what the kids watch, and they don’t seem to have been able to inculcate good taste so that the kids would voluntarily refuse to watch such shows. Funnily enough, there also seems to be no censor control over Indian television. Much as I hate the idea of censorship, I find it ridiculous that sex on TV and in movies is such a problem in India, but this kind of pure excrement is allowed to air day after day, and month after month.

There is zero meaningful content in any of these ads, cartoons, and shows, and the whole point of the exercise of even making them seems to be to demonstrate how “KOOL” and “HIP” and “WONDERFULLY rude” they can be.

A Typical Situation in these Typical Times …

An embarrassment of riches, that’s what most magazines would have you believe, is the age we are living in. Everyday I read about what a great age this is, the huge number of choices we have in everything, in fact, some people are even starting to agonize over “too many choices”. A recent article in my favourite magazine spend two pages wondering if shopping was going to become traumatic soon, with one having to decide between so many options.

It makes me sad, and frankly a little disappointed, that no one has bothered to think about what “kind” of choice we have today. What we seem to have, from what I can see, is a range of options, allowing you to choose between many types and brands of only the “popular” products. This applies to every field, every walk of life, and every possible case where you may need to buy anything. And what it essentially means is that people like me, the ones who are not so fond of the “popular” stuff, and periodically (even routinely) look for “off the beaten track” things, are left totally high and dry.

Something as basic as shopping for food is a clear case in point. Of course, things are much better now, compared to the dark ages when packaged instant soups were a new idea. But the predominance of one kind of food, or the makes for it, is clearly due to the “popularity factor”.

The middle class Indian consumer has suddenly woken up to the existence of “other” kinds of food (for breakfast and ‘tiffin’ if not for a meal) than the age old staples like idli and dosa or puri and paratha. Mainly achieved through a dogged advertising for Kellogg’s, followed up recently by something horrendous called “instant pasta” (a la Maggi), the trend has resulted in a sudden increase of interest in PASTA.

However, this still does not mean that’s we have a good choice in pastas, or makes thereof. There are barely two or three brands available, a highly overpriced “international” one and some competing, cheaper, but not all that great, local brands. A couple of brands are even stocking the supermarket shelves with heretofore unheard of things like pre-made pasta sauce (mainly tomato based), brine preserved olives, olive oils, and capers.

But pasta is, more or less, as far as it goes. Although a tiny minority of stores offer Ragu, and a few have interesting vegetables (nothing more exciting than broccoli or gherkins though), by and large, if you want to experiment with food, you better be super rich.

Cheeses have made shy, tentative, baby steps into the retail scene. In places like Pune, partly because of a huge non-Indian population and partly because of a generally higher level of “tish”ness in most educated “yuppy” middle class types, things have always been a little better. Cheeses are good, cheaper than other cities, and easily available in a large variety. I think nothing of ordering yak cheese on toast at the German Bakery, or buying very, very good Emmental, Gruyere, or a robust goat cheese at the nearest ABC Farms outlet. But the rest of the country isn’t that fortunate. Recently, some chain supermarkets like Spencer’s have begun stocking processed, packaged, cheeses that go by names like Emmental or Brie, but the quality is anyone’s guess, and the pricing is frankly exorbitant. I can walk into Dorabjee’s and buy anything from balsamic vinegar to fresh cold cuts, and a million other interesting things to set my culinary imagination on fire. Less fortunate are the people who fancy good food, but must shop at Spencer’s or Big Bazaar.

When I walk into one of the many MEGASTORES for anything else though, even in hip old Pune, chances are I will be disappointed. I walk into a CROSSWORD outlet for a book I want, and not only do I not find it on the shelves, but I am in for a horrendous time. The so called book advisors, fancy name for useless counter sales people, are not just uninformed but completely incompetent. You give them the name of the book…. Total blank… author…another blank…fumble with the computer, and then…”sorry ma’am it’s not in stock”. You can supposedly order books, and they will be nice enough to get them for you. Don’t believe a word of that. The books I have ordered at Crossword, and other such stores, and never received, would fill a room!

In the past, even as recently as six or seven years ago, the pavement dwelling, second-hand bookstores usually has something to pique my interest. Now, they too, not surprisingly, have gone the way of the bigger stores. While you will find hundreds of GRISHAMs and COELHOs, choices in the matter of any offbeat title or author have become severely restricted to the point of nonexistence.

It’s the same scene with music too. One of the branches of Music World in Pune exemplified the fact by having “helpers”, or whatever they are called, not even knowing what a CCR was when I asked for it. Everyone wants the hip-hop and the bubblegum pop that is everywhere these days and the tweeny “hip” sales people have never even heard of Creedence Clearwater Revival. White Snake? Spandau Ballet? Don’t even think about it! And here I am still in the realms of fairly mainstream music, in a global sense, just going back in time. If you have any hope of finding a contemporary offbeat or underground artist still remaining in your heart, that’s just plain ridiculous. It’s NEVER gonna happen.

Yes, we do get a lot more Hollywood movies now than we did 10 or 15 years ago, but it’s still just a tiny bit of the popular stuff. Even a cursory look at the Oscar nominations every year is enough to show anyone what didn’t make it here. And the Oscars are VERY mainstream! Indie films, shoestring budget experiments from the present or the past are NEVER gonna hit the plexes. Not only that, you will not hear about them either, or find them in any store.

The only reason I get to even hear of interesting non-mainstream writers, poets, musicians, films, and film makers is thanks to my equally crazy and equally non-mainstream brother who just happens to live in Chicago. And, much as we like to think we are becoming another America, THAT’S the difference. While you are equally flooded with the mainstream and popular stuff there, you actually have a real choice, and real access to the “other” if that’s what your heart desires. No such luck in the spoiled for choices India of the 21st century I am afraid. Here, for people like me, it’s either put up with the crap or shut up about it. If it weren’t for the once a year supply of books, music, and films, and the frequent “didi you MUST see/hear/read this!” that I get from crazyuddie, I would die of intellectual starvation!