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The pleasure of travel is in the company you keep
I don’t know about you, but for me travel is as good as the company I keep on the road. The weekend trip to Dhanachuli stands out in this regard. The fresh mountain air, the breathtaking views, the lovingly crafted properties we visited and stayed in, the delectable food…all these experiences were greatly enhanced and in fact, indelibly etched in my mind by the stimulating conversations we had.
Moreover, I rediscovered the absolute high of meeting new people and finding common ground in a very short period of time; the thrill of being in the company of creative minds that work differently from yours and yet feed into a similar sensibility; the calmness of not being judged and not judging those around you.
For this and more, my thanks go out to Te Aroha and Sumant Batra in particular, whose brainchild this Blogger’s Meet was. To warm up to the exciting series of posts I have planned about the fantastic weekend, I’m including these portraits I clicked of all my new friends. As fellow travelers, their names will crop up often in my ramblings about Dhanachuli and as I said before, they are as much part of the story as the frames taken by my camera’s eye and the words forming in my head!
In his element when he talks about the things he loves and collects, Sumant anchored our trip effortlessly with an energy and professionalism I can only admire and hope to emulate
Poised and bright as a star, Aanchal‘s love for art and eye for detail added a punch to our stay. It was a delight to bond over late night conversation and quirky turns of phrases!
Soft, observant and introspective, Vibha is like a portrait photographer’s dream come true! A writer, poet and editor with a fantastic memory for old Hindi songs….yes, we even found time to sing around the bonfire!
You could locate Vijay by his penchant for humming and whistling old Hindi songs. I could see that he listens keenly and sees even more sharply and his photographs tell the tale. Check out his website- http://travellingcamera.com/
Divya, cat lover and designer, taught me a thing or two about how to be yourself and not let the crazy world get to you!
And Aaditya of course. All my pictures of him are blurred and my strongest memory of him is of squinting keenly through the camera, in love with the idea of capturing a frame. The sharpest observation powers I have seen in a while… as far as company goes, AA was certainly the icing on the cake 🙂
Oh wait! I did find, a very apt, pic of him!
Artists can be true to their art only if they stay uninfluenced by public perception! Feb 08, 2012
Amitav Ghosh, a writer of fiction who I particularly admire, blogged recently about the dangers of writers facing their audience in response to the recent trend of literary festivals and the Rushdie fiasco at the Jaipur Lit Fest. He makes the point that writers are able to take controversial positions and push the boundaries of thought only because they are separated from their audience. When writers put themselves in a position where they are being questioned, they will also be influenced, therefore weigh their words carefully and lose their spontaneity altogether. On a more serious note, society needs voices of dissent, opinions that ruffle feathers, perspectives that are different from the mainstream; who offers these if everyone is answerable and no one is willing to take the risk of speaking their mind?
I have written earlier about a scary culture of intolerance that is spreading through society. Ghosh’s piece also echoes a similar sentiment. There is an urgent need for defiance in our society; we conform too much, we give in too easily. We don’t want to think things through because we are convinced of the futility of such an exercise. We don’t really believe in change.
But we do want to publicize our smallest achievement and so, expecting writers to only write and not talk about their writing in today’s world is quite impractical. Most of us put up pictures of mundane events on Facebook and its but natural to share our achievements. But Ghosh’s piece made me wonder- When is the right time to share and exhibit our work/talents/creativity? A friend writes decent poetry, but shares her work with a select few, firm in her belief that her writing needs to mature much more before she would be willing to share it publicly. This is not out of shyness of lack of confidence, I suspect, but out of a desire to hone her talent in solitude with constructive feedback. Adulation and popular opinion can often derail a creative process completely.
Even as I blog my heart out to the world everyday, I admire the ones with restraint and patience; the ones who pursue art for art’s sake and worry about its saleability at a different level, that is independent from the process of creation. That’s how I think it should be. I worry immensely when I break my rules and visit the site stats page of my blog, when I should be worrying more about how good I feel about what I have created!
Contrary to popular belief, true confidence isn’t about keeping your art in the public eye constantly; its about making it accessible, sure, but most of all believing in it yourself and continuing to nurture it.
ramblinginthecity 