Theory of Media

Ganesha said, 'You must narrate without a pause.' This would ensure that what Vyasa dictated was not adulterated by human prejudice.

'I will,' said Vyasa, 'provided you write nothing unless it makes sense to you.' This ensured that all that was written appealed to the divine.

Page xii

... Unfortunately, by the time Jaimini found Markandeya, the sage had renounced speech as a part of his decision to renounce the world.

Page xiii

Source: Pattnaik, Devdutt. 'Jaya - An illustrated retelling of the Mahabharata', Penguin books, New Delhi, 2010.

The world that is

poem by Nida Fazli

दुनिया जिसे कहते हैं जादू का ख़िलौना हैं

मिल जाये तो मिट्टी हैं खो जाये तो सोना है

अच्छा सा कोई मौसम तनहा सा कोई आलम

हर वक़्त आये रोना तो बेकार का रोना हैं

बरसात का बादल तो दिवाना हैं क्या जाने

किस राह से बचना हैं किस छत को भिगौना हैं

ग़म हो कि ख़ुशी दोनो कुछ देर के साथी हैं

फिर रास्ता ही रास्ता हैं हंसना हैं रोना हैं

Duniya jise kehte hain jadoo ka khilona hai
Mil jaye to mitti hai kho jaye to sona hai

Accha sa koi mausam tanaha sa koi aalam
Har waqt aaye rona to bekar ka rona hai

Barsat ka badal to divana hai kya jane
Kis rah se bachana hai kis chat ko bhigona hai

Gham ho ki khushi donon kuch der ke sathi hai
Phir rasta hi rasta hai hansana hai na rona hai

English Translation (a poor attempt)

This thing called the world - is a magical toy

Mere claydust when you have it, is gold when lost

Some(where) a fine season, a solitary world

If melancholy all the time, then wailing is pointless.

That rainbearing cloud is crazy, doesn't know

Which street to save from, and which terrace to dampen

Sorrow and happyness both, are after all together only for a while

And a continuous path ahead, no highs, no lows...

Forecast

The weather this morning was rather strange. The sky was meekly overcast with light grey clouds. Not full enough to saturate they confused whether to wet the space or not. They wept without conviction dampening the already humid space. Bulky with water, the air trapped within the earth and the clouds wouldn't move unless you did. The trees were still. Noises on the street dampened. A stable body perspired, a moving body felt cold. The sun was present in the evaporating heat and fuzzy light. The holes from the clouds framed the remains of a clear sky.

The roads were unusually choked for the morning. The air filled with cement dust of the ongoing metro construction settled slowly on the bathed pores of the body sitting against the bus window producing a surface of irritation. The bus felt full inspite of a handful passengers. One felt constricted inspite of being in release. A strange weariness crept in discouraging the promise of the day ahead.

Unclear of intent, an uneasiness began to carve space by involuntarily clearing people on the way. A sharp annoyance made way through a body coated with the confused condition of the weather. Nothing spoken, yet everything expressed and subject to a universal space that perhaps accommodated so many more morning irritations. The sky continues to be daubed by grey clouds. Trees droop in still air. We all wait for movement.

Goethe on Style

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Goethe discussed both the meaning of the morphotype and the philosophy of art with Schiller, and the type became associated with aesthetic conceptions of style and the ideal in art.¹⁹ As Goethe put it, a person accustomed to strictly logical thinking might find it hard to accept that an 'exact sensory imagination' might exist, but art was unthinkable without it.²⁰ Goethe discussed its implications for art in an essay on style of 1789, where he wrote that style was the highest level of artistic expression: 'Style is based on the profoundest knowledge, on the essence of things insofar as we can recognize it in visible and tangible forms.'²¹ In fact, just as deep insight into form in nature revealed the typical—that is, the ideal in the actual—so art at the level of style was also a visible representation of the typical or ideal.²²

Notes

To believe in oneself

"Persist and verify…The power that we abdicate to others out of our insecurity — to others who insult us with their faux-intuition or their authoritarian smugness — that comes back to hurt us so deeply… But the power we wrest from our own certitude — that saves us."


Rosanne Cash / excerpted from Brainpickings

Orientation

The concept of "orientation" allows us then to rethink the phenomenality of space-that is, how space is dependent on bodily inhabitance. And yet, for me, learning left from right, east from west, and forward from back does not necessarily mean I know where I am going. I can be lost even when I know how to turn, this way or that way. Kant describes the conditions of possibility for orientation, rather than how we become orientated in given situations. In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger takes up Kant's example of walking blindfolded into a dark room. For Heidegger, orientation is not about differentiating between the sides of the body, which allow us to know which way to turn, but about the familiarity of the world: "I necessarily orient myself both in and from my being already alongside a world which is 'familiar'" (1973: 144). Familiarity is what is, as it were, given, and which in being given "gives" the body the capacity to be orientated in this way or in that. The question of orientation becomes, then, a question not only about how we "find our way" but how we come to "feel at home."

Ahmed Sara, in Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Duke University Press, London. 2006. pg. 6-7

Two posters for the summer!

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The Craft of Smell

In true sense, the work of art at the Sassoon Dock was the containment of people in an overbearing envrionment of smell. It is the smell that defines the dock - which kept intensifying and reducing as one moved across the different chambers opened up for art installations at Mumbai's historic dock. One notices the largeness of these left over spaces that have remained locked for a long time. Opening these to the public makes one appreciate the architecture of a dock. 

The smell becomes a part of you in a while, after which you are reminded of it through different installations within the exhibition - the toilets, the sea, the perfume and so on. At the risk of becoming too obvious, the assertion of smell as an art form was refreshing. It takes one out of the sanitized environment of the white cubes and brings you to reconsider the city wherein you are constantly negotiating olfactory environments. 

Typography and Graffiti was an important part of art, primarily because it was curated by ST+ART Mumbai. Different parts of the city were taken over by street artists from all over. The exhibition saw a new politics in art making. Most importantly, it opened up the docks, which, while leaving, are the strongest memory that remind you of the city as a key trading harbour. The jetty, the warehouse, the left over luggage and sea leave you in a wave of history that is so close, but yet seems so far. It was totally worth visiting the place taken over by art!

Pashupatinath / Kathmandu

One of the most powerful experiences that I had in the city of Kathmandu was visiting the Pashupatinath - a living temple of the Hindu deity of Shiva.