Faded Earth

Subscribe …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 di...

Subscribe 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 sittin...

Subscribe 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 t...

Subscribe 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 e...