Diary Excerpt: 05/02/09: Vishwanath

I met probably one of the most interesting people I will or ever have met. Sorry. First, the boat to Ramnaga palace. Nothing much happened. Then I made the decision to hang out more with Viswanath cyclerickshawing (or riska as he calls it) across Varanasi. Life altering. I heard all his stories from Varanasi. About Amitabh Bachchan's visits to Varanasi in a black car with black windows, about Sunny Deol's Ghatak, how people starting insulting Amrish Puri when he slipped on the steps of Raja Ghat, Viswa's bengali friends, that cycle-rickshaw guy I liked. Luvkush, the dinner place. The guy there who was drunk and made a scene, twitching on the face, his friend who kept repeating something in undecipherable hindi, something "woh aapko bool raha hai", the other guy who looked like Anant Nag, mop on the head, worried. Goodnight. This is the time I will spend with Viswanath. Subtext: many cycle rickshaw rides later, I would grow to be a little older and a little wiser.

Diary Excerpt: 05/02/09

Met Somnath Baba after seeing sunrise. Then Saddhu from Bangalore. Chillum after chillum. Sitting on a slope. Inclined. Laughing, talking about the empty Varanasi otherside (illusion and non-illusion), about tourists visiting Hindu holy sites as opposed to the non-touristy Khaba. Why? Hearing about the naga baba penis lock, the key (stick), vibhuti, the 18-year old anti-intoxicant vibhuti-smeared saddhu, the mobile-wielding cool saddhu who told me not to say cheers and say namonamai instead of "bye". Conditions. "We have everything, we got nothing." Time to revise, address these things. Keep wanting. Never stop. This car, that phone, bunch of crap. The cool saddhu asking to keep my fake ray-bans. Meeting Viswanath for the first time, asking him to guess my age and he says I look 60, in Hindi. "Aap tho saat saal ka hoga." Immediate friendship. (subtext: not knowing this would last for years). Then, sitting with Korean tourists in Mona Lisa Cafe. The caucasian sitting in front of me strangely looks like Toshiro Mifune. Class. All that Kurosawa-saddhu-fire (Ran and burning ghat) subconscious shit. There I accidently meet Rodrigo, tabla player from London whom I met when I lived in London when he was busking in Tottenham Court road tubestation. How weird. All this is... And then the japanese pundit...

Lit

It was lit brightly those fifteen days. Everything was clear. The caterpillars inside my brain became butterflies. There was movement everywhere. Every second I saw something new I connected it back to me and my evolution to Man: Stage II. I was the dawn of man. Every morning I listened to Nikhil Banerjee's Sohini. Every morning I greeted the sun with a cigarette in my hand. The days were so beautiful and full of promise. I thought I was living inside a dream. The bubble could break anytime but I never thought it would. The sensation of being the centre of the world's axis was overwhelming but I was in control of it. Or atleast I thought I was. My brain was lit brightly those fifteen days. Everything was clear. Or atleast that's what I thought.

Cycles of time

The time cycle penetrates through my skin, the world sits and watches. Waits... I am waiting too for that one moment when everything will flip to the otherside. When the cosmic reboot happens. All time will be erased, there will be no more seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months. Only the present second. The happy new second. No more happy new years. Every moment will be fresh with activity. Everything will look clear, there will be no more fusion of past with the future. Only the present moment and a presence. Not 72.8% water. 100% water and a pure consciousness. When will this timelessness arrive?

It happened this January in Benaras for fifteen days. When everything changed. I became the new man, the uber-man, the man whose consciousness had jumpstarted to the next level. I was time, I was also timelessness.

Now I am...

...on the periphery. Looking in. Watching all that was. I have been ejected from the spiralling staircases of Benaras. The wind found a way to get me out. Now I can only remember what it was like to look through a kaleidoscope the shape of Chet Singh Ghat. I remember those walls, those cracks, age finding a way to mark all that is grey with a texture the colour of the earth. Abstract Kollisions everywhere, the ground looked six-thousand years old. That tree, those birds, that oasis. I remember being with Brownie looking at him with him. His tail fading to black. I remember that pigeon hovering about near a mirror thinking he found his mate. I remember Tomya, the way he played with Brownie. I am now sitting on a corporate chair listening to those stories played on repeat inside my head.

I remember that wonderful terrace where I played Marwa for hours at sunset, hoping the sun would stay. Any sign of the sun and I would return to Sa, the root note, that primordial sound from where the whole world emerged. The red sky bringing on the night, the night sky bringing on the black and the wonderful entry of Malkauns. How a raga can be coloured black but still sound so optimistic. I heard the Sarod's mirrorsound in my heart. The way the end of the day signalled a temporary movement to the dominant Madhyam and time bringing a crystalline shaped Rishabh into its vessel, a rose-shaped vessel holding all my thoughts from the day and its different descendants...

I am struggling to find a chorus to join, or a voice to sing in unison with. Its all come down to one. That one is me. There is no one near me, physically there are many but I have been singled out to pay my dues to life's unexpected taxman, he came knocking on my door that day in January when I became Dara Okat, the one who lost his hundred hands in the battle against time. But, time has to pass...

JK @ Rajghat

The work of J. Krishnamurti (1895-1986) has been of particular relevance to the teachers of the school both in their own lives and in their concerns about education. In his writings and talks to audiences all over the world, Krishnamurti emphasized the need for a fundamental transformation in human consciousness. The turmoil in our relationships and in the world is a reflection of our self-centredness and our confused attempts to escape pain and suffering. Without this transformation, he felt that there was no possibility of lasting peace and freedom for the individual or for society.

Krishnamurti was probably unique among seers in his unequivocal rejection of religious and spiritual authority. He refused to be cast as the guru, demanding instead that each one of us be “a light unto oneself”. He rejected method and practice, pointing out that these implied psychological time and a false sense of becoming. He spoke of the possibility of a choiceless awareness in the present that makes no effort to change or transform.

Benaras for me...

...was the insignificance of time. It was the smile on the faces of the four little girls in Assi, the hours spent in Harmony having chai with Rakesh talking about self-realisation and Gurdjieff, it was those solo walks on the ghats looking at the "Rakaposhi loves you" signs on Niranjani Ghat, it was timelessness in Kedar Ghat, it was listening to Shree in Pallabda's place, it was singing Sakhi Mora Piya Ko Dekho in Bhupali, it was the time spent in Lal Babu's little shop having his high protein lunch cooked by one of his employees, then talking about Yoga and man, it was researching the Raga in Aum Cafe, wifi internet and all while I played Kumar Gandharv's Bhimpalasi... Benaras for me was all this and more, wonder when I will come home again to Benaras...

Revisiting Gabriel Libinski in September

Two days of intensive discussions on film, life, art in general, cities, society and the future of humanity. And within those, interludes of Rat and Bear, Holy Mountain and El Topo. A very rich two days thanks to a chance meeting with Gabriel, a Belgian writer-thinker-violin & miniature guitar player. Oh not to forget he rides a cycle-rickshaw in Barcelona. And the best thing - he listens. Carefully listens, asks questions, reads the synopsis of my films in extreme detail reading everything out loud. Its been refreshing to have met him. And his sense of humour, wow. Really like Alice in wonderland, but Alice on LSD. Among other things, we spoke of the insignificance of a life spent buying Prada slippers, Armani watches & ck underwear (to think I was all that!), of a society that has lost the plot, of a people living in a time where they have no connection with their own inner selves, of the foreigners who come to India and cycle around everywhere with their children - the richness of that, the inward arc, of selling out working in commercial graphic design - making rich companies richer, of "flaunting it" a book about the power of shopping and owning and above all flaunting it and women wanting to be with someone purely on the size of a man's, errr, bank balance, of the floating man productions and its rather absurd logo, of being bit by an elephant!

I will be seeing him everyday till I leave. We even jammed last night at his place, him on the violin, me on the miniature while my boatman was rolling the J. I am having too many ideas these days. Its got to be the electricity of Benaras, one of the strangest yet inspiring places ever. How about a series of films like "The Belgian in Benaras" - peoples ideas of the place, what it means to them, etc. Go on then, do it Mordecai! Knives out...

Die in Varanasi

Benaras, also known as Varanasi, or Kashi, is the place many people visit to die. They stay here waiting. In waiting they see the flames burning 24 hours, 365 days a year at the cult Manikarnika Ghat where apparently Parvathi lost her earring. This ghat is always busy with activity. There are the drug dealer boys who I befriended just to get a peak into their lives. They all had white girlfriends. They were fashion conscious. They wanted me to make a film about them and call it "Fun of the Life". What a perfect title. I loved talking to them in English in those dark corridors of Manikarnika. Over chai. Listening to their stories was fun. I imagined their on-the-edge lives in the dark alleyways of Benaras. Their red right hands dealing drugs and making joints, the same hands rowing boats and eating food, opening beer bottles and drinking chai. This was their life. They were the boys of Manikarnika, their eyes saw a thousand things, their hearts shrunk to the size of a peanut. All they wanted was money, women and charas. There existed nothing beyond this. They partied on the boats during the festivals, their eyes glistening from the fire of the pyres. After spending an afternoon with them, I would walk back slowly through the gulleys back to Assi, back into the silence of Ganesh Ojha house...

I discovered Krishnamurthi that winter...

Question: Instead of addressing heterogeneous crowds in many places and dazzling and confounding them with your brilliance and subtlety, why do you not start a community or colony and create a reference for your way of thinking? Are you afraid that this could never be done?

Krishnamurti: Sir brilliance and subtlety should always be kept under cover, because too much exposure of brilliance only blinds. It is not my intention to blind or show cleverness, that is too stupid; but when one sees things very clearly, one cannot help setting them out very clearly. This you may think brilliant and subtle. To me, what I am saying is not brilliant: it is the obvious. That is one fact. The other is, you want me to found an ashram or a community. Now, why? Why do you want me to found a community? You say that it will act as a reference, that is, something which can be pointed out as a successful experiment. That is what a reference implies, does it not? - a community where all these things are being carried out. That is what you want. I do not want to found an ashram or a community, but you want it. Now, why do you want such a community? I will tell you why. It is very interesting, is it not? You want it because you would like to join with others and create a community, but you do not want to start a community with yourself; you want somebody else to do it, and when it is done you will join it. In other words, Sir, you are afraid of starting on your own, therefore you want a reference. That is, you want something which will give you authority of a kind that can be carried out. In other words, you yourself are not confident, and therefore you say, `Found a community and I will join it'. Sir, where you are you can found a community, but you can found that community only when you have confidence. The trouble is that you have no confidence. Why are you not confident? What do I mean by confidence? The man who wants to achieve a result, who gets what he wants, is full of confidence the business man, the lawyer, the policeman, the general, are all full of confidence. Now, here you have no confidence. Why? For the simple reason you have not experimented. The moment you experiment with this, you will have confidence. Nobody else can give you confidence; no book, no teacher can give you confidence. Encouragement is not confidence; encouragement is merely superficial, childish, immature. Confidence comes as you experiment; and when you experiment with nationalism, with even the smallest thing, then as you experiment you will have confidence, because your mind will be swift, pliable; and then where you are there will be an ashram, you yourself will found the community. That is clear, is it not? You are more important than any community. If you join a community, you will be as you are - you will have somebody to boss you, you will have laws, regulations and discipline, you will be another Mr. Smith or Mr. Rao in that beastly community. You want a community only when you want to be directed, to be told what to do. A man who wants to be directed is aware of his lack of confidence in himself. You can have confidence, not by talking about self-confidence, but only when you experiment, when you try. Sir, the reference is you, so, experiment, wherever you are, a whatever level of thought. You are the only reference, not the community; and when the community becomes the reference, you are lost. I hope there will be lots of people joining together and experimenting, having full confidence and therefore coming together; but for you to sit outside and say, `Why don't you form a community for me to join?', is obviously a foolish question.

Marcela Rossiter

Aum Cafe, January 2010. Chance meeting with Marcela Rossiter, blond bubbly elderly french woman always in black. She was in Benaras to learn about Kundalini from the famous Vagyogi Vagiesh Shastri in Benaras. We connected on the spot, a sphere of similarities, we extended our chance meeting over cafe latte and humus. She is more Spanish than French, psychic capabilities of feeling the presence of dead people in places where they died. She felt the exact spot of Joan of Arc’s death in a fort, later on felt psychic connection with black man, realised he was the force that managed to get her out of hospital from a bad kidney. She realised it was him who was going to save her. Then she let go and walked and walked as a certain force from inside took her to a Church in Notredame in front of the statue of Joan of Arc, who apparently became a saint in the last years of her life. A strange series of events. Give up trying to figure it out. Its life, it cannot be figured out, discussed or even be insulted by being put into words. Give up, give it all up. No labels. This is the time I realised the trajectories and tapestries all woven into a cosmic oneness we call coincidence.

That winter in Benaras I discovered Russell

It is very singular how little men seem to realise that they are not caught in the grip of a mechanism from which there is no escape, but that the treadmill is one upon which they remain merely because they have not noticed that it fails to take them to a higher level. I am thinking, of course, of men in higher walks of business, men who already have a good income and could, if they chose, live on what they have. To do so would seem to them shameful, like deserting from the army in the face of the enemy, though if you ask them what public cause they are serving by their work, they will be at a loss to reply as soon as they have run through the platitudes to be found in the advertisements of the strenuous life.

Consider the life of such a man. He has, we may suppose, a charming house, a charming wife, and charming children. He wakes up early in the morning while they are still asleep and hurries off to his office. There it is his duty to display the qualities of a great executive; he cultivates a firm jaw, a decisive manner of speech, and an air of sagacious reserve calculated to impress everybody except the office boy. He dictates letters, converses with various important persons on the phone, studies the market, and presently has lunch with some person with whom he is conducting or hoping to conduct a deal. The same sort of thing goes on all afternoon. He arrives home, tired, just in time to dress for dinner. At dinner he and a number of other tired men have to pretend to enjoy the company of ladies who have no occasion to feel tired yet. How many hours it may take the poor man to escape it is impossible to foresee. At last he sleeps, and for a few hours the tension is released.

The working life of this man has the psychology of a hundred-yards race, but as the race upon which he is engaged is one whose only goal is the grave, the concentration, which is appropriate enough for a hundred yards, becomes in the end somewhat excessive. What does he know of his wife? When he leaves her in the morning, she is asleep. Throughout the evening he and she are engaged in social duties which prevent intimate conversation. He has probably no men friends who are important to him, although he has a number with whom he affects a geniality that he wishes he felt. Of springtime and harvest he knows only as they affect the market; foreign countries he has probably seen, but with eyes of utter boredom. Books seem to him futile, and music highbrow. Year by year he grows more lonely; his attention grows more concentrated and his life outside business more desiccated.

Excerpt from Bertrand Russell's "The Conquest of Happiness"

A.K.A. Archaeology of Mind

That November I met Isaac Niemand aka Frank Kalero aka Saul Tiff aka JealousGuy aka Tico Tico. Art mastery in different names. Isaac Niemand was the filmmaker, Frank Kalero the publisher, Saul Tiff the cinematographer, JealousGuy the producer and Tico Tico the DJ. One man, different avatars. He was like Shiva in Shiva-city. We had the idea of shooting an experimental film in Benaras about a bear stuck in the gulleys trying to make it to the otherside to be with his friend, a bird. We found some inexpensive costumes from Chowk and then set out to shoot. I was going to be the protagonist and the antagonist. I was rewiring my brain to become an animal again.

It was difficult being furry and black in Benaras. People crowded to see what the fuss was about. We shot in the narrowest of gulleys to show claustrophobia. We shot in Chet Singh Ghat in the old fort, we scaled the walls, jumped to the otherside to show the bear waving at his friend, the bird, on the otherside. Eventually when the bear makes it to the river he gets help from a lion-headed boatman to take him to the other side only to be disappointed to see a mirror-reflection of himself in the water. A mirage... That was the plot. It was based around the "The grass is greener on the other side" thinking. The film was shot with a Canon HV30 and handmade lens, something that Baba Kalero made himself. He was a do-it-yourself filmmaker, he had his own concept dolly's and other little inexpensive tricks for the struggling filmmaker to use. Kalero had something special. He was unpredictable. One day he was masala rider, riding around on his bullet looking for other Shiva riders for another of his documentaries on the quirky bikers of Benaras. Another day he was shooting for his documentary on Benaras. For this one, he interviewed me and I decided to be in costume. I spoke of spirituality in Benaras with a straightface wearing a bear costume. These were the best times of our life. Everyday was fresh with vital energy from Ganga. the sun and the sky worked in collaboration to bring us fresh vibes from the earth. We visited the wonderful Aum cafe every morning to wire ourselves into the wifi and have hummus and cafe mocha. I never wanted this dream to end. Cycling around in the narrowest of gulleys, Kalero and me became the best of friends. Inseparable. I stayed in Gabriel's room and Kalero remained my neighbour. Shivacafe was in full bloom. This is where I met Gael Braejeul, one of Kalero's Shiva riders...

9/9/9

Prakash visited me in Benaras to celebrate his birthday with me. 9th September, 2009. He stayed in the adjacent room. We woke up early in the morning to make the boat trip to the otherside for a dip in the Ganga. The river looked at us with the prettiest eyes, the eyes that transmitted that special sunlight right into our hearts. There was a pujari on the otherside who did some pooja's for Prakash. We also took one of those instant photos with a captivating three-thousand year old backdrop. Every moment was unique in Shiva-city.

Prakash felt his sensors were on full reception. He was picking up all the signals the town was sending. Transmission via metaphysical satellite. New, every second. We decided to go for the Ram-Leela in Ramnagar and also see the Ramnagar fort. Prakash wore his striking orange kurta, we got on a boat and left for Ramnagar. There was Gorakhnath, Viswanath, Prakash and me. Goraknath, a local friend of mine, was dressed in primary colours, red shirt and yellow pants and he gave me a special gift, an "Aum" keyring that he dug out of the Ganga one day when he was looking for coins in the river. Among the five of us there was red, yellow, orange, black and blue. It was like the colour palette of a Kubrick film. At Ramnagar, we visited the fort and the museum and walked for hours to go see the Ram-Leela. Unfortunately, it was going to start very late so we decided to headback. One of the striking sights from the evening was seeing the King on elephantback making his appearance felt. We felt we were in another time. Benaras Standard Time, truly. The day was documented through still photographs. One day they will all emerge when I am reading stories from an old book on Benaras called "Benaras Phantasmagorik".

Gabriel O'Connor

I met Gabriel Libinski that September while having my chai at Raju's chai shop. He was carrying a miniature guitar. We instantly connected. Like three dots. The third dot being Benaras. The trajectory snapping out of time again. I dissolved into the mix. We spoke for a long time. He was in Benaras to write a fiction film. He was living in Assi Ghat, the cool part of town, where all the musicians and artists live. Chai after chai, we spoke of everything from film to politics, from music to expression. The bhang's effect was beginning to kick in. Bhang (Hindi: भांग) is a preparation from the leaves and flowers (buds) of the female cannabis plant, smoked or consumed as a beverage in the Indian subcontinent. I was seeing the colours and kaleidoscopic effects of the little lane, the cows came closer. They were interested in our conversation. We started meeting everyday, sometimes I would visit him in Assi, sometimes he would come to Chousatti ghat to visit me in my 100 sq. ft. haveli. We would listen to Sufjan Stevens and talk for hours. The chemistry was amazing.

He had some very strange ideas for films. One of them was called "Acts of kindness" and it was meant to show one man walking around in the gulleys feeding cows, dogs, helping the poor and just doing good. The protagonist was someone dressed in a long overcoat which had photos of himself stitched on. Very bizarre, it felt like Chris Morris's Jam in Benaras. I realised I had never met anyone like him.

A great friendship was forming. Serendipity in Shivacity. I played him some of my music, we watched the Doshi film together. He was very honest and sincere in his appreciation of my art. He listened carefully, asked questions. Everyday I would look forward to my meeting with Mr. Libinski. In Assi, he was tuning his ears to the violin. He would focus on every single note trying to make it as clear as possible. His dedication was inspiring. Around this time I met his neighbour in Ganesh Ojha house, a brazillian called Isaac Niemand. Initially, I found him too sarcastic for my taste, but over time I looked at him differently and would never know how good a friend he would become over the coming years. Benaras trapped me. I was in the zone, much like Tarkovsky's Stalker. The writer and the professor being Libinski and Niemand respectively. Were our deepest darkest wishes coming true in front of our very eyes?

(Insert snippets from diary)

November 8th
So Dr. Libinski left today. A wonderful 4 days with him, his thoughts, his ideas and his (the strangest till date) sense of humour. We had wonderful exchanges on life, humanity, creativity, utopian societies, violins, flutes, 21-gear bicycles, dot dot dot. I took his room (and all its positive energy) to begin a more disciplined way of being. One thing he said really made me think. A very very frail poor boy came to us asking for money and he said that most people dont deserve the bodies they have because of the way they abuse it with drugs, alcohol, cigarettes. Its time to wake up. A simple thing to say, yes, but a valid one. One for thought. Not only thought, action too. Act. Or die. There's no other way forward.

September Rain

The clouds consumed the Ganga and poured down the other day. In my little room in the old Haveli my Tarkovsky book "Sculpting in Time" was washed with the holy rain. Finally the images of Tarkovsky became a reality. The rain. The clouds, the panoramic views of Gangaji all became Tarkovskyesque. The parrots and the parakeets made their appearance and presence felt every once in a while. I could imagine seagulls in Benaras much like Kunigunda lost in the deserts of Dubai. Ajay Guesthouse, Chousatti Ghat. My room was probably 100sq.ft. but I was right on the Ganga. There were monkeys roaming around on my balcony. I remembered what it must have been like when Ginsberg was in Benaras. Always high, tripping on ganja with the other boys of the beat generation. They must have reformatted their brains to take it all in. I needed to look at everything with fresh eyes. My expensive Ray-Bans were with me twentyfourseven.

From Dubai to Benaras

On the Mansarovar Ghat slope, the following day, I sat with a group of Naga Baba's spearheaded by Manoj Giri Baba aka Monkey Baba. He was covered in vibhoothi (ash) and was ready to maar (light up) his chillum. Somehow there is a constant appearance and re-appearance of aviator-type sunglasses in Benaras. It will appear in all my subsequent visits in different forms forming different points of view sometimes looking at things in green, sometimes in black. They are my vision controllers. One of the baba's wanted to keep it. They proclaim to live a life of renunciation yet they want sunglasses and iphones all the time. I don't understand where they come from. What makes someone give up everything and roam the earth looking for dhuni's and chillums to proclaim the next new second. The Dhuni is a sacred site represented as a cleft in the ground. This cleft is emblematic of the Yoni or female vulva and generative organ. The Dhuni therefore represents a site of worship related to the Earth Mother, Shakti or Goddess. The Dhuni is worshipped by spiritual intention and the kindling of a flame inside it. Suitable materials are offered to the Dhuni and consumed by the heat or flame. This represents the eternal process of change and transformation on all levels of existence. As the Yoni is the nexus from which all manifest beings come into this world, the worship of the Dhuni represents a sacred nexus for the path of return from the physical to spiritual level. This is an intentional process of inversion or return to our spiritual source. The Dhuni is a sacred site and focal point for this form of spiritual exertion or Sadhana. Aside from the offering of sacred fuel to the Dhuni, mantras are also offered as well as the sounds of diverse musical instruments and ecstatic dance and gesture. Although several cultures retain traditions of fire worship, a unique feature of the Dhuni tradition is that it is the Dhuni or site itself which is considered sacred, not exclusively the fire kindled within it.

Later, I went to Mona Lisa cafe looking for something to fill my social cylinder. I spoke to many passing strangers. I was beginning to understand why this strange place was attracting the most diverse set of people. Here everything happens out of time. Time has a very inconsequential role to play in Benaras. No one wonders what day of the week it is. The tourists walk the gulleys, sitting in chai shops, observing life unfold every second. I was beginning to forget about time, I decided to lose the watch on this trip. It was interesting to come to a place like Benaras after living in Dubai for twenty years. From Dubai to Benaras, from materialistic to ascetic, from everything to nothing.

I remember this piece called "Do-buy" I had written about this shift.

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Its funny I am saying all this when all along up until now I had compromised my energies for creating commercial logos and branding (which is always explained as something much beyond a logo) for rich companies, building graphic guidelines and things exquisitely called brand driver platforms. Although it did sting once in a while I always thought of (and also owned!) sports-cars with 6-speed transmission (I remember telling people that being in an Audi TT was like sitting in a cockpit), black and white minimalist Armani XL wristwatches, Paul Smith trousers (with that really gorgeous multi-coloured band that would stick out for people to see), Prada slippers and the very assumably not-in-your-face red strip with the Prada type offset to the left, the black CK underwear (oh, you could be clever and rest your hand on your hips in such a way that the Calvin Klein type could be readable to your fellow designer-conscious graphic designer friends). All very carefully crafted for the conscious pretty-faced consumer. I would walk into the boutique shopping malls with 500 dollars in my pocket knowing I was going to spend it, but not knowing on what. Its funny when I think about it now but it makes sense why I named my folder on my macpro Lavish. Ha! Its all adding up now. My subconscious mind was housing all this information and distilling it slowly through my fingertips as they pixellated my innermost fantasies. And I didn’t even know. My parents thought I was progress-personified. I lived in a housing complex called Greens where everything right from the lakes to the palm trees was man-made. Anything was possible in this wonderful fantasy world. It was every middle-class Indian’s dream to be part of a society that had its own private Costa’s, its own private swimming pool surrounded by trees. I remember texting my brother about my uber-cool lifestyle when I was lazing around in the pool in my Ripcurl swimming trunks. I used to take my Tarkovsky Sculpting in time book to the pool hoping to accidentally bump into a pretty girl who knew his films and didn’t think he was a famous medieval classical composer. Alas, it never happened. What was I thinking, God only knows. Now when I look back I can laugh. I was still sensitive back then, though. I had my own upright piano, an Eastern-european piano teacher and a filipino piano-tuner called Jun. I went through it all. I expected to find real happiness in buying all of Tori Amos’s piano transcriptions and working out my favourite songs. Unfortunately, I never got around to spending too much time on the piano. Was I in favourable environments? What was my motivation? I wonder.

I guess there was an innocence in the futile acquisition of things big and small. Of things beautifully designed, sensitively crafted. Before I bought my car I made sure the rims on the tires were the 19” ones and not the 17” ones. Attention to detail, eh? Talking of attention to detail, I remember spending hours and hours crafting the logo of Uptown Cairo, a 7000-home township in Cairo for the super rich. I came up with this really clever idea of positioning it as a fashion brand so people could associate their lifestyle with, say, Giorgio Armani or YSL. The brandmark was also inspired by the YSL insignia. A very sophisticated CA would drive the brand by appearing on cufflinks, shopping bags and 80ft billboards. Black and white with an accent of fuchsia-pink. It looked really nice I must say. But, wow, its hard now to understand my dedication towards something so trivial. The hours spent creating the brand driver platform, the hours spent sifting through images in Getty and Corbis containing the tags sophisticated, class, up-market, quintessential, etc. I browsed through thousands of images downloading comps of the ones that matched my verbal brand driver “Uptown Chic”. I also created a little film in flash with the music of Air. How sensitive I was as a commercial graphic designer. Did I somehow avoid questioning this or was I just too caught up in wondering what to buy next? When I think back now I really wonder what my real motivation was. On the other hand, I had to keep the social and artistic cylinders of my heart constantly full by having screenings of Bergman, Tarkovsky, Kurosawa films (and post-screening discussions) in my apartment. I felt this somehow made up for all the shit I was doing in my day-job. I constantly lived in that sense of denial that hey I wasn’t really doing too bad in the self-realisation department. I rarely asked myself the question, “Are you being true to yourself?”. Actually I don’t think I ever even thought of that. I was too busy drinking Belgian beer with friends, discussing Ermenegildo Zegna’s fall collection of men’s suits, smoking cuban cigars, making sure my 100 dollar Terre-de-Hermes cologne found its way through the smoke-infested interiors of the post-modern Blue Bar or the David Lynch-inspired Cooz Bar in the Hilton. These were the things that constantly were on my mind. I was the cool graphic designer working with the best Branding agency in town hanging out with really pretty women, some of them Mexican, some Lebanese, some French, some even as exotic as half-Danish/half-Rwandan. I constantly sent photos to my friends back in India, me in my Stone Temple Pilots T-shirt and brown Mexx leather jacket (with the minimalist red interior satin lining) hanging out with super-gorgeous women, their arms all over me. Oh, how satisfied I felt. This, for me, was the summation, the ultimate realisation of what I constantly strived for. It was me climaxing in the social circus. I was up there. As the night was coming to a close the only question on my mind was whether I was going to flash my Gold or Platinum credit card when the cheque came. Or maybe I was too drunk to think of anything at all.

In 2004, I began documenting my thoughts on a blog I called Scalable Deficit. Deficit is defined in the dictionary as being “the amount by which something, esp. a sum of money, is too small”. Ironically, subconsciously, I must have been talking of that something as being the soul, and not money. Quite an apt title, now when I think of it. I had to write what I felt. I had to be honest. I knew I was doing something wrong in my life. My life, for sure, was lacking something. Something real. Which is why the words came so easily. I needed to vent.

I give up
Its a horrible day. Never felt so alone. I think I am a bonafide misanthrope. The sound of the human voice drives me to insanity. Its all opinion right? Everything is. "Have you been to the packaging and promotions section of the website? You might want to check that out." No, I don't want to check that out. Its all bollocks anyway. Who fuckin cares? These people can stuff their opinions on advertising and how cool it is up their... My heart is filled with Castrol. I am a commodity. I am a whore. Famewhore. I am a sellout. I have nothing to contribute to society. I sell lies. I sell mouthwash. There are no stories I can tell my grandchildren. I am the lost rays of a forgotten sunrise. I am all that I never dreamed of being. Plastic and cute, all the way.
Monday, March 07, 2005

The turning point for me was when I made my film “Look here, Kunigunda” which was a kind of visual poetry with no words. Having a film-club was good because I met quite a few interesting people like Mark, the hero of my film, Siobhan, the heroine and Nick, whose camera I finally used to shoot the film. So, I guess that was an important turn of events. It made me realise that beyond the glitz and glamour of the design industry, there was a world of realism in the artistic expression through film, a kind of vocation that maybe I could pursue.

Oh, I remember this lovely little poem.

Once the poem leaves your fingertips
it is no longer yours.
It acquires new shapes
in the eyes of others.

All art rides on the vehicle of opinion. This is where the author is at his weakest, vulnerable most. At that point of time, the author either waits patiently for comments (diplomatically conveyed), honest criticism, praise or love. I have always been the sucker for compliments. This receiver of love. Accepting everything good like I deserved it, running from those who fail to think like me. Atleast when you are creating artwork without the business hat on you can choose to be elitist and ignore what people think and decide to keep at it inspite of all the negative feedback. If you honestly feel for what you do, why should you care what others think. Results are not really in your hands. Maybe someday they will get it, maybe they wont and maybe you will be written off as the weird one that no one got. Who knows.

But, its different when you’re creative expression is at the mercy of a client or, even worse, a blonde Lebanese client-servicing executive who seems to have the final word on your artistic expression. It has happened to me many times. I could be sitting there with my headphones blasting Godspeed, you black emperor, working on an advertising campaign for a very large client like American Express when suddenly I could be interrupted with something like this:-

“We just presented the work to the client. It went down very well. Instead of the black and white photographs, can we see an option with colour photographs? The client was not too happy with the font you used, can we just stick to, say, a Helvetica? Or even Verdana? The client really likes Verdana? So, two options, one with Helvetica, one with Verdana? Can you increase the size of the logo and can we have FREE written in caps, and maybe in red? Other than this its all fine. Well done, Prem. Your a star. Shouldn’t take you more than an hour to fix this, right? Shall I arrange to meet them tomorrow, in the a.m.?”

Lina, the beautiful Lebanese client-servicing executive disappears saying she needs to run into another meeting in five (she probably needs those five minutes to do her eyes). I sit looking at my monitor not really knowing what hit me. But I try to calm down by going to the pantry to make myself a strong Nescafe in my own branded coffee cup. It all boils down to this. These are the moments that really make you go “WOW”. And little did I know it would get a lot worse than this.

Turquoise boy

No?
I say no to corporate magazines. I say no 9am meetings. I say no to 9-5. I say no to cubicles. I say no to annual reports. I say no to tea-parties. I say no to sushi lunches. I say no to group hugs. I say no to the ladder. I say no to the institution. I say no to institutional leeches (who use the ladder). I say no to team-building picnics. But I still sit here in my cubicle, staring at a computer screen designing and branding corporate institutions. Fuckin hypocrite, I wish I could go to sleep and never wake up cos I am saying yes, secretly.
Tuesday, June 27, 2006

In 2006, a branding consultancy called Turquoise headhunted me and offered me a job as Senior Designer in their London offices. It was a very exciting time. I always wanted to live in London, one of the three cultural Mecca's of the world. Turquoise was run by three women, the superpowers of the new world. The Creative Director, the senior designers, the designers were like little poodles on their lap or like lilliput men stuck in their hair. The studio was in a converted Victorian building in the very very expensive Holborn area. To keep up with my exquisite Dubai lifestyle I took up a tiny (like really tiny) studio apartment in Notting Hill for an insanely exorbitant rent. Why? I wanted to tell everyone I was living in Notting Hill, just like Hugh Grant. I also made it a point to tell everyone how much the rent was, which in Indian rupees was about one hundred thousand rupees a month. Er... I didn’t realise the coming one year would be me selling out completely in the corporate world, but also the year where I would write my most honest music to date. So, once again, I managed to offset the humdrum of the branding world with a sincere artistic expression through music.

Turquoise really started to kill me. I was dying a slow death in the Sylvia Plath sense of the word. By the end of six months, I had lost every bit of soul left. I lost a lot of weight too. My artistic and social cylinders were running dry. I had nothing to say. So, I started walking the streets of London alone. I began discovering a lot of new music, new artists, new films. I went to exhibitions in the TATE, Whitechapel Gallery and Serpentine regularly and began spending my money acquiring the paraphernalia of the artists I loved. Pierre Huyghe’s “Celebration Park” and Fischli & Weiss’s “Flowers & Questions” really inspired me to look within and find my own voice and make the exit from corporatism quietly. Like those signs in concert halls that read “Please leave quietly”.

February 2009

That first trip to Benaras. On the Shiv-Ganga Express with Allen Ginsberg's "Indian Journals" for inspiration. In my compartment there was a Sanskrit professor and a Muslim Silk saree seller. They spoke of their love for Benaras, what makes Benaras a universe and not just a city and how silly it was of me to expect to cover Benaras in four days. I had four days.

Straight from the railway station to Leela Guesthouse. Room with a slanted view of the Ganga for 350 rupees. I never knew this place would change the way I looked at life. From now on everything would be different. I started documenting everything on my still camera. The gulleys, the dogs, the cows, the chai shops, the monkeys. Mansarover ghat. The typology of the town was so simple. Everything opens out into the Ganga. In the vastness that is Benaras, you still can never get really lost. Maybe lost in your head, maybe metaphysically, but never physically. Metaphysically I was dropping the dots on that slope on Mansarover Ghat smoking chillums with some random baba's. One of them, a baba from Andhra gave me his take on Benaras, about this side being illusion and the otherside (the barren coastal otherside) being non-illusion. Ultimately, that is what is Benaras. On this side of the river there is everything, castles, temples, holy bathing points, pundits, graffiti, monkeys, dogs, tourists and on the other side there was nothing.

Meeting Somnath Baba, his hair tangled into circles, Sahasrara in full bloom. Angry baba, angry at politics, at samsara, at the worldly cycle of things, occassionally having a chai in his Akhara (ashram). Then the big meeting of the season. On the slope, I met Viswanath, a boatman from Bengal born and brought up in Benaras. He guessed my age. He thought I was sixty. "Sir, aap to saat saal hoga". Does this place drive everyone crazy. It certainly seems to attract a lot of weird people. On my first day I made a visit to the ever-popular Mona Lisa Cafe. There I met a violinist from America called Lorena. She would resurface again many months later in Himachal when I was lost in the forest looking for my house. Strange how time spins its hands into your gut and breathes out all sorts of connecting energies. I hung out with her for a while, shot a video of her on the boat while she tried to play some Carnatic-sounding compositions. She looked strange, I wonder how she found Benaras. The boatman, Pappu, had his name tattooed on his arm. He seemed very drunk. Later, he took me for dinner in Harishchandra Ghat and got even more drunk, I had to escape from him and back to my room. I found the first day in Benaras very unwelcoming. I constantly wondered what brought me to this town of bizarrities. But that is Benaras, it tests your endurance levels first, then it decides where to swallow you into its maze or spit you out permanently. Next morning, sunrise, and many more questions...

I woke up at 6. The weather was lovely. I was doing the regular touristy thing. Getting onto a boat with a camera and looking at life through the lens hoping to upload all this to my facebook page and wait for "likes" and comments. I was asking the boatman the regular set of questions, the answers that he belts out almost everyday. I had questions about the burning ghats, about the conmen, about the state of the river, the same questions. I didn't think different. It was my first major trip in 33 years. Cosmic reboot. I was slowly beginning to accept the coordinates of this town, accept that wonderful stretch of land between the Varna and the Assi rivers, that holy land of Varanasi. Or Benaras, or Kashi. I also bought a Rudraksha on the boat for two-hundred rupees not knowing whether it was genuine or fake. Rudraksha (also Rudraksh; Sanskrit: rudrākṣa ("Rudra tears")) is a large evergreen broad-leaved tree whose seed is traditionally used for prayer beads in Hinduism. The seed is borne by several species of Elaeocarpus, with E. ganitrus being the principal species used in the making of a bead chain or mala. Rudraksha is a Sanskrit compound consisting of the name Rudra and akṣa ("eye").

I started hanging out at Raju's chai shop near my guesthouse. A perfect setting for a chai shop. See, Benaras is expected to be three-thousand years old. So the first patch of about 2 km by 7 km from the Ganga onto the road is all pedestrian. It consists of narrow gulleys forming a sort of labyrinthian structure. These little streets or gulleys as they call it have numerous chai shops, temples, guesthouses, restaurants...sitting in one of these chai shops is like watching live television because you get to see monkeys, dogs, cows, ascetics, tourists, people from all over the country walking past you. You can never predict what you will see next. I used to enjoy sitting here at Raju's chai shop having my clove cigarette and listening to the stories of people and watching life's metaphysical hands making gestures at me.

First thoughts...

The book documents my visits to Benaras. The first one was in February 2009. Just four days. I lost both my cameras on that trip and met Viswanath, the boatman, someone I would encounter on all forthcoming visits. Then I went back in September when the monsoon rain washed my Sculpting in Time book, when I stayed in that old Haveli where monkeys hung out in my balcony, one of them even smashed my Ray Ban's, that Alpha Male walking in through my room to the balcony while Prakash and me sat there, Prakash's birthday when we went to the other side to do pooja and take a dip in the Ganges, that walk in Ramnagar, king on elephant back, the parrots, the parakeets, so many wonderful instances in one day, it was all too much for Prakash to assimilate.

Then those meetings with Gabriel, the Belgian who was writing his film in Benaras, living in Assi, playing the violin, the music of Sufjan Stevens, my Sarod, the introduction to Isaac Niemand, someone I hated at first, then the meeting with the Mexican violinist and the Korean sitar player, two wonderful girls living in the cosmos of Benaras, pizzas and apple pie at Vaatika's, humus and wifi at Aum Cafe, Shivani Ma in Red, introduction to peaceful Frenchman Gael Brajeul and how I finally moved into Assi in November when I returned to take Gabriel's wonderful room and its positive energy.

All along spliced with moments on the riska (cycle rickshaw) with Viswanath, moments in the gulleys on Gabriel's cycle that I got fixed. So many wonderful things happening all too quickly for me to take in. I knew I would miss these days one day in the future. And that day is now...carefree days, probably the best times of my life and better times yet to come when I visited back in 2010 first in November, then in December when I broke up with Katy after she travelled hundreds of miles to see me, finding an old Sarod in Chowk, then buying an Esraj, a Dilruba, a pair of tablas, a German harmonium, that time I stayed till February until those fateful 15 days when I apparently lost it, marking a full circle, Benaras standard time.