A recent photograph of an old man sleeping in a temple premises captures a beautiful image just like a poem does. Some times we create images which are sought for their intrinsic beauty , not because they are a part of the motif of a poem . Single images , which suddenly strike you either while you are pursuing a bigger theme or even while you are going about your daily routine are beautiful in themselves and are used , much later , in a poem or a painting.

My poem on the old man sleeping in the temple goes as under :


Sleep


This creature of the earth
Sleep-talks to himself
Nobody has heard him.
As the temple bells ring
The earth burns slowly
And goes up in swirls of smoke
These lights hurt him
But the smoke does not.
It is just like then
Of comforting mother-softness
Of all-around emerald aqua.
His limbs do not move.
Nor do his eyes see.
At the tunnel’s beginning
It is like what it was
When it all began.

I have taken a photograph depicting the delicious moments of a lazy afternoon on the river bank. One can notice the thoroughly relaxing fame of the man sitting on the cement bench and the man on the bicycle turning his face to look towards the river. The air is full of joyful inertness . The river , the man squatting on the bench, three people gossiping under the banyan tree and the man on the bicycle with one leg on the cement bench - all are components in the pervasive luxurious feeling of not having to do anything ! In this respect the photograph is very similar to a painting .

A poem recreating a similar lazy afternoon is given below :

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

Yesterday evening, as on all evenings,
The banyan briefly dallied with the river
Its tiny red fruits floated on the waters
Glistening in the sun like rubies
The woman-bather, busy disentangling
Flickering stars of pieces of driftwood
From her floating amavasya-like hair
Took no notice of the fruity overtures.
The last ferry did not bring him
Nor did the five 'o clock circular train
Which disgorged people in sweaty shirts
Onto the dusty Bagh Bazar platform
The mongrel got up from its disturbed sleep
Sniffing at the coal-smell left by the train
Went back to its sleep under the cement bench.
The beggars on the river steps ate their dinner
And retired for the day on the platform
Somehow they had prior knowledge
That nobody was actually expected
On the train or by the ferry on the day
Or for that matter , on any other day.

"At the unlit corner where awareness takes a blind turn " ,the ghosts of the past hurts some times haunt us in all their smokey whiteness.That is when we may start "thinking in flowers" , if I may use the phrase .Just think of flowers in multitudes ,on the trees, in the vases, in the florist's and everywhere else. A digital photograph you have taken recently of the bunches of flowers in the park can be imagined to produce those images on the screens of your closed eyelids.


I give below my poem written in such a moment :


Sunrise and flowers

In my nights of waiting
For sunrise and flowers
I look pain in the face
I struggle to think in flowers
And rising orange suns
My night then fizzles down
With its false props to pride
At five I wake up bleary-eyed
Trying to catch beach suns
Before they turn white.

In photography , as in poetry, minimalism can be successfully employed to convey something with starkness and without frills . A lot of course depends upon how you compose the photograph .In a recent photograph I tried to pit a man-made light-bulb against the sun by eliminating all the other surrounding details .

In the following poem I have used the same technique to describe a moment in the early morning in the Grand Hotel, Kolkata .I have tried to create the moment without the usual 'haze' that a poet usually creates :

AT THE GRAND HOTEL, KOLKATA

The morning crystallises
Pure and silver. At seven
The moment swells
To an iridescent event
Amid outcry of cutlery
And bone-clatter of china
Sparrow-love on the lawns
And aromatic hotel smells.

Like poetry , a photograph can capture fleeting images in space and can even explore their inter-relationship in a spatial situation.A photograph cannot capture their relationship across different planes of existence ,in space and time,except through the viewer's own present level of consciousness . Back-and-forth movements in time or dynamic switches between reality and fictional situations are not possible in photography.

Take a look at the following poem :

Images in a train




They lived outside the pale of my existence
Just a few images that touched the fringe
“Hello image” :Mersault addressed Marthe
Just like only one of her other lovers did
The woman here was a mere image
The way her eyes flashed at her husband
As she changed the nappies of the child
The child swung in the cloth-cradle, gently,
Like a weaver bird swings in the fibrous nest
He cried , he gurgled ,he knocked about
A mere image in another image’s existence
Mersault knew Marthe was a mere image
Flesh-and-blood Marthe did not know this
This woman did not know she was an image
Only I knew she was an image ,like Marthe.


In the above poem the characters have been invested with a certain halo which is a product of the poet's own mind. A photograph cannot produce a similar effect.


However , depending upon the state of the mind of the viewer and the sensitivity of his perception a photograph can almost reproduce a typical human situation much like a poem does and can produce almost the same effect in the viewer.

I have tried to explore an insane mind in one of my poems . I have imagined the ever-expanding consciousness of an insane woman flowing in the form of a continuously extending line from her consciousness towards the universe , going over trees , houses , mountains and into infinity.




The Insane Woman


With a cloth bundle
In her fragile arms
She looks through
Your eyes vacantly
Her eyelids fall lightly
Amid buzzing flies
The whites of her eyes
Glisten with moist laughter.
I remember her artistic
Scrawls on the walls
And the finest lyrics
Set to taut music
She had composed
In her early married days.
She made a fine home
For her husband and
An open house for visitors.
Here on the footpath
She sits hunched up
With her unwashed head
Between her drawn-up knees
Her thoughts beam
In a thin straight line over
Tall buildings and treetops,
Piercing the mountains
And onward, into the Infinity.
Scores of busy people
Go past her every minute
The dust from their vehicles
Forms a smooth layer on
Her rain-drenched face.

A photograph of the verdant rice fields, on both sides of the highway, stretching to the distant blue mountains is an experience of freedom of the mind, of the ever-expanding consciousness in space. The beauty of the digital camera arises out of the freedom it affords to the consciousness to expand , much like the way you feel when you lie supine on a flat ground looking at the limitless space of the sky.

I have taken ,recently, a photograph of the inside of an ancient temple with elaborately carved stone pillars which is highly evocative . This would surely have been a throbbing centre of activity two centuries ago when hundreds of devotees thronged the place for worship. The temple today , being devoid of God in the sanctum and in a state of neglect, has collected puddles of rain water and has become green and slippery with moss. A photograph is surely equal to a thousand words !

A photograph can freeze a moment in motion and tell a story beautifully like a poem does.The spatial existence shared jointly by different things at a particular moment can be beautifully reproduced in a photograph with the object of re-creating the times gone by , or , more importantly, with a view to capturing a human situation.



I have come across a beautiful photo captioned "Expectancy" in a newspaper. In the photograph a woman is drawing back the curtains to look towards the road for the return of her husband or lover or child .The photograph captures beautifully the "waitingness" in the way the woman's body is positioned near the window.

In another picture I have taken of a child playing with the sea the child is shown as running from the surging waves as though he is tempting the waves. Freezing the moment in motion here does not tell a story but has an appeal derived from the child's playfulness

The photograph of a dilapidated temple or any other ancient stone structure recaptures the presence of the people that once existed in a spatial existence jointly with the structure. The beauty of the photograph stems out of the effectiveness of capturing the "presence" associated with the structure.

A good photograph of a dilapidated structure of an ancient temple(now Godless ) recreates very evocatively the presence of the people who frequented the temple centuries ago .








The photographic poem

In the following poem I have tried to capture the "phantoms"exactly as a photographer does : fill as many visual details as possible . In doing so I have avoided , as far as possible, the use of imagery and back-and-forth movements in time so that the life of the ancients is recreated exactly like in a photograph :

Hampi

Rows of elegant stone arches
Stretching before Virupaksha temple
Housed multitudes of shops that sold
Exotic oriental merchandise
Incense sandalwood oil musk
And rarest of the Mysore silks
Ancient Vijaynagar hawkers
Sold diamonds and pearls in heaps
The lost civilisation of Hampi lies
Buried among these weathered rocks
Here every rock is a canvas of many hues
Every boulder is replete with legend.
The rapid Pampa meanders among
These cyclopean masses and here
She takes an abrupt northward course
This was the Kishkinda of Ramayana
Where our monkey-ancestors lived
Yonder lies the Matanga hill where
Sugriva took refuge from wrathful Vali.
Hampi took birth in this wild country
Strewn with boulders of strange shapes
Worn down by the vagaries of weathering.
Larger than life , famed emperor
Srikrishnadevaraya walked tall
Handsome and athletic conqueror
A poet-king with an exquisite sensibility
(Flanked by bejewelled queens
He stands immortalised in bronze
At the temple gates of Tirumala
The mighty emperor conquered
The distant Kalinga and its princess
Brought Srikrishna's idol to Hampi .
Under the haze of the searing sun
Ruined Hampi sweltered through
Five hundred years of history
The artistic plenitude of the sculptors
Defied the ruthless savagery of
The vandalising alien invaders
The stone thali of the temple spoke of
Giant men with gargantuan appetites
The harmonics of the musical pillars
Resonated through five centuries
A monolithic stone chariot stood
Motionless as though it were Time's
Relentless chariot that had come to a halt .


In short it is a plain narration just like what a historian does.