new site

jasmine tea
moonpeak cafe
mcleod ganj
red moleskine
now on www.tanushrishukla.com

in three weeks

i went from
a noisy cricket match

into a bus with a funky geometric floor

out a dinky airplane

into a city more tibet than india

with a quirky restaurant

and lovely tibetan thenthuk with a book

to a silent forest

and a whispery ashram where i could take no pictures but made many doodles (coming up)

to a music-filled house

to a perfect, silent train journey into the desert

straight on to a chaotic film set

and back to the city
to familiar things, both sad and funny

and barely a week later, i've already booked my tickets to go back to the ashram
and do it all over again next month

1987

someone i went to kindergarten with tagged me in this picture on facebook a few days ago
i didn't remember him, but silly little fragments about some of the others came floating back
the memory of a child is a strange thing
stranger still how different people record different memories about the same thing
didn't milan kundera write a book about this?
it sounds like something he'd write a book about.

look, look

look, look, look at my blog
the template so airy!
the pictures so big!
we're officially a cell phone and dslr pictures blog, people!
expect some not-so-dinkies soon
and pssst, i've also started sneakily going back in time and editing past photo stories
 wheee...

nazar na lage

she'll still get her heart broken someday
sorry to say

evolving energies

when i first started this blog, it didn't mean that much to me. i gave it a silly name and randomly started uploading to it whatever pictures i had on my cell phone. but i've started thinking of it a little differently now.

pictures have become important to me because they contain all these unwritten stories and poems and things said and unsaid and about to be said and never to be said. sometimes, it's about what the picture does not show or is trying to show or intended to show but got lost somewhere. what i've been writing around my pictures has been like that too--lost somewhere between the brain and the typing hand.

so the thing is, i want to start being more careful with the stories of these pictures, not just whip 'em out and hit publish like i've been doing. also, over time, i want to treat the pictures differently: maybe as posters, as still-frame films, as comic book panels, as found objects, as picture books for the broken hearted...? i don't know how or when, just putting it out there so i don't forget.

and here is the dilemma of the editor in me: i want to go back to some posts whose pictures i've loved but didn't do justice to with the stories. is that ok? i think it's ok. isn't that the fun part of the digital product, that it gets to be a bit of a shapeshifter?

also, i just bought myself a dslr (which i'm still too scared to use) so maybe there'll be a whole new parallel track on this blog. who knows? i certainly don't. may the energies evolve...!

the lost art of writing-behind-pictures

if we could flip over digital pictures like we once could photo prints,
what would be written behind them?

"fuck poetry.
let's just stare
at the sky
we'll feel like kings
with wings
i promise.
the stars
they have a way
of making some people feel so big
and others so very small
and lost
which one are you?
i can't wait to find out."