You know, it’s been forever since I just posted a couple of photos on this site. I should probably hunt around for some more.
Tag: Photographs
So a few thousand years ago a guy and his wife set out for home after fourteen years of exile in the spiffy jungles of peninsular India, and having just rescued his missus from the clutches of a very bad guy with ten heads, he decided that he was totally entitled to the guy’s flying car for the journey home — spoils of war and all that. This being the days before the IATA and GPS, the folks back home tried to make things easier for their returning king (whose slippers were doing a fine job of running the kingdom in his stead, apparently) and lit up the entire city so he could spot them from the air.
Hang on — did Laxman have to walk home?
This is all largely conjecture on my part, of course, but it seems that interpreting Deepavali is the birthright of every Indian, just like Swarajya (or at least that’s what Lokmanya Tilak said. I wish he would have added, ‘…and ice lollies’). Just today I’ve heard that Diwali/Deepavali is apparently about the triumph of good over evil; that the lamps were lit in order to banish roaches and other post-monsoon insects; that Narakasur was killed by either Krishna or Kali depending on who you ask, and that this all actually about communal harmony and free trade.
Funny, I don’t think anybody noticed while they were gorging on their own weight in sweets. A Doordarshan News report on the consummate consumption of sweets enthusiastically begins, “You may be familiar with the feeling of throwing up after gorging on Diwali sweets…”
Ah, DDNews. Crap, but pithy.
I for one am happy with this mega economic downturn. It means that there aren’t as many crackers in the air because nobody has money to burn, and so the air is not full of smoke, and I am not dying of an allergic reaction to it. Yup, I don’t like firecrackers either. Tradition they may be, but wasn’t gunpowder invented by the Chinese?
Oh but that doesn’t matter. Communal Harmony, Good over Evil, Puking sweets etc.
In all of this, the asuras and rakshasas get a bad rap, as far as I’m concerned, their name becoming synonymous with simplistic demons, monsters and bogeymen. Sure, so Ravana enjoyed a bit of a kidnap and hostage taking, but it’s not like he was unprovoked. I mean, they did lop off his sister’s ears and nose, you know. And very little is said of Ravana before his path crossed with Ram. Nobody talks about how Lanka was a perfect city built by the devas — a veritable Atlantis — and that he merrily defeated them and took it over. Nobody talks about his ten-headed super-intelligence — face it, that whole golden deer ruse was, well, gold (but then, in the end he did get done in by a single arrow straight to the chest, so…).
Maybe I’m just an irate South Indian unhappy with these pesky northerners trooping down to our virgin forests, stealing our women (or lopping their ears and noses off) and enfranchising our vanaras and bears. Mostly I’m just sore that Rama, the purshottam, made off with the fancy-pants pushpak-viman and it was never ever heard from again. Maybe when he got back he just left the rule of Ayodhya to the slippers and went off questioning his wife’s purity (what to do — log kya keh rahe hai…).
Because if he had heeded the words of our illustrious politicians on this day he would know that Deepavali is about communal harmony and freedom, and that means only one thing: mass production! Why, by the time the Mahabharata came around the place should have been full of shiny flying vehicles.
Baby Krishna should have been holding up that mountain on his little finger whilst on his My First Pushpak Viman™.
Bheeshma should have been impaled on a bed of arrows on the side of his flying yacht.
I can see it now: Draupadi! Dushasan! In the air! Infinite chiffon saree unravelling as that crafty Kaurava orbits her on his personal Pushpy GT-R, cackling maniacally.
Of course, there is no evidence that Rama didn’t try to turn the pushpak viman into a mass transport means for the people.
They must have just built the factory in Singur.
Allow me to rant.
Vogue India ran a photo-spread in their August issue featuring high-price luxury fashion accessories as modeled by people who — oh, what’s the word — are poor. This apparently caused some controversy. Mind you, these models were not just poor, but barefoot and missing-their-teeth poor. So poor that photographers from around the world come to India to take gripping, black-and-white shots of them in their state of bare-footed no-teethedness (sans Fendi clutch bag, of course), to highlight their, um, pooritude.
Now, frankly, I’m appalled… but not for the reason you think.
You see, I have no problem whatsoever with Vogue India’s photoshoot. I don’t care that they put 10,000 dollar accessories in the hands of people who make less than $1.25 a day (Who! Have! No! Teeth!). I don’t have a problem with these people being shown as poor as they usually are, except flashing a pair of designer sunglasses.
I do have a problem with people thinking that this is somehow offensive to the poor people. Oh, it’s offensive alright — it’s just offensive to people like you and me who buy and read Vogue (I have, and the Indian edition is quite nice). It’s people like us who actually know what a Fendi bag is, know that it costs 10,000 bucks and know that we’ll probably only ever buy a knock-off. It’s people like us who think poor people should only be seen in gripping, black-and-white documentary pictures in National Geographic or some exhibition.
Because — tell the truth now — you wouldn’t bat an eyelid at a young, skinny, urban person with a 10K bag in a magazine spread. Do you ask yourself, “Gee, I wonder if that model can actually afford that bag she’s modeling?” No, of course you don’t, because she looks like she can. She’s looks like a perfectly normal, upper-middle-class person who can afford a bag like that, or at least a knock-off. Heck, she can at least afford to eat badly all her life and then have her teeth fixed by a dentist, and isn’t that what’s really important? That she has great teeth?
How is a barefoot Rajashthani farmer any less of a viable fashion model than a size zero caramel-skinned Mumbai model who scrapes together her monthly rent? Because the latter fits in with your cushy world-view of how things should work?
I’m sorry, but a photoshoot in Vogue is neither going to solve nor exacerbate the problem of farmer suicides in rural India, so please don’t demean them (the farmers) by waving that flag around. And luxury brands are not tossing and turning at night in a moral quandary over how they’re going to sell their gold-dusted open-toed shoes in a market where poor people who can’t afford their brand exist. Last time I checked, there are people in the US and Europe who can’t afford it, and luxury goods are still for sale there.
Have you heard of this crazy new invention? It’s called Money. Works a little strange, but you’ll get the hang of it.
(see, told you this was a rant)
Of course, it’s not like Vogue is completely blameless. Firstly, they’ve dropped the ball by not crediting any of the models in their shoot (a courtesy they would show to most professional fashion models no matter how big or small). And when pressed for a response, the editor launches into some kind of biz-speak prattle about the ‘power of fashion’ and how they aren’t trying to make a political statement or save the world. Well, yeah, you’re bloody Vogue, we got that. But like it or not, a statement you have made, and it would help if you could have at least kept a well-prepared, intelligent retort ready for when this thing came up.
So, in summary:
– Fashion mag takes pictures of poor people with silly bags they could never afford.
– Everyone in a city gets upset that they’re seeing people they’re used to ignoring (except in gritty black-and-white shots) holding bags they secretly wish they could afford.
– People who can actually afford said bags are wondering where they can get that sexy ethnic turban the guy is wearing (HINT: Not at Louis Vuitton, baby).
– Creative types are wondering if the poor people are dirt cheap and where they can round up some for their latest campaign.
– Business people decide to comment on the issue by regurgitating every cliche in that last paperback on modern India they half-read on a plane once.
– All people born to be offended, are, and proceed to tack on their pet hot-button issue to things and generally tut and frown.
– As for the actual poor people, well, I have no idea what they think of the whole thing. Most of the people in the pictures are either smiling or bemused — bored, even.
I’m an outsider. I’m not one of them in the only way that actually separates us (financially), and on a cultural level I don’t think they give two hoots. I don’t care when some other middle-class Indian (as most models actually are) totes a Fendi bag in a photoshoot, so do they care when somebody (hopefully) pays them to do the same?
I’m not offended that someone did this. If anything, I applaud it (the photos are beautiful). I’m not offended that there are still poor people in the world while others can afford 10,000 dollar bags. Hey, I can afford tons of crap that other people can’t, and I still can’t afford a bag like that, so where on the levels of entitlement to being offended do I fall? I find all of this amusing and baffling and just a little bit sad.
Mostly, I’m just offended that you’re all still a bunch of idiots.
Over the past five years I’ve been amassing an eclectic collection of cheap used books on my trips to Bombay. At Rs.10 apiece (around $0.25 US) they aren’t expensive or significant (most of them are, in fact, the very opposite), but they are valuable to me, insomuch as they are weird — and I love weird. I have read very few of them; Of the hundreds (and by now, thousands), I have only finished a handful. There have been plans ever since I started blogging to talk about them, to read and review them, but this has so far not happened.
I was reminded of this recently when Dan blogged about his bookshelf, and in the comments I lamented that most of my books were in boxes (he suggested I just take a picture of the box). “That’s it,” I said to myself, “enough dawdling!” I looked through a small box of them and chose seven — none of which I have read — but which I think are interesting. Maybe this will give me the impetus to actually read some, but for now I will talk of their weird and wonderful subjects, their pretty and often breathtaking covers, and their all-round coolness. I hope you find them as fun as I do.
A Bit of Background
India has a huge English-speaking population, especially in the cities. In a culture that values education and knowledge as much as we do, it stands to reason that books and reading are still a significant part of life (at least among the urban middle class). So nothing is thrown away, old books move from private collections into small neighbourhood libraries where they get read by thousands of people over dozens of years, and eventually when they’re tattered and worn, or riddled with worm holes, they end up in raddi.
‘Raddi’ literally means ‘scrap’ and raddi merchants deal in paper and other valuable things like copper and metals. They buy in bulk by weight, and pick and sort things by hand into various piles in their usually hole-in-the-wall shops. The loose paper ends up in things like newsprint, and single-side printed matter is cut and bound into cheap notepads, while some of it even ends up as sandwich wrapping from roadside vendors. It’s a fun game to read the scrap on which you get your sandwich; usually it’s some kind of internal documents from companies — memos and letters and photocopied invoices — and sometimes it’s even old school textbooks (which are crap anyway, so no big loss).
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The books, however, are kept aside and resold. In raddi shops the price is not fixed and is negotiable; you choose a book, ask the vendor how much he wants for it; he inspects it and quotes something ridiculous (5-10 times what it’s worth) and then you haggle. In South Bombay where time is money and people just want to get from their office to the train station and vice-versa, things are a little more advanced, and in addition to the stack of negotiable old tomes, there will usually be a display of fixed price 10 Rupee books.
Remember, these people buy by weight, not title (and most of the hawkers don’t know English, but can read the words), so it’s quite common to find something you might pay a hundred rupees for just sitting in that pile because it’s too worn or the cover/author’s name is uninteresting. Many bargains are to be found. And below are just seven:
(Oh, and you can click on the front covers for larger versions)
1. Envoy to New Worlds/Flight From Yesterday
Our first book is even greater value for money than the others, because it’s actually two books. Published by Ace Books’ ‘Ace Double’ imprint, this is two novels for the price of one. When you get to the end of one, just flip it over and continue reading! It’s a gorgeous format from a design point of view alone, and there were hundreds of these, including this which was published in 1963.
Of the two tales, Keith Laumer’s Envoy to New Worlds is significant because it marks the first appearance (in a novel) of Jame Retief, ‘The Machiavelli of Cosmic Diplomacy’ as it states on the cover. He’s apparently an intergalactic diplomat, a role modeled somewhat after the experiences of his author in the United States Foreign Service. Retief would go on to star in upwards of sixteen books. The absence of a back cover summary prevents me from making any guesses as to the plot of this first adventure (I’m guessing there will be diplomacy), but any cover that depicts a man who has descended from a ladder with a cape, a gun, and a cummerbund, has piqued my interest.
On the flip side (haw haw), the slightly less well-known Robert Moore Williams (his name is so plain he couldn’t have made it up) gives us Flight From Yesterday. ‘Yesterday in America, tomorrow in Atlantis’ the cover blurb reads. Surely, hey must be talking about lost airport luggage. No? Oh well. Keith Ard (‘es well ‘ard, I hope) is an unemployed test pilot who answers a mysterious classified ad and apparently meets up with vanishing men in togas (or is it vanishing togas?) and girls with literally flaming hair. If this is any kind of good SF, the man with the vanishing toga teaches him stuff, and he gets off with the truly hot hottie. If this is progressive SF, then the roles of the man and the girl are switched. Either way, Keith Ard!
The cover reminds me of The Phantom Tollbooth movie, which is one of the reasons this book caught my eye. Sadly, no artists are credited on either of the covers. The books themselves are slim (Flight From Yesterday is 120 small pages, 11 pages longer than its ‘book-mate’) and both have a certain charming brevity to the narrative. For instance:
“How’d you get this, Keith?” he asked.
“I was struck in the back by something that felt like a hot wind made in part of living electricity,” Keith said.
Dr. Riker made no comment.
I love old SF.
2. Mushrooms, Molds, and Miracles
To say that author Lucy Kavaler’s work is eclectic would be an understatement. Anybody who writes books called The Private World of High Society, The Artificial World Around Us and The Wonders of Algae deserves to be taken seriously, and by all accounts, Mushrooms, Molds, and Miracles is a very well received and regarded book. It covers everything from fungi as miracle foods and medicines to yes, even hallucinogens and extra terrestrial speculations. The writing style is a perfect mix of conversational and academic; not shying away from big words when it needs to, but eschewing them when something simpler will suffice.
If it still aren’t convinced, here’s the first section of the back cover copy:
Martinis and the secret of heredity, Penicillin and The Angel of Death, Truffles and L.S.D., the Irish Potato Famine and the Fall of the Roman Empire, Astronauts, Gourmets, Scientists, and Indian Medicine Men…
What does this wildly assorted list have in common? The answer is Fungi.
How could I not pick this book up?
3. A Dictionary of Geography
All this talk of mushrooms should get you in the mood for the great outdoors, yearning to fulfill that romantic ideal of going out into the nearest wood and poking around under a rotting tree bark. It might help, therefore, to have a handy guide to tell you the difference between a gryke and a gulch; to be able to properly interpret the hachures on your map and to watch out for precarious talus.
All these and more things can be found in the Revised an Enlarged edition of Penguin’s A Dictionary of Geography by W.H. Moore. This surprisingly weighty paperback does exactly what it says on the cover, and even has a bunch of pretty black and white pictures in the middle. It’s fun enough if you are a closet geography nerd like me, but is also useful as an idea mine (there are several terms I’m going to steal for story titles already). We’ve all been at a dinner party where we’ve needed to know the difference between a Mercator’s Projection and a Sanson-Flamsteed Sinusoidal one, haven’t we? Well now we can be ignorant no longer.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the top of that there drumlin to see if I can spot that dingle I’ve been trying to find all day.
4. Our Language
Big words scare people. It’s the truth. But big words needn’t scare you any more after you’ve read (Prof.) Simeon Potter’s Our Language. The beautiful Romek Marber cover was enough to convince me to buy this book long before I opened it. Its ambition of telling the history, structure, dialectic branches, trends and future of the English Language (also known as ‘Merican’), and that too in only 200 pages, sealed the deal.
This is the kind of book that publishers seemed to just pop out on a lark back in the 1950s and 60s, and is now unjustly forgotten. They do not make them like this anymore. Here’s something that doesn’t claim to have the answer to everything, is not a trendy pop-culture phenomenon, the latest gee-whiz-ain’t-it-spiffy nonfiction breeze that gets blogged to death and launches a thousand speaking tours (even though I greatly respect and love things like Tipping Point and Freakonomics). It’s just a simple, well-researched, intelligent account of a subject, and we’re all busy reading about Britney’s navel grit.
Shame on you, human race.
5. Teen-Age Vice/Designs in Scarlet
Speaking of the human race…
Oh, where do I begin? This 1939 (but 1957 edition) book is so deliciously cheesy. Told in a Bob-Woodward-channeling-Raymond-Chandler style, only bad, it apparently took Cooper eighteen months of “relentless, coast-to-coast personal investigation to ferret out the facts. If you are shocked by what he found, remember — he meant you to be.”(!) — this from the inside flap.
The entire book is like this. I should probably point out here that the author started his career as a clown, and at the time of his suicide in 1940 was the chief publicist for a circus. Of course, nothing I could say about this book could match the back cover copy, so I’ll just let it do the talking:
What makes them do it?
Who is to blame?
They hold orgies in cellar clubs, go on juke-joint “honeymoons.” They get hopped up on liquor and dope, then rob and rape and murder. They are the young people under 21 who commit more than half the major crimes in the U.S.A.
Inspired by J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Courtney Ryley Cooper gives you the grim and tragic answers in this brilliant and blistering exposé of TEEN-AGE VICE.
…To paraphrase Renée Zellwegger, “You had me at ‘Hoover.'”
6. Cool Kids with Hot Ideas
Likewise, this book had me the second I saw its cover. No, I’m not just talking about the naked girl on the bike (although it is a well-posed photo, and she isn’t bad either). The cover design is remarkable, though entirely uncredited (and in a rare instance, they paid attention to the back too. Cover, that is). I routinely pick up books I have no interest in if the cover is particularly good. Being a graphic designer (with the emphasis on graphic), strong stark covers like these have always appealed to me over today’s wispy, layered and overworked Photoshop monstrosities.
The text itself is a lot less sensationalist than the cover would have you believe; certainly, it’s not as SHOCKING(!) as Teen-Age Vice. A compilation of articles, Cool Girls… may have lost its edge when viewed from our media-saturated times. Perhaps, in 1968, this boook chronicled the kind of shocking behaviour people associated with fringe sorts like hippies and beatniks, not ordinary teenage daughters. Most stories deal with unplanned pregnancies, unwed mothers, and illegal abortions (remember, Roe Vs Wade only happened in 1973). The others deal with drugs and teenage prostitution, and none of them are made to look sexy.
It’s interesting that a book with such an unabashedly titillating cover disguises what is fairly straightforward, even depressing, content. I could go on and on about how news has always been latently pornographic, but that’s another story. This book is the perfect example of ‘Don’t Judge a Book by its Cover.’
But what a cover.
7. How to Build Your Cabin or Modern Vacation Home
“Enough!” I hear you say, “all this teenage vice is too much for anyone to take. Can’t we talk about those nice mushrooms or sexy dingles again?”
Well, sure, I’d love to, and if you do want to chuck it all and move to the farthest wood, it would be a good idea to have some place to live when you go there. The first thing that strikes you about this Popular Science Skill Book (other than the splendid Bauhaus cover by Frederick Charles) is the little note on the inside that says it’s printed on 100% recycled paper. Somehow I never imagined that people highlighted that fact before the 1980s.
This is an honest to goodness 160 page attempt to teach you how to build a cabin. It’s pretty successful too, and I have little doubt that a person of average intelligence might actually end up with a functioning home in the woods if he used it as a rough guide. The genius of the book lays in the fact that it doesn’t just show you ‘four methods of supporting rafters on top plates in gable-roof construction’, but also covers things like ‘how to develop a spring’ (as a reliable water source), how to choose a site for your home in the hills, and an overview of the tools you might use (of chainsaws it says: “Gas-powered chainsaw speeds log-cabin building. It is strictly for outdoor use.“).
My favourite part has to be an early chapter showcasing classic and avant-garde cabin designs to inspire you. I have half a mind to buy a plot of land and try one out, but I think I’ll start in miniature with ice-cream sticks. The fun doesn’t stop there, though; the back cover gives the names of several related titles, including How to Work with Concrete and Masonry (for my closet brutalist, of course) and How to Build Your Own Furniture (I’m also vaguely intrigued by How to Do Your Own Wood Finishing by Jackson Hand, but only so that I can giggle like a schoolboy).
How to Build Your Cabin or Modern Vacation Home is strange; it’s set up almost exactly like every book on drawing I have ever seen or purchased, only at the end of it you get a house. How cool is that?
In Conclusion
I hope you’ve enjoyed this short trip through a little corner of my book collection. Even though I didn’t look through the majority of them, there were enough good ones that I was spoilt for choice, and could even group them by theme. This first one was a pick-and-mix of strangeness to whet the appetite, an amuse-bouche for your bibiomaniacal palette.
Vishal
Burji is an Indian Railway Station institution. Throughout the country, stands with sizzling cast iron griddles serve up plate after plate of this stuff with soft, butter-seared pillows of pav bread late into the night. You shovel it off steel plates, sopping up every last bit with the spongy bread, and perhaps contemplating another serving (or even eyeing the tray of sheep’s brains which the stall also prepares in a similar way.).
It’s hard to say which came first; the silky, creamy Continental version of scrambled eggs, or this spicy Indian one (anda bhurji). It’s fair to say that both could have cropped up independently, and I’m certain that scrambled eggs were invented before the omelet (everyone tries to pass off a failed omelet as scrambled eggs when they’re learning).
I like both versions; they each have their purpose. The Indian, for instance, wouldn’t be the best match with buttered white toast and ketchup, and the Continental would not take to chapattis very well. They’re both easy and quick to make (though this one requires a few more ingredients), and are equally scrumptious.
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Recipe
In a heavy bottom pan, heat a tablespoon of olive oil on a medium flame, and add in one clove of garlic, sliced or minced, and one thumb-sized green chilli slit down the middle (you may scrape away the seeds to reduce its heat, and remember, in India at least the smaller the chilli the hotter it is). Finely dice a medium onion and add it to the pan; sautee until translucent (I know some people who like it still crunchy, and some who prefer it brown and caramelised. It’s up to you).
Take a tomato that’s a little smaller than the onion and dice it large. If you’re using cherry tomatoes you can simply halve two or three of them. When the onion is cooked add the tomato and sautee further.
When the tomatoes are cooked, add a pinch of turmeric powder. Good turmeric is strong, so use sparingly, and use a spoon to dispense it if you don’t want your fingertips to turn yellow for a few days. The rich, deep yellow colour that results from adding it is something you’ll want to replicate in all egg dishes, and so turmeric may be used in omelet mixes as well (just dissolve it in a teaspoon of milk or water so that no lumps are fomed).
Along with the turmeric I also add a little chilli powder. The powdered red chilli adds a different kind of heat to the sharper fresh green chilli, and when used in tandem they give a more rounded spicy taste.
Note that adding in curry powder instead of turmeric may be okay but I wouldn’t advise it. Curry powder contains several other spices such as coriander and cumin that would interfere with the generally clean and simple taste of the eggs.
Sautee for a minute until the spices take to the onions and tomato. Turn the heat up to high and add in a quarter cup of water, bringing it up to a simmer.
(A Side Note: This mix you have in the pan right now — before you add the eggs — is a very versatile one, and is sort of like the ‘trinity’ they use in Cajun cuisine. From this point, you can pretty-much add anything to this and come out with a good dish. Green beans. Mushrooms. Strips of Chicken. Tuna. Spinach. Paneer. Boiled, diced Potatoes. Tofu. Broccoli. A drained can of beans. Seafood. The list is endless, and what you’ll end up with can be called a bhaji. Anyway, back to the burji…)
If you like, you can break all your eggs into a bowl beforehand and beat them as you would an omelet mix, seasoning that with salt and pepper. I just season the onions and tomato and break the eggs in whole, scrambling them in the pan one or two at a time with a wooden fork. Either way now is the time to add in 4-6 eggs, depending on their size (i.e. 2-3 per head).
Stir the mixture around until the eggs are cooked. That water we added earlier will make the burji crumbly and more like mincemeat rather than creamy scrambled eggs. You can keep it creamy by omitting the water, beating the eggs up with some milk beforehand and not cooking them as much, but in general this is how burji is prepared in India. Finally, plate up and garnish with finely chopped cilantro.
Serve immediately with either chapattis or spongy bread that has been buttered on one side and seared on a pan (soft baguettes work well).
Eggsplicitly Speaking… (and not)
I mentioned before that the basic preparation of onions, tomatoes, garlic and chilli with turmeric is a base for a lot of dishes — bhajis — in Indian cuisine. If you’re vegetarian in the Indian sense then you may substitute crumbled paneer for the eggs, and end up with a popular dish called paneer burji. It’ve also had a similar paneer dish where the tomatoes and onions were pureed instead of whole (blitz the raw ingredients seperately beforehand, then fry as above), and the dish was finished off with cream for a strangely italian-tasting dish that might have gone well with the right kind of pasta.
Indeed, even this kind of burji might make a nice variation on Chinese Egg Fried Rice, if made in a wok with cold cooked rice put in just before you add beaten eggs.
I’ve had proper scrambled eggs much fewer times than burji. Chalk it up to the more pungent taste and the fact that it is easier to get right; you can prepare it without obsessing over it. It also works as a good lunch or dinner for one, and it firmly fits in the category of Comfort Food for me.
Perhaps it’s the memory of late nights coming home in Bombay, hungry and tired, when the only things open are the hawkers outside the train stations; islands of enticing aromas lit by kerosene lamp beacons. In the pool of their turmeric light, many a truly great meal has been had.
Here I am, getting ready to take another welcome trip to the land I call Home, and I’ve realised that I haven’t even shown you any pictures from my last trip! It was a pretty good one too, with a few days spent outside Bombay, during which these pictures were taken.
Hariharehswar is about half a day’s drive South of Mumbai city, and along with nearby Shrivardhan it forms a nice place to get away to. The reason most people will go is because of a temple there, but my greatest memory of the trip will have to be the beaches.
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Now, beach culture is not a big thing in India the way it is in the West. Being a country with a distinct hangover of Victorian morality tends to make sunbathing and bikini-clad beachcombers a bit of a no-no; sure, you’ll get to see tons of them naked goras romping around Goa, but in the rest of the place, even cosmopolitan Mumbai, beaches usually involve fully-clothed people hanging out, splashing water on each other, and eating a lot of snack foods. Harihareshwar, meanwhile, is in the middle of nowhere and is surrounded by fairly conservative villages, so I don’t think they’ve even seen a bikini except on TV*. It didn’t matter, really, because nobody in our group knew how to swim anyway, and the beaches themselves were huge
*(It seemed like every house big or small had a satellite dish)
Looking through the hundreds of pictures from that trip, I note that we didn’t end up taking many that showed the sheer scale of the shores. Mostly I think we just gave up, because you can’t really take a picture that properly represents it. I’m talking relatively untouched, mutiple kilometre long stretches fifty metres wide here. The sand is dark and ranges from smooth to coarse. This beach, for instance, an unnamed and almost empty stretch (there were no snack food vendors, but there was one cow) had sand that I’m sure, given enough wading, would blast years of dead skin off you. There was this other one that was literally fenced off by a near-impenetrable three storey high jungle and studded with millions of little shells. All told we may have actually stopped and looked around four of the dozen or so beaches we passed on the way.
Best. Beaches. Ever. (even without the freedom to run around naked, but give it time. Maybe in 20 years all this morality will finally be behind us and ‘Indecency’ will reign supreme, as it should)
It makes me very sad to realise that I don’t live in a little hut just off the frame.
V
PS A big thank you to Kiran and Swarupa for the use of their Minolta Dimage 8 megapixel prosumer thing with its gorgeous large lens, which all of these pictures were taken with.
My mother let me draw on walls. It was 1986, I was three, and we were living in a one bedroom apartment in Ghusais, back when there was nothing there except for a block of already decrepit government flats, Al Mulla Plaza (closed because of a border dispute), and a procession of electrical towers between there and Sharjah.
She got a lot of flack for it, of course. Neighbours would come round and wonder why on earth I was still alive after such a heinous crime, and then look worryingly at their own children as the young ones gaped at the sheer audacity of the red and green scrawls, their eyes luminous with the shock of seeing freedom, tolerance and understanding — and of course, whimsy — for perhaps the first time in their fragile lives. Several adults vowed never to bring their children into contact with my parents, not the first and certainly not the last time that was said to them.
The rationale my mother offered — since the simple truth of “Why not?” was far too much for others to bear — was that since it was a rental, once we moved out the landlord would paint it for the next tenant anyway as per the local norm; if the landlord objected, she was gladly willing to pay for the painting herself. They never objected, but I would have liked to see the look on whoever came to that apartment after we had gone. The building itself was torn down sometime in the 90s to make way for a compound of houses.
It was the only place I ever drew on the walls, and even I am not sure why exactly. The rationale to my three-year-old self probably had something to do with not wanting to waste paper, and the fact that if I drew straight on the walls it would forego entirely the costly and time-consuming framing and hanging processes.
Mostly I just wanted to draw, and my parents wanted great art on the walls, for which I gladly obliged.
The Mall of the Emirates is supposedly the third largest mall in the world. The parking building is certainly the biggest I’ve ever seen, and the shops are huge, but I still wouldn’t mind a larger one to roam around (In a couple of years we’re supposed to get at least a couple of contenders for biggest mall in the whole wide world). My favourite part is the huge atrium in the centre. This picture is just a small part of it, and was taken in the early evening one Friday wth the new Kodak c875, before we took in a screening of Music & Lyrics.
In case you didn’t already notice, I barely took any pictures in 2006. There were a bunch of reasons, most of which squarely came down to a combination of mild depression and acute laziness, but there were a few technical factors inhibiting my photography.
Plain and simple, our camera wasn’t working too well, and still isn’t. Since 2003 Samir and I have been using an Olympus C-4000z, a 4 megapixel, 3x optical zoom that is the size and shape of the average potato and takes 10 seconds or so to start up and take a picture with.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fantastic camera and I wouldn’t trade it for a dozen Canons. The image quality is phenomenal and while I’ve read a dozen reviews talking about how the images are too contrasty (and I partly agree), there’s a certain look to Olympus digital camera results that I just like.
Now, of course, we come to the problems. The first one is that the batteries are wonky. We use two sets of four AA NiMh batteries for the thing, different brands and ratings, but over the years they’ve become depleted to the point where they barely hold any charge, and anything they do hold leaks away within a few hours. I’m not sure if it’s the old simple battery charger we were using or some kind of fault of the camera, so I’m reluctant to plonk down on a new set until I know for sure. Despite this we’ve come to understand the quirks of the unwell batteries and can squeeze two full cards worth of photos into a session through judicious use of the screen and zoom.
This brings me to the second problem, which is that two 128MB SmartMedia cards (which aren’t available here anymore) don’t hold that many full-quality pictures. Sure, 140 pics is still a lot more than a film camera, but on an average day out even that number can be limiting. I like to use the freedom that digital cameras give me to take many pictures of the same thing — sometimes dozens — then choose the best one later. The image limit takes me back to the days of 36 shot films with the developing and printing expenses. I like to plan my shots, but I don’t like to obsess over choosing one over the other at the shoot itself.
The third and most frustrating problem is that the navigation buttons on the camera don’t work anymore. We’ve been talking about giving the thing in for repairs for months, but usually some kind of weekend trip or other photo-op comes along to tempt us and our camera away. It also is neither the fastest nor the most compact piece of equipment to carry around on a day-to-day basis.
All of these factors, plus the increasing strain of two passionate photographers with just one camera between them (the last trip to India was frustrating enough with the battery issues) made one thing clear:
We needed to get a new camera!
Back in 2003, when we decided to plonk down good money for our first digicam, Samir did the hunting. I hadn’t actively handled a camera since the mid nineties when we each had 10$, plastic lens focus-free 35mms. I learned pretty-much everything I know on that old lavender-coloured thing and still have tons of old photos (some of them are even taken from the even-cheaper and older 110 film camera I had when I was six). None of the shots are as experimental as the ones I take now but they were a lot of fun to take (development and film costs etc. meant that photos were precious, but we still took a roll a month, much more than most people, and certainly most 10-year-olds).
Samir had researched and fished around for all subsequent cameras, and was the primary user of them too (I was busy, addicted to my PlayStation): the all-singing, all-dancing Samsung 35mm, the Ricoh compact and the strange and beautiful Praktica MTL5 with a Zenit lens, our first and so far only SLR. We love to research stuff. It’s a wonder we get any work done…
…Oh yeah, right, we don’t.
He spent the better part of his free time in August 2003 looking for just the right camera, and finally we decided on the C-4000z and went out to look for it. Just wandering around the shops and looking for stuff in our price range was and is not a fruitful endeavour, which I’ll expand on later.
Getting used to a digital camera after using a film camera all my life was frustrating, at first. I wasn’t prepared for the enormous amount of lag between pressing the button and the taking of the shot. Where previously I’d just run my thumb over the dial quickly to advance the film — a two second operation if I was nimble, and a one second job using the Praktica’s trigger-like film advance — the digicam would take a more glacial approach and spend 5 seconds showing me the picture, then writing it to the card, and prepping for the next one.
This is why I got into macro photography: I could use the screen to focus exactly on the part I wanted, frame things without having to worry about a discrepancy between viewfinder and lens, and hey, I could take my time — my subject wasn’t going anywhere!
As time progressed and I learnt the ins and outs of the camera, I did get a better hang of taking outdoors and relatively fast-moving shots, but a quick scan of digital camera sites over the past few years revealed that resolutions had improved; more is now squeezed into a truly pocketable form factor; higher ISO settings (faster ‘film’) and anti-shake technologies are now available in consumer-level compacts so taking night shots is easier; and my main quibble — the lag between shutter release press and actual shot — is vastly reduced.
While most people would move up and buy a bigger camera for their second purchase, a digital SLR usually, I chose to go for a compact because I needed something small, quick and versatile for everyday use. I don’t want to end up lugging a massive SLR to the mall.
Having a good compact camera for everyday use is an important thing for a hobbyist and professional photographer. Contrary to popular belief we don’t all like to roam around with bulging equipment, and the smaller the camera the less likely it is to warrant attention from security guards in public places (this is especially important if, like me, you are an unshaven brown man). It isn’t a replacement for a large pro or ‘prosumer’ camera, but it is a necessity if you want to take pictures while living your everday life.
The Consequences of Compact
Most compact cameras are overpriced crap. A hundred years from now when we have Quantum Processor Virtual Reality Smellovision cameras, the compact ones will also probably be overpriced crap.
Photography, the use of light to form an image on a medium, has so far been based on the lens (and for the forseeable future, it will be). The rule of thumb is that the more light you can put through the lens and onto the medium, the clearer the image will be. This is why SLRs are so big: the lenses are huge. We can infer, then, that the tiny lens in your old compact camera is not letting all that much light in, so it doesn’t have as much to deal with.
I’m not even factoring in things like zoom lenses and their mechanisms, electronics, film and film advancement mechanics, meters and flash bulbs and batteries and all the other stuff that needs to be engineered to fit into a size that is about as big as two decks of playing cards. Getting all those things tiny enough and working properly means that often image quality is sacrificed; things aren’t fine-tuned as well because they just can’t be at that size and budget; and after all, 99% of those cameras are going to go out and take crappy pictures of people who are either drunk, sunburnt or some at some stage inbetween.
Are they really going to notice that high-contrast areas of the picture have purple lines around them, that their Rudolph-red nose at the centre has a millimetre level of pinching and distortion? Probably not, and they usually have enough money to spend on cameras to cover all the costs of squeezing those parts into that sleek, compact body (which they will lose after said drunken picture is taken, anyway).
Like I said, most consumer cameras are overpriced crap.
Photography, thankfully, has long been a popular hobby, and there are magazines and websites and awards given by those magazines and websites to cameras that aren’t crap. People like seeing the words ‘Award-Winning’ on the box of something, and so they might spend 20-30% more on an award-winning product than just whatever the guy at the photo shop pimps them.
Most people also know at least one person who’s ‘into photography’ so they’re the ones these people will go to for advice when choosing a good camera — a compact one — and this friend will go along with them to the photo shop like a concerned parent and grill the minimum-wage guy behind the counter on things like ISO levels and macro modes, none of which the eventual owner of the camera may use, but if you’re going to pay good money for something it might as well not be complete crap.
The odd thing is, digital cameras work in a way that actually makes it easier for a compact camera to not be crap. Unlike film cameras where physics demands that the lens has to be big enough to make a full-sized picture on that type of film (so 120mm cameras are large, and the old 110 films needed smaller lenses), in a digital camera the image is captured on a very tiny CCD. If you made a CCD the size of a 35mm film it would cost a bundle and be of a resolution that only museums and pornographers might have any interest in, so manufacturers now don’t need to be limited by the size of the film medium. Lenses, therefore, get smaller. Even a regular digital camera’s lens is smaller than a 35mm camera’s, and compacts are smaller still.
The thing I told you about bigger lenses putting more light through still holds true though. Digital SLRs, despite the smaller size of a CCD, still have full-size lenses, and while this does result in things like image noise, they do produce better results than compacts. Olympus have come up with a smaller SLR format to better suit CCD sizes, the Four Thirds Format, which apparently is all shiny and cool with 14 megapixel SLRs that are no bigger than my current regular digital camera.
Unfortunately, since cameras like these are still bigger than compacts and the engineers have more freedom to make them good, they all cost a whole lot of money. I don’t want to end up lugging a $5,000 camera to the mall.
In the quest to make a camera that has a high megapixel count and supermodel slimness, camera manufacturers also remove a whole bunch of features that anybody who is ‘into photography’ like myself wouldn’t dream of living without. Viewfinders go out the window. ‘Professional’ user modes such as Aperture and Shutter priority modes are omitted. I once saw a (film) compact from Kodak where you couldn’t turn the flash off — ever. It cost five times as much as I paid for the old plastic-lens one ten years ago! Nobody really notices this kind of stuff, because the majority of compacts are bought by people who think the ability to put flowery vignette frames around pictures of their cats is a must-have feature.
If you are a regular consumer and you walk up to your photo guy saying your camera doesn’t take good photos, he’s just going to try and sell you the newest, shiniest thing that has its own set of ‘helpful’ automatic modes, or if you look rich enough he’ll try to sell you an SLR. There are an alarming number of people I see walking around malls toting Canon D5s and taking pictures that are as shit if not more than most compacts. Must be something to do with the big, big lenses, I think.
The Quest For Digital Excellence
It started, as it usually does, when we were called in to consult on the purchase of a compact camera for a friend. I had been keeping aside some money for a compact, but nothing that was really affordable (sub $200) seemed very good, and nothing very good was affordable. I was still willing to spend up to $300 for a good compact, and while looking around the shops for the friend’s camera I was also keeping an eye on things that looked good for me.
The friend ended up with a Kyocera 5 megapixel, not a bad camera and certainly for the $150 price it was a good buy, but lacking in all those essential prosumer features such as manual settings and high ISO. I looked at a bunch of stuff in the $300 dollar range and noticed the same thing Samir and I had encountered four years ago during our last camera scout:
Dubai prices are ridiculous. It didn’t matter how old a camera was or how primitive, price seemed to be determined by how high the megapixel count was and what the brand was (Nikons and Canons being the highest price). We turned then, to our old friend the internet, and there it was only confirmed: cameras in the market here were ridiculously overpriced. Still, we needed one, so we set about doing some research based on what, to me, is the major factor in choosing a digital camera: Image Quality.
Lucky us who live in the 21st century, for while in the film era people would have to buy magazines and listen to reviews, with digital you can just go to a camera review site and download full-resolution, unaltered sample pictures taken by the camera you’re interested in. Over the next couple of weeks two sites in particular were almost ingested by us: Steves’s Digicams and DP Review.
Steve’s has a nice list of ‘Best Cameras’ and their reviews are very in-depth. Like most American sites I’ve read, however, they seem to favour Canons and Nikons a lot. They also take some really average-looking sample photos, usually of the same things. This is a good thing, because it shows you how a camera will behave in the hands of a completely unartistic photographer — showing you the typical unartistic results one can expect from the camera — and the same subjects duplicated across dozens of cameras means you can compare and contrast two models almost directly.
DP Review seems to be more European, and the sample images they take are downright gorgeous. Really, I don’t think those guys can take a bad picture with any camera. I do think (but I’m not sure) that their photos are altered; something about the perfect contrast and saturation on the samples doesn’t quite gel with my experience of any digital camera’s standard output. DP Review is the place to go to see the best results one can expect from the camera.
You’d think that all this wealth of information would be confusing, and it is, but once you spend enough time doing it you tend to notice things both in Steve’s average photos and DPR’s exquisite ones. Subtle details and quirks of camera start to show up, and based on these you can steer towards the ones you like more.
One of the first ones I looked at was the Pentax Optio M20, one of the ‘best cameras’ on Steve’s but despite their recommendation I didn’t like the sample pictures one bit. It also didn’t have any kind of manual settings or image stabilisation. That was out.
I didn’t like Canons or Samsungs either. I can see why a lot of people — especially reviewers — would recommend them, but it is a personal choice. They have a very even, ‘digital’ look to them, perfectly fine if you’re a texture artist or enjoy spending a lot of time in an image manipulation program, but I’m more interested in something with its own character — a ‘camera’ rather than a ‘recording device’ if you know what I mean.
One camera that did have character though, was the Leica M8. Despite the fact that its image sensor is so sensitive it turns ultra-violet light into hues in the image, I’d still buy one because it’s a Leica and it doesn’t just take pictures, it takes Leica Pictures.
Unfortunately it costs $4795. Yes, that’s nearly five thousand dollars. Still, if I had the money…
But wait! Leica does provide lenses for Panasonic’s Lumix cameras, and there were a whole bunch of those in the market, such as the FX07, which Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing recently declared (in typical Doctorow fashion) “The Perfect Compact Camera”(!) but Leica-shmeica: it’s overpriced, and doesn’t have any manual controls whatsoever.
It also has a Lithium Ion battery pack, which is not a bad thing, but I prefer cameras that accept stanard AA batteries. While I always carry a spare set of charged NiMhs with the camera, it is a comfort knowing that the camera is that much more usable on long trips because in a pinch you can walk into any convenience store and pick up a pair of batteries that will last you a few shots at least. Again, it’s a personal thing, but a camera is a very personal purchase.
The Fuji Finepix F30 caught my eye because of the fantastic performance at ridiculous ISO settings like 3200, but that was a little too expensive.
I turned, next, to Sony’s Cybershots. I remember six months ago another friend had bought a P200, and at the time I was quite impressed with what it was for the price. A little hunting showed that the P range were the ultra-compact, non-viewfinder, LiOn battery pack ones, and the W range was similar but had regular batteries. The image quality, while not as unique as the Olympus I had used so far, was still impressive, with little purple fringing (a purple line on high-contrast areas). The fact that the exact models I was looking for were no longer available in the market but that choice on the back burner. Also I wasn’t completely in love with the image quality; it looked ‘too digital’ for my taste.
It’s All About Image
Dozens of cameras went by and were rejected because of price, lack of features, noisy photos or just plain gut reaction. A lot of them had very aggressive noise reduction, an in-camera, non-adjustable feature that smoothens out skin tones and highly detailed areas so that they look better. Every digital camera big and small does this, but in most I found that it was unsatisfactory, turning skin into pasty smears and hair into clumpy messes. Not something most people would notice if viewing their images in a “fit to screen” mode, but it does show up when looking at it in the actual resolution. For anyone who wishes to manipulate their images later in Photoshop or The GIMP, the more detail the better — there are much better noise filters available in computer software, and you have more control over it..
Frustrated, I looked once more at Olympus compacts. Some of them had very bad video recording capabilities or the lenses weren’t very good. One that I almost decided on — the Mju/Stylus 750 — had a horrible fuzzines on the outer edges of the pictures, the consequences of trying to squeeze a 5x optical zoom into an ultraslim case. Also Olympuses use xD picture card media, which is supposedly slower than SD and also more expensive.
Somewhere late in the game, I decided to just stop looking at the cameras with an analytical eye, and just go to DP review and look for something that had pictures that wowed me. The Nikons have a fantastic film-like look, and if they weren’t horribly overpriced here (the S10 which I was considering was over $400 because it had a 10x zoom), I might own one today. The surprise contender, however, was the Kodak c875.
So far I hadn’t considered Kodak because one look at the back of their cameras and the prominent “share” button had told me that they were very regular consumer oriented. I was wary of being unable to just dump the photos from the camera, without using some kind of proprietary software. I’m the kind who doesn’t ever use Windows Picture and Fax viewer (the program most pictures open in by default) because when you rotate the image it directly, permanently changes the file. It’s always best to just keep the thing as it came out of the camera because in compacts you’re dealing with JPEG compressed images, and the more you mess with them and re-save them the more likely you are to get a loss of quality in the finer details.
Nevertheless, the photos were very impressive. Also it was an 8 megapixel camera with a 5x optical zoom and an adequate amount of manual controls. While it didn’t have an optical viewfinder, the macro wasn’t all that great (10cm minimum distance, versus 2cm on my Olympus), and it wasn’t as slim and pocketable as the others, something about it just seemed right.
I looked around town and either found it overpriced or not available at all. It seems that the high megapixel and zoom put it in league with higher-end cameras. Currently the average compact is a 7 megapixel 3x zoom so anything above it is automatically priced higher no matter what its price in the international market.
Keeping those international prices in mind I even hunted around the internet, but there it turned out that with all the shipping fees it would work out to as much as I would pay here, and at least if I bought it here I’d get local service and warranties. It was getting to a point where I had to choose between the lesser of two overpriced shops, and that is when I went to the supermarket.
Supermarkets are strange places. If you have a local one you go to often you tend to overlook all the bits you aren’t usually interested in; the dry cleaner; the little knick-knack store; the Kodak photo shop. Samir is a lot more observant than I, however, which is why, at the checkout counter one day, he noted that in addition to taking passport-size photos and printing film, the little hole in the wall also sold digital cameras. Turns out they had the c875 for a lot less than the other stores, and around the same price as it would have cost me to order it off the net. Plus, it came with a battery charger, four batteries and a 512MB SD card.
You don’t usually find a better deal at an official dealer in these parts, mostly because large hypermarkets buy in bulk numbers and can afford to have a slimmer proft margin. Small stores you can bargain in, but this usually brings them down to the listed price in a hypermarket. But here it was, a great deal on a good camera next to the checkout at a supermarket.
And that is how I got my new camera.