Photographs taken to bring tourists. And photographs taken by tourists themselves. Some minor details are always missing between these two. In my case it was a long line of big-boned women clad in ghaghra, choli and odhni or the veil, balancing earthen water pots on arcing hips tracing a colourful line like the Madhubani-painted Bihar Sampark Kranti Express pootling along the platform. I saw this in some tourism literature while attending the Jaipur Literature Festival and was instantly enamoured – equally by the women as by the setting. Coy heads
Much has been written about muses and understandably so – they are salacious tales and scandalous to boot. The recorder always faithfully documents the gratitude the artistic and literary worlds owe to these little Lolitas who, by dint of their tenderness and tautness, aided the ageing masters in their Elysian pursuits. What might have started as a fugacious fuck culminated in a lot more – usually great works and sometimes children. Nothing great about the pick-up lines though which were insipid at best: ‘I am Picasso. We will do great
Toll plazas judder me. I have never passed through any without my mind wrought, eyes blazing, head giddy and generally feeling violated. True, there have been happy occasions where I gave a lift to an old man who was a plaza manager by dint of which I didn’t have to pay not one but three tolls. The ‘toll plaza 1 km ahead’ is where I begin to scan the area for possible circumventing routes; then these collectors have the area fenced in in such a way that would probably daunt
They are all Meeras Throbbing notes twanged out from a three-string kamaicha. Wood-ringed fingers tapped on a ghara. A sadhu with the longest dreadlocks sat like the sachem he was surrounded by attitude and subalterns and general onlookers including me. Thick wafts of grey-blue smoke rose from a smouldering chillum that briskly changed hands in the nippy morning. Sensuously draped eunuchs swirled in and out of the billowy screen singing paeans to Meera, the most devoted of the Krishna bhakts. Their raspy voices rose above the temple bells and
