There are visual treats that come with exploring unknown spaces. The slice of time from an early morning walk with the sun warming up the sky and the buildings gleaming in this vibrancy. Sometimes we get humbled by the privilege to experience this piece of art forming around you every day in a different hue.
Sunrise vibes at Muweilah, Sharjah
..“Art is unquestionably one of the purest and highest elements in human happiness. It trains the mind through the eye, and the eye through the mind. As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life.”
I came to know about this new filmmaker on the block Jordyn Dunseath through one of Peter Mckinnon‘s film making competitions and I’m impressed by the soulfulness and art in her way of storytelling. Impressed by the way they’re crafted with a lot of passion. When somebody gives his / her heart and soul into something, that’d be felt in the work of art. God bless! I see a good future ahead.
This is a photograph from a couple of years ago that’s really close to my heart. When I had traveled to Netta’s place during the initial years, I was not familiar with that place. Neither am I now. After an afternoon tea with family, me and Netta went to the town aimlessly and I was looking for a beach nearby and on a random search, I got to know about Payyoli beach which was so close to their home but the fun part was that she hadn’t been there before. What welcomed us when we aimlessly drove in there was a very wide, serene beach with not a single soul in the premise feeding in the vibe of a private beach. (No, those were not Corona days. I’m speaking of sometime in 2017, on a guess). There were fishing boats parked there and we had witnessed a blissful sunset together sitting on a boat. That moment in time is captured by this shot. So you see, every frame has a story weaved within it. Even if I’m put in a dungeon with a handful of photographs, I can sit with them with a cup of tea and write story after story behind each of them for weeks 😀
The legendary photographer Ansel Adams kills it with his timeless quotes. He once famously said, “You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.”
It’s one of my favourite pastimes to graze through old photo archives and to relish and hark back to the stories and memories that evoked them. Recently, I discovered a treasure trove some of the old photos, notes and illustrations from my 2013 archives. I’ll be trying to share some of those nice memories here in some of the subsequent posts, God willing. After all, this is my wondercrate. Photo narrations are something that I never get tired of.
Panda cram is such a little chucklesome memory. Back in 2013, only a few of my colleagues had personal cars. So, a dear friend of mine had a sedan car with him which can carry 5 people max. So, we used to hop in this car for our lunch trips. So in total, we would be 5 people and the car would be almost full. And then, someday, he got this huge stuffed panda as a gift from somewhere and he had put this in his car. The panda is considerably huge and is tad bit almost the size of a grown-up boy 😀 And as usual, during a mid-noon when we were about to go for lunch on the car, we had this unusual co-passenger inside the car taking the size of an almost full-size adult, and I still remember all of us had to cram inside the car to accommodate this amigo and we laughed our heads off. Visualizing this would make me chuckle every time I think about it or see this photograph. Good times.
Recently I’ve have been grazing through the videos by Chinese blogger Li Ziqi, who became an internet sensation after her videos on handicrafts, traditional cooking, and DIY from the countryside of Mianyang in southwest China’s Sichuan Province grew in popularity and caught netizen’s attention worldwide. What attracted my attention is the inherent calmness and the passionate composure with which each theme is made. It is in stark contrast with the heavily commercialized video bombardments, often largely obliquely spurious that we see on every video platform. Each video I’ve seen so far is so genuine and brilliantly captured. From what I’ve read in magazines, Li lives with her grandmother in a Chinese rural province. Orphaned at a very young age, she moved to city to work. After her grandfather’s death, she returned to the village to take care of her grandmother who fell ill. All her food and handicraft videos are often crafted from scratch and are prepared using authentic basic ingredients and tools making the best use of Chinese traditional techniques.
She initially started posting videos on Mepai, which is a very famous social platform in China and garnered great attention. In 2017, she started posting videos on Youtube which grew in popularity ever since. Her grandfather was a cook in the village. She learned how to grow vegetables, fish, carpenter handiworks, traditional dishes, and bamboo crafts. The well-made videos with its passion and subtle nuances give a wonderful experience of Chinese traditions and culture and her positive spirit on self-reliance sent by her life expertise has attracted warm international reception.
Her videos are unfeigned, lucid and basics from scratch and mostly don’t use any sort of modern technology or even electricity in most cases. She does everything on her own from cutting goat and rabbit fur for the brush hairs to chopping small trees to make paper. In one of the videos that I saw, she built a coffee table and two sofas using bamboo in its entirety using carpentry skills inspired by her grandfather. In some other videos, lip colors are prepared from fresh flower petals and honey. You’d be amazed by how she delves to the roots. The honey shown is not from a supermarket, but from a beehive in the village. She prepares her own deserts, sweet potato jelly, and pancakes from the sweet farm potatoes which she harvested on her own. A lot of traditional ways of preparations are shown.
The authenticity and fervent equanimity keep these visuals apart from the rest of the crowd and has truly impressed me. As we touched upon in our note on compassionate prudence, true magic ensues when people put in their signature on every single thing they do and when everything is done with love. Stories like this truly inspire!. God bless!
