Anger: Ego's fairest son.

Found my next film subject(s). This will be good. Hollywood, under me. Bring me a skull of lillies, a peach-coloured drum soda, a plant that borrows from the tree, the flower a thing that picks the bee's brains, a giving that's not really a giving, a soul-flashed willow tree paying for its very own appletree...

The Myth and Magic of Ajmer

Ajmer is a strange muslim town in the heart of Rajasthan. It is considered a very important place of worship primarily because of Garib Nawaz, who apparently was sent by Prophet Mohammed to introduce Islam to India. The Dargāh Sharīf is a fascinating place where the iron furnace apparently never heats up while the food is cooked, where the food stays fresh even after a year, where thousands of limb-less poor people hang around expecting to get food and money. The lanes are tiny, you can almost smell the brick that's cast thousands of years back. My friend Taj Hussain, the auto-driver, took me around and told me these tales of Ajmer. Quite fascinating.

The Dargāh Sharīf of Khwāja Mu'īnuddīn Chishtī is situated at the foot of the Tārāgaṛh hill, and consists of several white marble buildings arranged around two courtyards, including a massive gate donated by the Nizām of Hyderabad, a mosque donated by the Mughal emperor Shāh Jahān, the Akbarī Mosque, and the domed tomb of the saint. The Emperor Akbar, with his queen, used to come here by foot on pilgrimage from Agra every year in observance of a vow he had made when praying for a son. The large pillars, erected at intervals of two miles (3 km) the whole way between Agra and Ajmer, marking the daily halting places of the royal pilgrim, are still extant.

Come to Ajmer, feel the force.

It is the distance between the head and the heart that worries me the most. It is the distance between you and me that worries me second most.

A
very
private
machine:
A
study
of
the
aesthetic
&
acoustic
components
of
a
brain.

The significance of neti neti

In Brhadaranyaka Upanishad, god is questioned by his students to describe God. He states "The Divine is not this and it is not that" (neti, neti).

Thus, the Divine is not real as we are real, nor is it unreal. The divine is not living in the sense humans live, nor is it dead. The Divine is not compassionate as we use the term, nor is it uncompassionate. And so on. We can never truly define God in words.

All we can say, in effect, is that "It isn't this, but also, it isn't that either". In the end, the student must transcend words to
understand the nature of the Divine.

In this sense, neti-neti is not a denial. Rather, it is an assertion that whatever the Divine may be, when we attempt to capture it in human words, we must inevitably fall short, because we are limited in understanding, and words are limited in ability to express the transcendent. The original texts shed light on the practice of neti neti as a tool to Self-realisation aka Brahman.

The art of listening

Listening is an art which very few of us are capable of. We never actually listen. The word has a sound and when we do not listen to the sound, we interpret it, try to translate it into our own particular language or tradition. We never listen acutely, without any distortion. When you tell a rather exciting story to a little boy, he listens with a tremendous sense of curiosity and energy. He wants to know what is going to happen, and he waits excitedly to the very end. But we grown-up people have lost all that curiosity, the energy to find out, that energy which is required to see very clearly things as they are, without any distortion. We never listen to each other. You never listen to your wife, do you? You know her much too well, or she you. There is no sense of deep appreciation, friendship, amity, which would make you listen to each other, whether you like it or not. But if you do listen so completely, that very act of listening is a great miracle.
- JK

Joyless

You've got your 7-figure paycheck,
your 12-figure credit limit.
You've got your diamond-studded wristwatch,
offsetting your lizard-skin sneakers.
You've got your remote-controlled blinds,
and later, your climate-controlled jacuzzi,
You've got your computer-programmed carseat,
your chrome-plated wheel-rims,
and to drive to
your own fancy Starbucks,
You've got your white platinum cufflinks,
to match your black Armani dinner suit,
and over dinner,
to gift your girlfriend,
a precious oyster pearlset.

You've got all this.
All this and more, so why so sad?

Do-buy

Its funny I am saying all this when all along up until now I had compromised my energies for creating commercial logos and branding (which is always explained as something much beyond a logo) for rich companies, building graphic guidelines and things exquisitely called brand driver platforms. Although it did sting once in a while I always thought of (and also owned!) sports-cars with 6-speed transmission (I remember telling people that being in an Audi TT was like sitting in a cockpit), black and white minimalist Armani XL wristwatches, Paul Smith trousers (with that really gorgeous multi-coloured band that would stick out for people to see), Prada slippers and the very assumably not-in-your-face red strip with the Prada type offset to the left, the black CK underwear (oh, you could be clever and rest your hand on your hips in such a way that the Calvin Klein type could be readable to your fellow designer-conscious graphic designer friends). All very carefully crafted for the conscious pretty-faced consumer. I would walk into the boutique shopping malls with 500 dollars in my pocket knowing I was going to spend it, but not knowing on what. Its funny when I think about it now but it makes sense why I named my folder on my macpro Lavish. Ha! Its all adding up now. My subconscious mind was housing all this information and distilling it slowly through my fingertips as they pixellated my innermost fantasies. And I didn’t even know. My parents thought I was progress-personified. I lived in a housing complex called Greens where everything right from the lakes to the palm trees was man-made. Anything was possible in this wonderful fantasy world. It was every middle-class Indian’s dream to be part of a society that had its own private Costa’s, its own private swimming pool surrounded by trees. I remember texting my brother about my uber-cool lifestyle when I was lazing around in the pool in my Ripcurl swimming trunks. I used to take my Tarkovsky Sculpting in time book to the pool hoping to accidentally bump into a pretty girl who knew his films and didn’t think he was a famous medieval classical composer. Alas, it never happened. What was I thinking, God only knows. Now when I look back I can laugh. I was still sensitive back then, though. I had my own upright piano, an Eastern-european piano teacher and a filipino piano-tuner called Jun. I went through it all. I expected to find real happiness in buying all of Tori Amos’s piano transcriptions and working out my favourite songs. Unfortunately, I never got around to spending too much time on the piano. Was I in favourable environments? What was my motivation? I wonder.

I guess there was an innocence in the futile acquisition of things big and small. Of things beautifully designed, sensitively crafted. Before I bought my car I made sure the rims on the tires were the 19” ones and not the 17” ones. Attention to detail, eh? Talking of attention to detail, I remember spending hours and hours crafting the logo of Uptown Cairo, a 7000-home township in Cairo for the super rich. I came up with this really clever idea of positioning it as a fashion brand so people could associate their lifestyle with, say, Giorgio Armani or YSL. The brandmark was also inspired by the YSL insignia. A very sophisticated CA would drive the brand by appearing on cufflinks, shopping bags and 80ft billboards. Black and white with an accent of fuchsia-pink. It looked really nice I must say. But, wow, its hard now to understand my dedication towards something so trivial. The hours spent creating the brand driver platform, the hours spent sifting through images in Getty and Corbis containing the tags sophisticated, class, up-market, quintessential, etc. I browsed through thousands of images downloading comps of the ones that matched my verbal brand driver “Uptown Chic”. I also created a little film in flash with the music of Air. How sensitive I was as a commercial graphic designer. Did I somehow avoid questioning this or was I just too caught up in wondering what to buy next? When I think back now I really wonder what my real motivation was. On the other hand, I had to keep the social and artistic cylinders of my heart constantly full by having screenings of Bergman, Tarkovsky, Kurosawa films (and post-screening discussions) in my apartment. I felt this somehow made up for all the shit I was doing in my day-job. I constantly lived in that sense of denial that hey I wasn’t really doing too bad in the self-realisation department. I rarely asked myself the question, “Are you being true to yourself?”. Actually I don’t think I ever even thought of that. I was too busy drinking Belgian beer with friends, discussing Ermenegildo Zegna’s fall collection of men’s suits, smoking cuban cigars, making sure my 100 dollar Terre-de-Hermes cologne found its way through the smoke-infested interiors of the post-modern Blue Bar or the David Lynch-inspired Cooz Bar in the Hilton. These were the things that constantly were on my mind. I was the cool graphic designer working with the best Branding agency in town hanging out with really pretty women, some of them Mexican, some Lebanese, some French, some even as exotic as half-Danish/half-Rwandan. I constantly sent photos to my friends back in India, me in my Stone Temple Pilots T-shirt and brown Mexx leather jacket (with the minimalist red interior satin lining) hanging out with super-gorgeous women, their arms all over me. Oh, how satisfied I felt. This, for me, was the summation, the ultimate realisation of what I constantly strived for. It was me climaxing in the social circus. I was up there. As the night was coming to a close the only question on my mind was whether I was going to flash my Gold or Platinum credit card when the cheque came. Or maybe I was too drunk to think of anything at all.

In 2004, I began documenting my thoughts on a blog I called Scalable Deficit. Deficit is defined in the dictionary as being “the amount by which something, esp. a sum of money, is too small”. Ironically, subconsciously, I must have been talking of that something as being the soul, and not money. Quite an apt title, now when I think of it. I had to write what I felt. I had to be honest. I knew I was doing something wrong in my life. My life, for sure, was lacking something. Something real. Which is why the words came so easily. I needed to vent.

I give up
Its a horrible day. Never felt so alone. I think I am a bonafide misanthrope. The sound of the human voice drives me to insanity. Its all opinion right? Everything is. "Have you been to the packaging and promotions section of the website? You might want to check that out." No, I don't want to check that out. Its all bollocks anyway. Who fuckin cares? These people can stuff their opinions on advertising and how cool it is up their... My heart is filled with Castrol. I am a commodity. I am a whore. Famewhore. I am a sellout. I have nothing to contribute to society. I sell lies. I sell mouthwash. There are no stories I can tell my grandchildren. I am the lost rays of a forgotten sunrise. I am all that I never dreamed of being. Plastic and cute, all the way.
Monday, March 07, 2005

The turning point for me was when I made my film “Look here, Kunigunda” which was a kind of visual poetry with no words. Having a film-club was good because I met quite a few interesting people like Mark, the hero of my film, Siobhan, the heroine and Nick, whose camera I finally used to shoot the film. So, I guess that was an important turn of events. It made me realise that beyond the glitz and glamour of the design industry, there was a world of realism in the artistic expression through film, a kind of vocation that maybe I could pursue.

Oh, I remember this lovely little poem.

Once the poem leaves your fingertips
it is no longer yours.
It acquires new shapes
in the eyes of others.

All art rides on the vehicle of opinion. This is where the author is at his weakest, vulnerable most. At that point of time, the author either waits patiently for comments (diplomatically conveyed), honest criticism, praise or love. I have always been the sucker for compliments. This receiver of love. Accepting everything good like I deserved it, running from those who fail to think like me. Atleast when you are creating artwork without the business hat on you can choose to be elitist and ignore what people think and decide to keep at it inspite of all the negative feedback. If you honestly feel for what you do, why should you care what others think. Results are not really in your hands. Maybe someday they will get it, maybe they wont and maybe you will be written off as the weird one that no one got. Who knows.

But, its different when you’re creative expression is at the mercy of a client or, even worse, a blonde Lebanese client-servicing executive who seems to have the final word on your artistic expression. It has happened to me many times. I could be sitting there with my headphones blasting Godspeed, you black emperor, working on an advertising campaign for a very large client like American Express when suddenly I could be interrupted with something like this:-

“We just presented the work to the client. It went down very well. Instead of the black and white photographs, can we see an option with colour photographs? The client was not too happy with the font you used, can we just stick to, say, a Helvetica? Or even Verdana? The client really likes Verdana? So, two options, one with Helvetica, one with Verdana? Can you increase the size of the logo and can we have FREE written in caps, and maybe in red? Other than this its all fine. Well done, Prem. Your a star. Shouldn’t take you more than an hour to fix this, right? Shall I arrange to meet them tomorrow, in the a.m.?”

Lina, the beautiful Lebanese client-servicing executive disappears saying she needs to run into another meeting in five (she probably needs those five minutes to do her eyes). I sit looking at my monitor not really knowing what hit me. But I try to calm down by going to the pantry to make myself a strong Nescafe in my own branded coffee cup. It all boils down to this. These are the moments that really make you go “WOW”. And little did I know it would get a lot worse than this.

Turquoise boy

No?
I say no to corporate magazines. I say no 9am meetings. I say no to 9-5. I say no to cubicles. I say no to annual reports. I say no to tea-parties. I say no to sushi lunches. I say no to group hugs. I say no to the ladder. I say no to the institution. I say no to institutional leeches (who use the ladder). I say no to team-building picnics. But I still sit here in my cubicle, staring at a computer screen designing and branding corporate institutions. Fuckin hypocrite, I wish I could go to sleep and never wake up cos I am saying yes, secretly.
Tuesday, June 27, 2006

In 2006, a branding consultancy called Turquoise headhunted me and offered me a job as Senior Designer in their London offices. It was a very exciting time. I always wanted to live in London, one of the three cultural Mecca's of the world. Turquoise was run by three women, the superpowers of the new world. The Creative Director, the senior designers, the designers were like little poodles on their lap or like lilliput men stuck in their hair. The studio was in a converted Victorian building in the very very expensive Holborn area. To keep up with my exquisite Dubai lifestyle I took up a tiny (like really tiny) studio apartment in Notting Hill for an insanely exorbitant rent. Why? I wanted to tell everyone I was living in Notting Hill, just like Hugh Grant. I also made it a point to tell everyone how much the rent was, which in Indian rupees was about one hundred thousand rupees a month. Er... I didn’t realise the coming one year would be me selling out completely in the corporate world, but also the year where I would write my most honest music to date. So, once again, I managed to offset the humdrum of the branding world with a sincere artistic expression through music.

Turquoise really started to kill me. I was dying a slow death in the Sylvia Plath sense of the word. By the end of six months, I had lost every bit of soul left. I lost a lot of weight too. My artistic and social cylinders were running dry. I had nothing to say. So, I started walking the streets of London alone. I began discovering a lot of new music, new artists, new films. I went to exhibitions in the TATE, Whitechapel Gallery and Serpentine regularly and began spending my money acquiring the paraphernalia of the artists I loved. Pierre Huyghe’s “Celebration Park” and Fischli & Weiss’s “Flowers & Questions” really inspired me to look within and find my own voice and make the exit from corporatism quietly. Like those signs in concert halls that read “Please leave quietly”.

Still

I stopped to look at the sky and the clouds,
I stopped to listen to the birds and the bees,
I always stopped,
became still, really still.
Motionless.
Sometimes for a minute or two,
sometimes for hours.
But I remember I always stopped.
Always.

Letters from Hinterland

There is a definite artistic minority in the world today. What is considered mass culture today mostly constitutes of art and expression made purely for a commercial cause. And, sadly, of very bad taste. Dangerous to generalise, I know, but what you see around you, be it commercial cinema, commercial music, commercial graphic design all contribute to a very uninspiring visual and aural landscape.

The need of the hour is of a place for like-minded people and artists to come together and live in a sort of utopian society where each one contributes to the growth of the society and in the process also learns and grows artistically. A growth within, a growth of the soul, so to speak.

This place, which we would like to call Hinterland, is the brainchild of L, a mysterious yet optimistic version of Kurtz (Marlon Brando in Apocalypse now). The Hinterland book comprises of letters from residents of Hinterland to L. These letters are from random residents who have written and documented their thoughts. The letters have one thing in common. A coming of age of these very distinct separate lives. And that is what connects them. They may be artists, teachers, architects, orphans, musicians, cooks or filmmakers. But they all come together to bring to life this utopian dream. Hinterland, at its most fundamental level, is a collective of people living in harmony in an environment where there is no concept of money, no concept of automobiles, no concept of day-jobs, no concept of time.

Posi ti vi ty

i am positivity.
i am 6am. i am hollywood under a purple sky.
i am the sound of your silence.
i am the reflection on glass.
i am the turn on a road, i am also 120kmph.
i am the 17 seconds within a "moment"
i am the air between your head and the noose.
i am the water that falls.
i am the sound of the night. i am also the color of dawn.
i am the decomposed version of your heart.
i am the curve, the line and the shape of your thoughts.
you are one of the faces in my mirror.

Sans-inspiration, sans-common sense, sans-real joy, sans-sincerity, this city is truly sans-life.
I have no love or interest for this city anymore.
Cant wait to go back to Benares, hundreds of miles away, anywhere but here...
I'd rather be drowning with the fish.

The Mexican & The Korean

Two faces of music,
Two phases of thought,
One violin, one sitar,
One, she wears her Buddhist dress,
The other, she wears her funny little chin,
One thinking, one laughing, one hoping, one dreaming.
The two girls of Mona Lisa.
Two phases of thought.

BHU

I visited the wonderful expanses of one of India's oldest universities, the Benares Hindu University. Walking through the greens was refreshing. And with Gabriel, the laughs, my boatman on the fringes, a lassi spiked with Bhaang, every step, every second seemed like it contained a million different moments. Riding back, the images started to kick in. Every second was new, fresh. Getting off at Godolia and walking back to my room on the Ghats, I seemed to observe every single detail, every face that passed me, every little scene in the minutest of details. The world of Benares is truly something else. There is an electricity here that I cannot express in words.

"Intellectual work is important and has an undoubted place in the scheme of life. But what I insist on is the necessity of physical labour. No man, I claim, ought to be free from that obligation. It will serve to improve even the quality of his intellectual output."

M.K. Gandhi

One of the hallmarks of a man of self-esteem, who regards the universe as open to his effort, is the profound pleasure he experiences in the productive work of his mind; his enjoyment in life is fed by his unceasing concern to grow in knowledge and ability – to think, to achieve, to move forward, to meet new challenges and overcome them – to earn the pride of a constantly expanding efficacy.

A different kind of soul is revealed by the man, who, predominantly, takes pleasure in working only at the routine and familiar, who is inclined to enjoy working in a semi-daze, who sees happiness in freedom from challenge, struggle or effort: The soul of a man profoundly deficient in self-esteem, to whom the universe appears as unknowable and vaguely threatening, the man whose central motivating impulse is a longing for safety, not the safety that is won with efficacy, but the safety of a world in which efficacy is not demanded.

Still a different kind of soul is revealed by the man who finds it inconceivable that work, any form of work, can be enjoyable, who regards the effort of earning a living as a necessary evil, who dreams only of pleasures that begin when the workday ends, the pleasure of drowning his brain in alcohol or television or billiard or women. “The pleasure of not being conscious”: The soul of a man with scarcely a shred of self-esteem, who never expects the universe to be incomprehensible and takes his lethargic dread of it for granted, and whose only form of relief and only notion of enjoyment is the dim flicker of understanding sensations.

Still another kind of soul is revealed by the man who takes pleasure, not in achievement, but in destruction, whose action is aimed not at attaining efficacy but ruling those who have attained it: The soul of a man so abjectly lacking in self value, and so overwhelmed by terror of existence, that his sole form of self-fulfillment is to unleash his resentments and hatred against those who do not share his state, those who are able to live as if by destroying the confident, the strong and healthy, he could convert impotence to efficacy.

From The Psychology of Pleasure by Nathaniel Branden

The Simplest Question

...to ask yourself is:
"Are you really true to yourself?"
If you know the answer to that, if you can answer that in all honesty, you've got all it takes to make a real change. That's when you will find harmony in your work - a deep sense of satisfaction, a clear sense of you.