Lost in the shadows of the city lights

Portrait of Saurish Lahiri by Anirban Saha

Post originally written in April 2012 as a reaction to the above photo for Anirban Saha's photography project. His fantastic website is http://www.anirbansaha.com

There's a comfort in anonymity; in being one in a million. One in five million, to be more precise.

She lets go of my hand. Even though the night is warm and muggy, the sudden coolness in my palm spreads throughout my body. We step off the train. This is no time or place for sentimentality. We go our separate ways. No one has to know.

My mind remembers; my hand remembers as I make my way home through narrow streets unsuitable for the number of people who travel them daily. I skip over a pothole, dodge a passing car. The driver honks his horn at me. It is the only interaction we will ever have. 

I keep walking. Passers-by complain about the weather. Hot; humid; smog; pollution. But they understand nothing. The fools don't realize that they cannot breathe because the night air is full of urgency. 

Everything is important right now. The weather, the cars, the girl. Especially the girl. Some kid, slouching along in his low-slung jeans and too-tight t-shirt, is playing music out loud on his phone. I've heard two songs now and they were both about her. Every song is about her. DJ, get out of my head.

I catch a whiff of what seems like her perfume; I become hypervigilant, searching for her face in the crowd. But she is not there; perhaps it was someone else, perhaps only an olfactory memory, but it nearly brings me to my knees. I lean against the side of the nearest building and catch my breath. That damned kid is still somewhere around. Maybe I should give him my headphones. But then a familiar guitar intro slams into me, soon to be followed by lyrics that will tear into my soul. A river of red taillights adds to my sensory overload. 

Isn't this what I wanted? This feeling that everything matters? This crowd, the fading summer heat, these taillights, these songs, this perfume? The moment where everything is centered in Her; this feeling of endless possibility that will only last until I dial her number one last time, only to find it disconnected? 

This very moment is the pinnacle of my life, in all of its pain. After this moment, it's all downhill from here.

 I close my eyes. A tear slips through the lashes. 

No one has to know.

Hand-Pulled Rickshaws of Kolkata

"You can find every kind of transportation in Kolkata," he said to me proudly, as if I had the Richard Scarry book Cars and Trucks and Things that Go in front of me and was checking off each vehicle inside. If I had, I would have had to make notes in the margins of the ones that Richard Scarry did not include.

Rickety trams. Trains departing Howrah Station. The metro slinking underground; the autorickshaws plying their routes. Ambassador taxis and Maruti 800s and the extremely occasional Mercedes. Three-wheeled cycle rickshaws, bullock carts, and men carrying dozens of chickens suspended upside down on either side of the seat of their bicycles.

And the one you will not find in any other metro area in India, the hand-pulled rickshaw, saved from extinction in this city that clings to its past just as the rickshaw pullers clung to their age-old profession in the face of their possible ban. Whether a ban has actually been put in place I do not know, nor does it matter, since they still fill the Kolkata roads regardless.

I saw many jarring things on my first trip to Kolkata. Having lived in Delhi for nearly a year, the poverty no longer moved me, but the hammer and sickle painted on the side of buildings did. The urgent monsoon sky did. And these men, thin, gaunt, darkened by the sun, often barefoot, certainly did.

Anirban Saha has done a series of photographic sessions of these rickshaw-pullers. He portrays them in black and white, in sharp focus against the blurry sped-up background of modern Kolkata. The images are poignant, but viewing them brings back the same feelings of uneasiness at class distinction that I had when I first encountered them. Intellectually, I understand their importance to the day-to-day life in the city. I understand that they remain in Kolkata by choice and not entirely by compulsion. But for someone who grew up in an egalitarian society, watching one man be beast of burden for another is uncomfortable. Children riding to school does not affect me in the same way as the fat man in a business suit, riding in broad daylight when he could easily walk. And I know I could never sit in one.

Perhaps this is what makes the most uneasy about the entire situation. It is a world I encountered, but not my world. As a foreigner, I cannot enter into that sphere. Availing myself of a ride is an image that smacks of colonialism and flies in the face of my generally-egalitarian nature. And if it were I who were taking the photos, instead of the talented Mr. Saha, it would be nothing more than poverty porn. This has little to do with skin color. He, as a lifelong resident of Kolkata, has interacted with this world from his childhood, perhaps even rode to school with a classmate or two in such a rickshaw. His eyes and his camera lens see as perfect sense what I see as cognitive dissonance. And his photos focus on the task at hand, on how the past and present coexist, not objectifying the bare feet or the wiry bodies. He is able to photograph these men and their occupation in a way a disturbed or impartial foreign eye cannot.

I encourage you to go take a look at his photos and give your own impressions.

Oppan Lungi Style!

Bengalis in lungis dancing to a Korean song in New York City. America is great, isn't it?

Here's the video:

And here's the article:

http://opencitymag.com/first-gangnam-style-lungi-style-flash-mob-hits-the-streets-of-jackson-heights/

While watching this video, it occurred to me that I probably am too out of shape to dance in a flash mob even if on the off chance I were asked to. Maybe it's time to change that?