Jul 29, 2010

Rendezvous with strangers........

Well its been a long time i wrote about one of the strangers from my elite list. When the thought struck to address one of them, it was hard to resist the temptation to remember "the li'l girl on the highway".

Li'l GIRL on the highway...
Every time while talking to people about my passion for photography, I am quick to recollect the story of how I found this girl on the highway, on our way back home from pondicherry.
I have always believed that this pic of the girl which i clicked on that sunny day in black n white mode in my Nokia N73 camera phone is still one of my personal favorite and best picture, that I've been able to frame till date.
I shall post the picture of the girl at the end of the post for my description of the girl and your imagination of the same will be impacted by the visual.
In fact I was shocked at the final picture, as I was clicking it with a camera phone and had to force see the frame on screen due to bright sunlight.

We were working at CnT at the time of this trip. A gang had already gone to pondicherry and it was an instant decision, like most of the times, that me n savan took, to travel to pondy on my bike. We woke up early and started our long ride, one of the earliest bike rides. We were on our way to surprise the rest of the gang.
 I'll not be elaborating much about how we got there, what we did there, where we stayed, though the trip will be remembered for what happened to kiran [churan as he's famously known in CnT]. On the night when we reached pondy, Akbar suggested that we pack him up into a sack and bury him somewhere in the CnT campus. You must know that CnT is privileged to have a huge campus with lots of vegetation, more like a mini forest if you would like some exaggeration. All of us were stoned and high while Kiran was fucked up. . .

That's all about the stay at pondicherry. It's time to begin the return journey and meet the girl. Well, there's no hurry, She'll get to the place where we stop by to wash our car and bike, only once we reach the place. She's not waiting there. ANYWAYS, I cannot resist to be at the place as soon as possible. . . .

I must add a li'l bit about the fight to grab the handle of my bike by the members of the other gang. Me and Savan make a gang too. . . Mr. and Mrs. Patel were not interested in the bike as they were "the Santrowaale", the smart ones. That leaves only Akbar, Suraj and Kiran to fight it out. Kiran some how managed to get to the steering wheel of Santro and that sort of took him out of the competition for the bike. . . Now you must have had a clear Idea of Who, When I said "We" were still working in CnT.


Me n Savan were never willing to give away the bike to anyone, though our backbones were craving for those cushioned seats of Santro. So we decided one of us would always hang on to the bike. When Akbar was riding, Savan was inside the car and when Suraj took to the handle, it was Savan's turn to sit behind the Man. Where am I? ? ? I am either sitting behind Akbar or resting on the cushioned seats in the car. Quite obvious, yes, it is. . . . one of my silly pleasures, to simply confuse people.

While writing this, I realized that I was always in the illusion that I had taken the picture of the girl in My Nokia N73 but here I stand corrected, It was this picture that I shot in Akbar's N73 that inspired me to buy an N73,  for the impression that the clarity of the picture made on me. This was the reason I have the pictures of the return journey from pondy and not the otherwise. 
As I told you earlier, while akbar was riding the bike, I would take the pillion seat with his camera in my hand and shoot anything and anyone. . . . At 100kmph speed you don't expect clear shots, especially when you are sitting behind on a bike, that's not just going fast but flying low!!!!
Please don't charge of plagiarism, I picked that line about flying low on one of those days when I was stuck in a traffic jam. It was written on one of the bikes - hold your imagination rite there - he wasn't flying, remember the traffic jam. It was apt for this situation.

I think I'll just plug in something that I had written about photography sometime back, which was never touched after wards. Its about what I felt about photography and the frame that was captured. "Each shot framed tells me a story and the moment in the frame helps build a story before and after the moment. The picture itself tells the story that is beyond the moment captured in the frame. Each picture becomes a point of reference to the origin and the end of not just the narrator[cameraman] but also the subject.

Well on our way back, Mehul spotted this small water body and stopped over to clean his dirty santro. The man was good at that, I mean spotting these beautiful serene locales along the way. You see larger the surface, more prone you are to dust accumulation. It is here that we came across this girl who was with her friends, baring it all to the hot sun with only the modesty covered. I remember savan n suraj pulling my leg saying - there he goes to shoot his Kingfisher calendar for the season. . . . Well, when I did decide to make my calendar - I used her pic for my birth month. . . . .
What happened after I shot the girl and showed it to her and my friends, as they say the rest was history, Remember I told you earlier the picture is a point of reference between today and yesterday and the moment in between. . . . 

That's for now. . . . :)
chocolates n a li'l money n volleyball net n wrap. . . one more session all that and more.

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