Pelči Palace

trinity

We've all been to sri lanka now! I went trincomalee-sigiriya-colombo-negombo and it was like a dream. 

Trincomalee especially, only a few years past bombs and tidal waves, is a bare but beautiful reminder of how the land retains memories. Of course, most tourists there don't have a clue. The sea there is just so beautiful that it's hard to turn your back to it. But one morning we found ourselves chatting with Sajeeth Khan, a boatman and snorkelling guide, who told us stories about his 5 months in LTTE custody and close-range details of genocide in the area. His almost poetic Tamil ("time of the moon" is night, for example) was being washed away by the sound of waves, above us it was the noon sun, and all the stories he told us seemed so unreal. As if he was reciting a poem on tv, with a lot of static. Crazy. After a while the sun bathers flipped like eggs on a pan. Our skin was burning so we said goodbye and went to find some shade. 

I wish I had spent some more time in Colombo. Tell me what it was like? I want to go back for a longer time.

Rice fields

Bus ride from Siem Reap to Poipet border in Cambodia, on my way to Bangkok. My co-passengers were a young thai girl and an old Russian man on their way to Pataya. They were eating sweet mangoes which was making me very nauseous. Somewhere half way there, a woman started screaming "Tuk-Tuk - Hospital - Stop - My husband - He is dead" I froze. I saw two seats ahead of me a man was lying lifeless, his woman hysterical - unwilling to touch him. There was a doctor on borad who revived him. "He has suffered a minor stroke, but is stable" she declared. After sometime, we were on our way again.

The end of something

I'm writing this after the first rain of the season here in Khar(w). In these (w)indward parts I received the rain fresh off the coast just a few moments after I came home from the last day's work for CAMP.
Shaina and Ashok have left to Germany to show the things we've made over the past month or so -  film, some photo objects and a book. The project we worked on, Wharfage 2, started in 2009. Though the outputs have changed over the years, the subject remains the same = dhow trade between India-UAE-Somalia. Our days here have been steeped in the sounds of the sea. We've been peering into a screen - looking through the eyes of sailors who have filmed their travels between countries, customs and duties (the many uses of those two words!). They show us first hand the true spirit of free trade. Diesel is bartered off instead of custom duty, pirates are fed as they are waiting to hijack bigger ships, Dubai's meat is brought back from Africa - alive - and with it the coal which cooks it... The seaman's stories are interwoven into many political and historical narratives - and are far from confirming to the popular ideas of what happens.
And then there were the music videos. To compliment the solemn vastness of sea travel are music videos of scenes from sea. It is a common practice to shoot interesting sights from the boat - dolphins, a drowning ship, a burning ship, an oil tanker, yourself against the sun, the deck of your boat marching on in all weathers or just another dhow at sea - and then to add appropriate music over it on one's music xpress phone. At port there is time to share these music videos with friends (so you sometimes hear Baluchi in Gujarat). Some of these music videos (which will surface on Pad.ma at some point in future) are absolutely kneewobbling. They are so intimate and almost always have humour in the choice of song. The compelling hum-beats of the naats sung by Farhan Ali Qadri and Owais Raza Qadri will echo in my head much after the songs themselves have stopped.
So yes, the past month, I've been off in another world. And the fact that camp has blue walls and a huge blue sun-screen on the terrace that rocks from side to side as if it were the sail of a boat - just locks this entire internship experience into one complete unit in my memory.

When the rain came, it washed my tired shoes clean.

Large

I visited my old home+campus from growing up years. And it was very awkward. Do things/places in memories seem much larger than they actually are or is it because I was physically tinier then?

This is a strange 'i-dont-know-what' that haunted me when I was a kid. I thought it was where IIT did all its secret experiments/launched space missions from.

Belongings

 I found these, his old specs from when he my age. He collects things for memories.. too.