Bombay - 25th, past mid-night - stopped the car on Marine Drive, only to find that the city is electric and has fantastic energy, and will never stop and wait or be contained

I could survive the torture of travelling, just if I could always find the unpolluted new and crisp fresh in every place I visit. And only sometimes its difficult to keep on moving. When rest seems distant, dangerous and futile. When being tired is just a part of the game. Its a rule. Its fair. Its necessary. Rules are half the game.

Chrismas gifts, still motionless streetlights, cars fly by and snatch seconds of attention and air, fascinate and free. Bombay offers insanity, contrast, youth and life.

Dont know why it was so fascinating - there is 1 second left for the lights to turn green. Maybe because I was waiting the first 59 seconds,counting each single one...makes the last one count

Marine Drive - Long long rows of lights winding blinding curving curling, causing rushes of tremendoues sensation and suspension.The blood stream of the city makes itself known and felt, and i fell inside its charm, supporting it, mixing in, blending, becoming its impulse, becoming its push, becoming its live electric lights bouncing off the windows of cars and falling dancing on the concrete of the road between the sidewalks. So hypnotized. So strangely in love. Stranglehold.

Sparks, Traces, Power, Proof

Spending time in such a timeless city
Watching its men move in countless directions
My eyes break and crash against a million unknown faces
Lost and aimlessly swaying in tides of human energy
Christmas flavoured Bombay evening
Feels just about right
:)

Winter of 2006

Bangalore to Bombay in a train. Bad food. Amazing views. A new camera. An old wish. Photographs of a journey in the belly of the snake in the dry land. And Oasis. The music. The monotone clicks of the steel wheels. Second Class. And that little hint of dangerous happiness.

The first thing I can’t escape.

Trains racing past each other...

The loud metal deep rushing roar of the air swirling between, pushed my pulse into sharp rhythm.

Flash storm…frightful. It lasts for about 15 seconds. I can see windows blur past mine…just the realization of immense motion is all I can feel…its not very hard to think….but it is, to breathe.

And then the suddenly…fading of the clamor, with faint hiss of the twisted turning air left behind...till it settles down…till the tracks stop trembling.

And then back to the rhythm of the wheels under...steady and still and strangely quiet...my pulse is back…slow and measured. Its not very hard to think…its not very hard to breathe either.

Suddenly falling; I could hear the music again in my headphones; and I was glad; I was happy. I was satisfied.

December rolls past the door and I know it, as soon as it does. Its fast, vicious and long and stretches into the horizon...dotted with telegraph poles and bare branch trees and the straightness of barren fields, broken here and there with slim distant outlines of humans and houses and trees.

I love standing at the door. And I can feel my weight thrown against that wind. And I can sit and I can sometimes have a cigarette and somehow escape from beind caught. And I can spin or fall or float or crawl or freeze or feel like I’m going to be launched into the deepest blue of the sky. And I can wait for a stranger to stand at the door opposite mine and watch and wonder whether they feel the same and what they feel and why. And I can hold all those possibilities and probabilities on that door... just standing there holding a handle bar as tight as I can to keep me from falling. And Sometimes on that edge of the door the ground suddenly gives way. The bridges take away the solid continuity of level ground .The railway bridges. I can hear the hollow echoes of the tracks and steel underneath…and I can feel the elevation under my feet…under the train…under those railway tracks…my fear…my height…my fall. Its control I can’t lose. It’s definite. It’s exact. And it’s certain, the intensity of a secret flight.

There are traces of me all over those tracks. Fallen pieces of dreams and desires, released into the vast horizon beneath the melting sun and floods of clean liquid air. Miles of level ground and fields, and countless towns and signals and junctions and platforms and people…