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Life flows in front of us like a spectator viewing
a kaleidoscope, every moment life enthralls with images from its
eternal repertoire, as if never seen before. In this eternal interplay
of time and life, photos are like snatching a memorable moment
from flowing time and keeping it forever! And to talk about life,
life is not all about the concrete jungle and created reality
of commodities or suave urbane- life is what flows away from the
limelight, away from all focus and publicity of Page-3 or media
gizmo. This is the life, which flows silently on the footpaths
of skyscrapers, where abundance above never looks down to scarcity
below, or to those “actual” life close to mother nature
in some unknown, uncared village of Jharkhand, Murshidabad or
Midnapur , where accessories of life have not shrouded life itself—I
call them my “subaltern”—out of my kaleidoscope
of life and my efforts to steal a memorable moment from time—I
have chosen them.
I don’t call them villagers, folks, aboriginals or tribes-to
me these terms are snobbery of those “plastic” urbane,
the so called civilized. It is to me the same distinction that
First World and Third World terms denote…a naked display
of discrimination and power semantics. I was strongly impressed
by Mahasweta Devi and Gayatri Spevak Chakraborty when they used
“subaltern” in their literature in describing those
less-privileged whose life still rotate around nature. This is
precisely the reason when technology endowed me with such a tool
called camera—I thought of exploring my “subalterns”
going to villages of West Bengal and Jharkhand and many other
places not leaving apart the footpaths and shanties of urban surroundings,
where dire poverty never overwhelmed humanity, as a spectator
as I see life through my camera, the gay moments sparkle out of
gory—my kaleidoscope every time brings out a new scene-a
new lesson of the sublime ethos-“the subalterns”.
I have tried to present some of those memorable sojourn in this
website, my projects and my concept where the sublime ethos of
every work is as I described above, and to add more it is about
Post modernism-where gradation of plurality is void construct—it
is all about plurality per se, several standards—not “The
Standard”.
I may therefore conclude this brief introduction with a humble
request that view the photos not just random moments from repertoire
of life, or folk life but a string of thoughts depicted through
images culminating to a philosophy-“The subaltern”—a
“realistic reality”, coarse and uncut; never a well
groomed suave “plastic reality”.
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