In your hole, you stay put up, silent. Hollow endemic sounds approach with shapes you sense in their aerial reverberations. Some prancing like the man-eaters of dense Kumayun, some steep like thousand-year aches of avalanches. Some, even still the ululations of sea-tectonics. Some burst fury, some, arrested in their motion - frozen, dank, doomed. And somewhere stop at multiple thresholds. I wish I was fabricating some fantastic sketches.The skies our million wargrounds of hiss and doom. I know not the deep screeches, shrieks, shouts which people partake pleasure from. How easily men submit to the dance of the aural dark. The sheer impassivity of nil recurring. What orgasmic feral might they seem to conquer in ebullience. What leaves behind, but dust and echoes.

The film arrives at the idea of continuity in two ways - the first, a quasi-positive conclusion and the second, a more visceral but unsettling dark one. 

As the protagonist has dealt with meting out of vengeance, he now heaves a sigh of apparent sanity. Beams of sunlight filter through the porous fabric-screen in which he holds out the candy - the tingling reflections re-creates the innocence gathered back, once lost. His sibling reaches out for the bright realm which his elder brother has brought her back. They overcame a crisis, and though abrasions are real and yet to disappear, a hope for a new day, probably less ghastly as the last, is a hope worth keeping the life continuous. It is a merry denouement, but, maybe, for the time being.

However the strands do not have free, loose ends - the strings pass on to others. The abuse suffered by a sodomized child, when turned an adult (whose profession commands authority in all ranks of the society) was passed on to another hapless, disadvantaged minor on the street. The death of the perpetrator of abuse did not sever the flow of violence but merely invoked a varied apparition of same. It passed on hands to an uninformed bystander, who absorbs it and shrieks out. A fearful object has started to gain agency in his mind and the continuity comes alive. Has the bystander completely inherited the doom he has witnessed, or are fragments of the act of killing reside back in the mind of the protagonist, which might invoke some demons later on in his life? Will he, by the vice of his ill-doing, become a fiend, later on?

Violence continuous.    


_______________________________
Maanjha | Rahi Anil Barve

 

 

 

___________________________
Journey and back again | Abbas K

maurice sendak
leo lionni
mercer mayer

karadi tales - bombay
tara publishers - chennai
tulika - chennai
national book trust



The Voyeurs by Gabrielle Bell
Ant Colony by Michael DeForge
Teratoid Heights by Mat Brinkman
After Nothing Comes by Aidan Koch
 Kevin Huizenga's Gloriana
 Anders Nilsen's The End
 Josh Cotter's Driven by Lemons
A Drunken Dream and Other Stories by Moto Hagio
The Book of Genesis Illustrated by Robert Crumb
Baby Bjornstrand by Renée French
The Furry Trap by Josh Simmons
My New York Diary by Julie Doucet
Meat Cake Bible by Dame Darcy
The Armed Garden and Other Stories by David B.
Asthma by John Hankiewicz 
Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel
Sailor Moon by Naoko Takeuchi
Louis Riel by Chester Brown
Garden by Yuichi Yokoyama
Artichoke Tales by Megan Kelso
A Child's Life and Other Stories by Phoebe Gloeckner
Special Exits by Joyce Farmer
Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay by Ben Katchor
Ice Haven by Daniel Clowes
Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus by Jack Kirby
Gast by Carol Swain
Daddy's Girl by Debbie Drechsler
Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Days by Al Columbia
The Love Bunglers by Jaime Hernandez
High Soft Lisp by Gilbert Hernandez
Jordan Wellington Lint: The ACME Novelty Library 20 by Chris Ware
The Diary of a Teenage Girl by Phoebe Gloeckner

There are two types of people: those who pursue, and those who don't.

Of Making Images

Let me proceed in describing what I am seeing, and the various agents enabling me in the process. 

On my laptop screen, I am browsing Facebook. There appears a photograph after a click on the refresh button. I stimulate the machine (and the many technologies layered within and out of it) to fetch newer configurations of picture elements, their alignments producing shapes and hues. The shapes are, to my own semantic deconstruction, relatable, for my visual exposure to and knowledge acquired thereof, enables me to understand that a vertical stroke of a certain height and width is a 'l' and another similar one with half the height with a tittle on its top is an 'i'. The text has come in, and below it is the image. Even when I am trying to understand the image the newsfeed has regurgitated, for it is still pixeleted, still 'loading' (though the boundaries of the picture has been defined, the colours are yet to be put in, the curves to be traced and gradients to be set), the machine-learning intelligence has captioned it, for a brief moment - "This image contains: one person, outdoor, sky". And then comes the full image, in clarity, all pixels defined enough to evoke in me a sense of familiarity - of my friend posing in a serene meadow, her eyes squinting at the harsh sunshine.

The assimilation of various sensory and neural impulses and responses created an experience for me to view a picture on a social networking site. It is born out of my personal urge to reach to the world wide network to fetch a picture for me. I am hankering for an image – I desire to be informed about my acquaintances, and be acquainted to a visual. I command the machine by a click (or a sweeping gesture on a screen). My ‘self’ of flesh and bones, and more importantly, of urges, emotions and decisions, seeks out to find impalpable connections of my virtual self on the cyber-world. I wonder what my friends would possibly be doing this moment, or in that hour. The fact that I need to connect to those people, via their virtual selves, via the multiple images of them possibly engaged in activities or frivolities, is my semiconscious effort to ideate an image of my liking on the device screen.

Here I, by a sleight of my verbal abilities, try to sway past the immediate fallacy of the notion of ‘creation’ vis-à-vis ‘passive viewership’. I use the word ideate instead of create. One might argue that I have not etched a stroke on a physical surface or dabbed the paint a la creation, and I would counter the argument that I have lent my impulses do the formulation in the abstract signal processing and deciphering. My wish to behold what I sketchily seek is the dominant in this ideation. And that is precisely the objective of what I will proceed to term as quasi-passive image-making.  

The technology helps. Even if I be allowed a heuristic estimation, I cannot viably surmise what amount of 'I' went into creation of the image. An approximate percentage or a probably fraction will not draw the exact perimeter of synthesis of this person and the technology in which he immerses himself. I am, consciously, not engaging with the decision of what is the tangible material I should use to create the image or, the most intrinsic of them all, what constitutes the image – its components and message. Au contraire, I leave to chance and chance alone, what the network and the site's intelligence would bring forth. If one studies the deep machine learning possibilities that social networking sites explore, I can very reasonably provide me with the 'kind' of image I am mostly like to recognize myself with. The specific set of four friends whose photographs and posts I regularly pause to watch on my feed, are most likely to show up when I refresh the page, in want of newer pictures/ posts. I am lending a part of my being to create the frames I want my other reality to constitute of. My previous exploration of a commodity which I want to purchase on an e-commerce site on a side tab also takes part in the canvas of pixels (via suggested items in my feed). I have chosen a language in which the texts appear, and that is the part of the reality I want to acquaint myself with; any other would not be in my domain of appreciation.

These are the visuals which I have gradually constructed, not in the manner of precise selectivity but as responses to bias and likability. Even, a careful afterthought posits that what I claim as a construction is not a deliberate act but of my neural synapses reacting, feeding to its likenesses, favourites, avarices and ennui. I engage with them in rapid regularity and my creation on the screen right now is not a product of ideation of this instant, but of my past learnings, of wanderings and experiences. I sift through them, ‘like’ what I like, scroll past what I don’t, and thus create my own collage of visuals I want my future self to gain cognizance to.      

I am not the creator. But I have designed to my own tune the manner of images that will unfold before me. I am generating the image (in the sense of artificiality) of the real without the origin or reality – though deriving a snap out of it. The simulation of my consciousness is the sensibility of my engagement with images.

Every afternoon, after lunch, Amabi settles down on the couch in the seh-dari, opens her sewing box and scatters about her a colorful array of snippets. Seated next to the stone mortar, washing dishes, Kubra observes these colorful pieces of cloth and a red band of color surges across her pale, muddy complexion.
When Amabi lifts tiny gilded flowerets from the sewing box with her small, soft-skinned fingers, her strange drooping face suddenly lights up with a strange, hope-filled luminescence; the glow of the gloden flowerets is reflected on the deep, craggy folds of her face, glimmering there like the flames of tiny candles. With every stitch the gold sparkles and the candles flutter.

_______________________________
The Wedding Shroud | I Chugtai

গান হয়ে যায় আজ যা কিছু বলার মোর যা কিছু ভাবনায়
যেন এ হৃদয়ে গেল আকাশে মেলি পুলকের শিহরণ লাগে গায়

গান হয়ে যায় আজ যা কিছু বলার মোর যা কিছু ভাবনায়
যেন এ হৃদয়ে গেল আকাশে মেলি পুলকের শিহরণ লাগে গায়

চপল তব আঁখি দুটি কোন সুদূরে সদা ধায়
সহসা বাঁধন সব টুটি, মোর মন সাথি হতে চায়
ক্ষণে ক্ষণে মনে শুনি, দূরে কে বাঁশি বাজায়
মানে না এ মন আপনারে, পৃথিবীর কোন সীমানায়

ম্লান হয়ে যায় আজ যাকিছু বিফল মোর যায় অপূরণ বাসনায়
যেন এ জীবন কারো পরশে নূতন দ্বিধা সব অকারণ ঘুচে যায়

চপল তব আঁখি দুটি কোন সুদূরে সদা ধায়
সহসা বাঁধন সব টুটি, মোর মন সাথি হতে চায়
ক্ষণে ক্ষণে মনে শুনি, দূরে কে বাঁশি বাজায়
মানে না এ মন আপনারে, পৃথিবীর কোন সীমানায়

______________________________________
Arunendu Das