you just cant figure out

The wine was flowing, literally……

…………. Once again I demonstrated my lack of knowledge of all things which have alcohol in them, except of course the most exotic of cough syrups which I have had the opportunity to taste on several occasions. Trying to get a feel of the thing I shook it a bit, and to my surprise the bloody thing came frothing out of the bottle, spilling all over the floor. By the way the thing doesn’t taste any different from a cough syrup.

But this all is not important, what is important is the intellectually stimulating discussion which followed after the cleaning. The four of us decided on watching a movie, as the snacks kept in Lukhi’s room were perishing away. I happened to mention that I want to watch ‘The making of the mahatma’. As if that was not enough I stroke the stones again to throw in the spark, “The life of Gandhi was pretty interesting while he was in South Africa. Although some of the ideas that motivated him were not correct, the consequences of his actions were all good.”

I love discussions; they help me make others understand things correctly ;) But then there has to be a common basis for the discussion. In this particular case, as we were trying to evaluate Gandhi as a person, there can be no discussions if the other person asserts that he can not be evaluated at all. Just because he did all kind of things in his life time and half of them were good and the rest not so good. And that it is kind of futile to discuss and make value judgments on a person who died more than 50 years ago because the conditions back then were pretty different. In short, there is no way you can judge a person, situations always keep changing.

Now I can go on spending another hour describing what is involved in judging a person, both on the basis of his actions asam well as his ideas and convictions, but feeling lazy. Besides I have no intention of boring you with didactic monologue. Will leave you with this insightful quote by Leonard Peikoff:

“Justice — being an aspect of the principle that every cognition demands an evaluation — requires moral judgment of men and their works across-the-board, with no areas of life excepted or exempted”.

Btw couldn’t resist mentioning this interesting observation. Gandhi although loved to call himself a very honest person, was if you examine a little deeply neither truthful nor dishonest but quite arbitrary. By arbitrary I mean belief in ideas not out of reason but blind faith. The mere fact that he believed in God illustrates the truth of the observation.

of photography

Had an argument with Banno a couple of days back about my photography style. Good thing….. resolving conflicts is a nice way of working out this lazy brain of mine.

I have this habit of avoiding close up photographs and zooming out to squeeze in a whole lot of things in the frame. This according to Banno is a mark of a novice, now coming from a novice himself I don’t think I want to believe that. Not that I would be disappointed if that is true, it will only give me an opportunity to differentiate from the old-timers.

Every photograph tells a tale and its background, the context forms an integral part of the plot. A non existent or hazy background leaves too many questions unanswered.

The most intriguing of plots have their background leading to the central theme, ‘Parson’s pleasure’ and ‘The champion of the world’ are the two stories that instantly come to my mind. The theme cannot be isolated from the contextual setting, the two make an indissoluble complete.

But a story is probably not the best of analogies. In a photograph the distinction between the background and the foreground is much starker than in a story. A photograph gives enormous scope in portraying a conflict or harmony, something which the interplay of context and theme can’t bring out easily in a story. No wonder the Chinese of old days said: ‘A pictures paints a thousand words’.