the last few days ...

08.08.18

I have nothing to write these days. There’s just nothing happening. Sometimes even an advice sounds so valuable before I sleep over it. Then it sounds worthless. Something I could never so or be. Things are always so two faced. When I’m bored, all that sounds so important and fine, and suddenly, it starts sounding all fake and silly. I should always give myself some more time before I do or say certain things. Being impulsive will ruin me, as I have discovered in the past. I don’t mind being useless. In fact, there have to be useless people in the world for the world to appreciate useful people. Imagine if each and every one was a winner… winning would be mediocre. And we losers would be winners. Sure, we losers make sense sometimes.

I met Atul after a long time yesterday at Harshad’s place. I laugh imagining how we all were six years back when we first met. I was a kid just out of school! His new little guitar is damn amazing. That’s his travelling guitar. He made it in the US. And since he was there for just a few weeks, I thought maybe the guitar is the reason he went there. That’s what he did at Aroville. He spent his time playing his guitar and making one. That’s the best thing one can do there actually. Now, I want a little guitar myself! Maybe I can make one. But I don’t have the resources to do so. Good quality wood, some metal, and etc… And while I’m dreaming, I want a bass too. But anyway… some day I will. Here’s another one of my ideas left incomplete.

But that little guitar is very cute to play. And it has a very non-reverberating bass sound. And it’s little. And so cute. I want one!!!

Now I’m as green as his guitar… I always want more than I need. But that’s human nature. Not me. I don’t have a nice guitar strap. I need one so I can stand and play my guitar. I can make one. Sounds like a great idea, I jest need to check how I can make one at home.

My guitar string tensile structure idea is still somewhere in my mind’s closed closets, the key to which I have lost somewhere. I need to read more about tensile structures and all. I still remember my brilliant bridge, the one that I designed during the bamboo workshop in second year. It really was well made. If only the clutch wire had arrived before and if only I had had the necessary spare parts, it would have been lighter, nicer and much more effective. But I learnt a lot. Maybe some day if I get a chance to, I could design such a bridge for some little span. That would be nice.

Making a guitar is a very nice idea. Let me at least start researching on it. See if I can get some nice raw materials and some tools. I need to start spending some of my money on better things. So I spend more money on commuting

08.08.19

When I desperately wish for something and I get it, I usually end up making the most phenomenal blunder I can ever make, and give away whatever I have earned. On a silver platter. Even if I get something I deserve, it’s always lost so easily by my own divine deeds. I feel amazed. I work hard on self pitying, blackmailing the supreme force and get my hearts wish … and I blow up all the earned hard work in 5 minutes . How stupid can I possibly get!

08.08.20.

Sourabh said that the phase that I’m going through is good to galvanise me into the person that I aspire to be. According to him, the guilty feeling is good.

But how can something that makes me feel terrible make me do things later? How can I possibly believe this is going to help mould me? What do I want to be moulded into?

I’ve been losing sleep over all this. I’m wondering what to do to make this feeling go away. There’s a momentary relief when I’m doing things, but it comes back, and I feel like this again. My brain is overheating. Whatever little is remaining.

I set about making myself completely useless today. I did nothing constructive. Diem perdidi… what can be more disgraceful than that?

I just want to make my life a holiday. Everyday should be one. But alas… it’s not to be… I’m not making it into one.

08.08.21

Gangu arranged for a little presentation that I’ll be giving at college on photography. It is a small session open for all as a part of first year basic design and 3^rd an 4^th year elective on photography. It’s going to be really interesting. Let’s hope I make sense to them of what I’m doing. I wonder what I should show them in terms of composition, and content. I have to start sorting photographs from today itself. I don’t want it to become an exercise in just displaying my pictures, but for them to understand about various ways of compositions and moments. About colours, spaces, textures and tones, shadows, movements, planes and masses … perspectives and focus, point and views and depths of field.

08.08.25

Sometimes, ideas just come from somewhere. Just like yesterday. Another afternoon power-cut forced me to switch off the computer in order to lessen the load on the UPS. And I sat down to see all that my mother discovered today. She loves to empty out drawers and take out all the unwanted stuff from there, and make way for more unwanted stuff that I love to accumulate. Yesterday, she found some old biconvex magnifying lenses. And a small lens from my former fish eye door viewer. The one which I was used for my initial lens baby experiments, and which was later relegated to that little box in one of the messy drawers once I found that it was the wrong lens. As a kid I always troubled my mother when I had nothing to do. So she would give me the junk in on of the messy drawers to buy her some peaceful time. We have, over time kept our respective habits intact.

So even before I could start yesterday afternoon, she handed the lenses over to me, and I was wondering what could be made out of them. Sunday afternoons are lazy, and I soon slept it off and woke up quite forgetting the lenses. Then post the grand spectacle of the Olympic ceremony and dinner, I was back with those lenses… I realised soon enough, that that one of the lens would make a wonderful fixed zoom lens which can focus on objectives in different visual planes. Now all I need is something to hold it. The lens would function if I moved it closer and further away from the sensor for focus, and so I needed to make it flexible. Don't think i can complete it soon though...