at the Library of Congress is a fantastic resourse for readings in the poets voices ranging across twenty odd Indian languages. These are sound clips of one of my foremost literary masters, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, reciting his very beautiful lines such as these:

aur bhii dukh haiN zamaane meN muhabbat ke sivaa raahateN aur bhii haiN vasl kii raahat ke sivaa mujh se pahlii sii muhabbat merii mahbuub na maaNg

There are other sorrows in this world, comforts other than love. Don't ask me, my love, for that love again.

Poetry, in particular Urdu poetry reaches completion when it lifts off from the page and becomes sound, becomes music. And this recordings project is a gold mine indeed for poetry across all Indian languages.

Flickr is a wonderful resource to take armchair trips to places one that hasn't been to, as well to revisit places that one had already been to before, and thus shares a degree of intimacy with. Oochappan's Flickr stream is one such hatch to open, to fall into the world that has always been, and perhaps will always be; the world of sun and brilliant colors, weather beaten men and women, children with large lambent eyes, various kisoks for gods (not only of Hinduism), old temples filled with incense, flowers, people at prayer, lumbering Apus etc.

No wonder, Mr. Oochappan, who is Belgian, feels compelled to revisit Tamil Nadu for the first three months of every year, and this since 1987. It appears that he has found his Shangri-La, and now takes beautiful photographs over there to remind viewers like me of all that was visible but remained unfelt and unseen then.

The image I have used in the above logo is a section of a iconic photograph taken by Eudora Welty in Mississippi during the Depression.


(Click to view it larger)

I find this photograph to be very beautiful for a very simple reason: the way it depicts both a journey forwards into time, and that backward look of the woman whose face we cannot see. While Miss. Welty is considered one of the essential writers in the 20th century American literature ( her slender memoir on writing, <a href=”www.amazon.com> “One Writer’s Beginnings” is a must read for any aspiring writer), she was a fine photographer as well. To me at least, her photographs rank right there with the more well known photographers who had worked with her for the W.P.A. during the Great American Depression, including those made by Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange.

While I was aware of Miss. Welty's fiction, it took a lucky invitation to a dinner at the house of some serious photography collecting couple (folks who have a couple of signed Heri Cartier-Bresson's can only be called very very serious collector; obviously they were reasonably prosperous as well!) , to reveal this aspect of Miss. Welty's work to me. That evening, I spent quite a bit of time gazing at a Welty photograph that showed a full dunkin baptism by the bank of some Deep South river. It was as if a Negro' spiritual had passed from music into image. So the following weekend I checked out all the material I could find on her photographs, and had myself a little visual feast.

In <a href='www.nytimes.com">this lovely New York Times interview, Miss.Welty talks about the connections between writing and photography. A quote:

"..because in both cases, writing and photography, you were trying to portray what you saw, and truthfully. Portray life, living people, as you saw them. And a camera could catch that fleeting moment, which is what a short story, in all its depth, tries to do. If it's sensitive enough, it catches the transient moment."

You may read here, the NYT book review of "One Time One Place", the book from which the above photo comes from. Also, more recently, this photo has also been used on the book cover of Edward P. Jones' Pulitzier Prize winning novel "The Known World".