Writers Block!!!!

I am having a rather severe case of writers block, but i can feel a depression coming on. And when that strikes, you can be sure that I will be churning out tomes. See u soon.

I Won!!!- Bent But Not Broken

Holy smokes (as they say on flikr), or holey moley, as Captain America would say, I actually won a photo competition named Chandigarh In April. Well, its only a measly first runners up, but all the same, its something. And there might be some money to cover for the cost of the print too. So, a cheerful post. The picture is the one that won.
I was called over to the art museum the other day to title my works and in the midst of a severe case of a writer's block, I opted for untitled -1, 2, 3, 4.......
Silly Me!!
See you all at the exhibition.

For those with an interest in flowers, and flowers that bloom on cactii in particular, I believe this is a flower that blooms on a spiny thing by the name of ::

Acanthocalycium spinoflorum.

But then , like all things in life that really isnt what this is all about. This is about transience. This beautiful flower blooms on the cactus for a day. It comes into its own in the morning and by the evening its gone. I have never really seen it being pollinated by any insect so i really dont know anything about it. WHat matters is the fact that it is beautiful, and how and then for a short time. And is gone in the blink of an eye. Something that the japanese talked so much about in their death poetry with the sakura or the cherry blossom as the main motif. Here is an example:

Senryu, died June 2, 1827

Like dew drops

on a lotus leaf

I vanish.

(Senryu, died June 2, 1827)

This flower bloomed on a cactus that was planted in my garden many years ago. And as I woke up on the 3rd of june, my father told me that there was a flower blooming outside and maybe i would like to have a look. I saw it and as i had my camera with me, i took some pictures of it to record some of that transience, and as I bent down close i smelt it and looked at it closely for the first time. There were so many memories attached and all of them came back. And again there is this is familiar sense of despair, that there is a certain meaninglessness to everything. A sense of waste. Its easy to be religious, and it gives so much comfort from this feeling but that is not for those who reject this notion of god. I am still looking for answers and living on as I do.

Happy Birthday to Me!!

On the 2nd of June, I became another year older. And from now on I have stopped counting my age in addition to my weight. And thats MY birthday cake. It was very chocolatey and very rich. Outside it was very hot and very dry. So i went out into the hills and took some pictures. It was a nice birthday, filled with doing things I love to do and with people i love to be with.

Back From Mcleodganj

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUKwdy3jd18

Just got back from Mcleodganj, and no I met no happy people. I just got a splitting back ache and took no significant pictures as well. But I saw this video somewhere and I have to share this, its the funniest thing I have seen in a long time.

The value of Art

Art is a vague and nebulous concept, something like culture. Wikipedia defines it as::

Art is that which is made with the intention of stimulating the human senses as well as the human mind and/or spirit. There is no general agreed-upon definition of art, since defining the boundaries of "art" is subjective, but the impetus for art is often called human creativity.

An artwork is normally assessed in quality by the amount of stimulation it brings about. The impact it has on people, the number of people that can relate to it, the degree of their appreciation, and the effect or influence it has or has had in the past, all accumulate to the 'degree of art.' Most artworks that are widely considered to be "masterpieces" possess these attributes.

And as we all know, masterpieces appreciate with time. I meant monetarily at least. But when I read this, I went into a bit of a tizzy. Its called Excremental Value.

Icon II: Piero Manzoni's Merda d'artista

By John Miller

"If you stuck a piece of shit on the wall, it would be all the same to them as long as someone told them the shit was worth money.That's the nouveau-riche approach"
- Andrea Fraser, performance script for May I Help You? (1991)

Fraser's statement issues from the mouth of a supposed patrician, a woman who might serve on a museum's board of directors. Hers is a provocation meant to distinguish between old money and new, between those with a vast store of cultural capital and those in the business of acquiring as much as they can in the shortest time possible. For the patrician, the acquisitive efficiency of the nouveau riche is odious because the very prospect of ready exchangeability jeopardises long-standing traditions of cultural inheritance. This efficiency, as such, produces a relative indifference to deeply ingrained aesthetic experience. Curiously, her rhetorical substitution of shit for art recapitulates the logic of Piero Manzoni's legendary work Merda d'artista (1961), a provocation of an entirely different order.

Merda d'artista is an edition of 90 signed and numbered works that Manzoni said he made from his own excrement. Each is a 30-gram can of shit, measuring 4.8x6.5cm, "freshly preserved, produced and tinned", as stated on the label. This information appears in Italian, French, German and English, against a background pattern produced by repeating the artist's name in block letters. Because Manzoni sold each can by weight at gold's daily market price, the shit literally became worth its weight in gold. In retrospect, this has proved to be a bargain. At $35.20 (£18.07) per ounce - the price at which the London Gold Pool (an international consortium of central banks) wanted to fix the precious metal - a tin originally would have cost about $37. That was 1961. Thirty years later, Sotheby's auctioned one for $67,000. Then, the price of gold had climbed to $374 per ounce. If Manzoni's initial pricing scheme still held, it should have cost only $395.77. In other words, in 1991 Merda d'artista had outperformed gold in price by more than 70 times.

The virtues of being laid up

I havent been blogging for some time, initially due to severe back pain and later due to lassitude and the inability to walk around like I used to once. Thankfully, I think I think I am getting better now. And as a result i am spending a lot of time (too much In Fact!!) in front of the computer and have been downloading some wierd stuff online. One of these is a High-Dynamic Range (HDR) software by the name of Qtpfsgui. And as I was playing around with It, I made that surreal, crazy looking picture of the Gandhi Bhawan above. Sure the software is fairly buggy and crashes occasionally but it does get me some interesting results.
Now back to the back, after rest and analgesics, I have been on medium wave diathermy, hot fomentation and even homeopathic medications. Anything to avoid the surgeon's knife and the prospect of going into general anaesthesia and not waking up later freaks me out. Anyone has any ideas, let me know.
Until that time, I am invalidated, unboozed and medicated. In short, completely useless. It breaks my heart to see my D200 gathering dust.

Back to the Back

My nemesis, my back finally caught up with me this past week and had me laid up in bed, alone and in pain for most of that time. And as a result, I have been out of circulation and immobilized.
As a kid, I often hoped that I would not have all these painful conditions like a tooth extraction, loss, or a backache but now I have lived through it and more, I realise that it actually is as bad as it is said to be, but nearly not as bad as it could be.
While in pain, I realised certain facts about doctors and patients. I dont know if others have gone through it or not. As a doctor, one thinks like a doctor, its so very natural and instinctual even. But when I became a patient, I was confused and very uncomfortable. And that is after the fact that I am a doctor myself and would be expected to know better. And the one thing that I wanted most from my doctor was time, patience and an explanation. And those are the things that were in the least supply. An inability to listen, to interrupt before I could complete, and the tendency to let explanations hang in the air are probably the most disturbing things for any patient. And I admit that when I sit on the other side of the table, I am often guilty of that too for whatever reasons.
I hope I can improve my practice through my own experience.

Cassia fistula

Cassia fistula
Originally uploaded by Shubh M Singh.

Happy Baisakhi to all. May the New Year be great and prosperous.

The Chronicles of a Rolling Stone

I was born in the family of humans. Yet, I became a rolling stone. Not because of a change in chemical constitution, but due to a lack of fine moral fiber. As a result, with an increase in girth and a gradual rounding up of edges, I have gradually started to look like a boulder (thats a stone too!!) that might roll when given a hard enough push. And as we all know, a rolling stone gathers no moss. But now that I have become a rolling stone (for reasons too numerous to mention), its a fine idea to talk about the good rolling stones and the bad rolling stones.

The one man who I want to kill most dearly is a certain Publilius Syrus who had nothing better to do than to go around defaming rolling stones. I mean what sort of a man says that a rolling stone gathers no moss. And that too before Lord Jesus Christ was born. And anyways, who would like to have a growth of some slimy moss anyway. For the record Publilius Syrus was a Latin writer of maxims (actually a slave), who was smart enough to impress all people who looked at him only superficially (reminds me of me) and got out of slavery and put forth a lot of paleo-Oscar Wildean stuff including the one on rolling stones gathering no moss. But we rolling stones are made of sterner stuff and we kept on rolling and kept on repelling all sorts of mossy efforts to stick to us. Its a good thing that most of the stuff is now lost, who knows what else he might have said.Excluding of course a certain Kate Moss.
The next famous rolling stone was closer home, and true to form was an idiot of the first order too. he had nothing better to do than to roll away and allow what he guarded be plundered on hearing "Open sesame", or as we say " Khulja simsim". A certain Alibaba had a lot of fun this way and got luckier than Shilpa Shetty. He had nothing what so ever to do with mobile phones and sim cards, and it was probably a good thing that he developed loss of hearing as he grew old and that left some stuff intact. I even have a picture of what he did. And anyways, he gave an idea to Indian politicians of saying reservations whenever they run out of ideas.

Alibaba says "good thing I took that memory course when I did".

There are some other notable rolling stones too, these guys keep running around rolling in the death valley in far away Nevada, and some of these guys are as much as 50 kgs in weight and how they move is a closely guarded secret of the rolling stone free mason society.

(Pic from www.luminouslandscape.com)

There is one in south India too, only for some strange reason, its called the Krishna's butterball.

It actually is a large rolling stone, it decided to let some moss gather. Only problem being that Mahabalipuram is too warm for moss to gather and later it became too late to start rolling again. Moral of the story being, keep rolling.

Soon, after someone decided to take out a magazine and then a rock group too by the name of Rolling Stone thus lending some much-needed credibility.


It is eventually Bob Dylan who has made the Rolling Stone a force to be reckoned with. If Dylan sings about something, it gotta be profound, right???


How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

He probably started off writing a song about a rolling tyre but then decided that a rolling stone sounded so much better. I agree whole heartedly.

I dont know 'bout being alone
or with no direction home
or being a complete unknown
but its not all that bad
being a Rolling Stone!!!