The Prophet

A Voice Cannot Carry the Tongue and the Lips that gave it Wings.

Alone must it seek the Ether

~ Khalil Gibran {The Prophet}

Jumping Jacks Flash!!!!

Come to the edge.
We might fall.
Come to the edge.
It’s too high!

COME TO THE EDGE!
And they came,
and he pushed,
and they flew.
~ Christopher Logue

"But I say: That which is falling should also be pushed!

And him you do not teach to fly, teach - to fall faster!"

~Neitsche

When The Road Becomes My Bride....

When the Road becomes my Bride
and the earth becomes my throne
I adapt to the unknown
Under wandering stars Ive grown
By myself but not alone

Off the beaten path I reign
Rover wanderer
Nomad vagabond
Anywhere I may roam
Where I lay my head is home

- Lyrics adapted from Metallica's Wherever I May Roam

Searching for Shangri-La...

My Shangri-La beneath the summer moon,
I will return again
Sure as the dust that floats high in June,
when movin' through Kashmir.

Sometimes The Lights All Shining On Me..

Sometimes the lights all shining on me
Other times I can barely see
Lately it occurs to me
What a long strange trip it's been

- Truckin by The Greatful Dead

Breaking The Habit

In The Forest....

In The Forest...

Bare Trees...

A Riot of Colors....

The festival of colors.
A bit of Gulaal too..
Flowers in the Garden
Alongside You!!

Riders Of The Storm. II

All the tired horses in the sun:
How'm I s'posed to get any ridin' done? Hmm...

Adrift In the Sea of Yearning

We're just two lost souls
Swimming in a fish bowl,
Year after year,
Running over the same old ground.
What have we found?
The same old fears.
Wish you were here.

- Pink Floyd (Wish You Were Here)

Shelter From The Storm

A Philosophical looking bird caught in the snow fall. In the Garhwal Himal in Uttarakhand India.

I was burned out from exhaustion, buried in the hail,
Poisoned in the bushes an' blown out on the trail,
Hunted like a crocodile, ravaged in the corn.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."

- Bob Dylan (Shelter from the Storm)

-

The Whispering Wind.

Will the wind ever remember
The names it has blown in the past
And with his crutch, it’s old age, and it's wisdom
It whispers "No, this will be the last"

~Jimmy Hendrix (The Wind Cries Mary)

The Lord Of The Ring

All the birds have flown up and gone;
A lonely cloud floats leisurely by.
We never tire of looking at each other -
Only the mountain and I

- Li Po (Alone Looking At The Mountain)

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

My latent Cyberdelic tendencies came to the fore before my recent peregrinations to the Himalayan mountains of Uttarakhand which lasted for over two weeks across the New year and Christmas break. Will upload the trips photographs (on my flickr stream)as soon as I have recovered from the journey and its aftermath (more of which in later posts)

Took these a couple of months ago in a whole series of shots and experimentation with water and oil droplets (mostly shot in industrial settings during visits to some chemical factories in Gujarat producing effluents in the manufacture of industrial dyes and paints)

I rather enjoy the leeway and scope of experimentation while composing Macros as the only real limit is the scope of one's own imagination and ability to "visualize" a shot in the most mundane of settings and objects.



Creatively I find it more satisfying than other genres of photography where scale and composition experimentation can be rather limited in lieu of the bigger picture.. This telescoping down to the microscopic level is really fun and always reminds me of one of the joys which initially attracted me to learn Photography as an art form.

~ ~

It's interesting to explore how the mind associates different influences and events asscociated with memory. How unrelated themes can intermingle in the most unlikely ways &

places



Inspiration is that most tenuous of things.. never know when it comes a calling and where it may spark the engines of creativity to come to life..Two random thoughts which collide somewhere inside our smug wooly cotton brains in its infancy

~ ~

The title is inspired by the pshycedelic colors and the fact that I was shooting this in Acid Bath and it seemed most apt..

The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test was originally a non fiction novel by Tom Wolfe and attained a cult following not unlike " Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintainece" by Lou Prisig in later years

It was released in 1967 featuring the travels of author Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters as they drive across the USA in a DayGlo painted school bus dubbed "Furthur," as well as the Acid Tests, during parties several of which had early performances by The Grateful Dead.

*(Ken Kasey was the author of two benchmark novels the most famous and my personal fav of them being "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest ";and "Sometimes a Great Notion".

He was also a counter-cultural figure who, some consider, was a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s(or Beatniks as they are more popularly known ~Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac) 'and the hippies of the 1960s.

Distant Ships On The Horizon

Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing,
Only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness.
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another.
Only a look and a voice; then darkness again and a silence.

- - - -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Tales of a Wayside Inn. Part iii. The Theologian’s Tale: Elizabeth. iv

And soon, too soon, we part with pain,
To sail o’er silent seas again.

Thomas Moore: Meeting of the Ships.

Frozen In Time.

Freezing Time is the only way to grasp Eternity for an hour..

And can eternity belong to me, Poor pensioner on the bounties of an hour?

Those spacious regions where our fancies roam,
Pain'd by the past, expecting ills to come,
In some dread moment. by the fates assign'd,
Shall pass away, nor leave a rack behind;
And Time's revolving wheels shall lose at last
The speed that spins the future and the past:
And, sovereign of an undisputed throne,
Awful Eternity shall reign alone.

-Last verse by : Francesco Petrarch Source: Triumph pf Eternity (l. 102)

Young Buds

Countless the twigs which tremble at Dawn,
When Young Buds Lean on each other in yearning..
As little by little the night turns around

(The frangipani tree in my backyard at dawn, lyrics adapted from Pink Floyd's : Set the Control For the Heart of the Sun.)

Unmarked Helicopters

Ask the wind that blows
Which one will be the next to go?

The Dream of White Orchids

The Dream of White Orchids, originally uploaded by The Wandering Hermit.

Orchid Perfumes rise
As incense Wafted
By the Wings of Butterflies
- Basho

.

Afterglow

Afterglow, originally uploaded by The Wandering Hermit.

In the wake of the vanquished sun
The golden Afterglow