Sundays in Calcutta were usually spent riding our bikes and exploring different neighbourhoods. After a ride northbound beside the Hoogly (Ganges), we cut back into the city streets and came across this bus. Watching the painter create the numbers was amazing. His hand was fast, accurate and fluid.
After painting "lovley" on the crossbar of Dave's black bike, which he bought in Dehli from Mr. Lovely 3 years ago, he painted "Best Qwalitey" on the rear fender. Painting "best quality" on an Indian bicycle is a bit like painting "we mean no harm" on the side of a B-52 bomber.
Where whitey goes, a crowd will grow.
This horse sculpture has a bamboo armature inside it and is made from mud from the Hoogly River. It will be painted, then brought to the river and thrown in as an offering for the gods during a pooja. The armatures will eventually be fished out and the whole process will be repeated.
"A patina is the surface that bridges the gap between art and nature" -Dave Trattles, on the phone to me in Calcutta while he was cycling to Chennai with Jada and John.
A saree hanging out to dry in north Calcutta.
I think one reason India is so great looking, and therefore an excellent place for taking pictures, is because the people there are a rather inquisitive lot. This means they do things like stand in doorways looking out - framing themselves for the camera lens. They also congregate in groups around all kinds of activities, providing an audience for the mundane, turning a flat tire into a spectacle.
2 comments:
Oh, and don't forget the LIGHT-- the gorgeous, liquid, delicious LIGHT. Everything looks gilded in loveliness in that glorious, rich, golden light.
Hey BP, I have gone back to your paragraph re the "Best Qwalitey" bike three days in a row, marvelling at your exquisite sense of irony, and wondering how I can tell you that you should be publishing these snippets.
I had my own version of a "Best Qwalitey" kind of moment today. Surrounded by the atavars of corporate speak in my workplace, I heard someone say that our goal is to "incentivize" customers.
This is a much less appealing bastardization of the English language than Qwalitey, which after all, is intended to capture an aesthetic ideal, even if just in the imagination of the beholder (the most perfect bike ever created by Plato himself in his inventory of ideals).
And I'd much rather take a spin on the shitbox two wheeler called Best Qwalitey than think too much (or at all) about incentivizing customers.
The colour palette for India looks awesome. AA
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