About wanderwonder
What am I?
A place is made up of what I want to see. A place comprises of what has been previously denied to me. A place becomes all that which was unknown to me. A place visits me, as much as I visit it. A place examines me, as much as I examine a place. I am an Indian national but would like to describe myself as a thought nomad, although I have also just completed a PhD Thesis on Culinary Fiction because I was inquisitive about the way food metaphors and symbolism articulate and reflect socio-psychological life in the Asian Diaspora.
I am an amateur as a photographer and have no prior training in it but I donot hesitate to aim my lens at anything and everything. I am very opportunistic when it comes to travelling and exploring places new or old, used or unused and have time and again managed to find reasons to go for travel, inspite of hectic schedules. The guiding principle in my life is ‘Work Hard but Travel Harder’. I have also exploited urgent toilet excuses to stop public transport systems I have been travelling in, to get down to click pictures of places and things that I felt should be shot but were fleeting by and then again resumed my journey. I donot think I will stop doing that. I donot like being stuck to moulds. I prefer an inter-disciplinary approach to life and I like to stretch myself to see where my limitations begin and where my strengths and capabilities could likely evolve or adapt. I like exploring new things and do not feel that just because I have done a doctorate in literature, I cannot be consistently comprehensible and good in other skills. I have travelled a lot in my beautiful and diverse country, India and gone on whirlwind tours and unplanned, impromptu trips too. I may regret saying something, writing something, doing something, but travelling to someplace and doing photography, is something which has never made me feel any regrets. I have never felt that I shouldn’t have visited a place, nor have I ever felt that I shouldn’t have clicked that image.
I want to be a travel writer-cum-photographer, that is, I ultimately would like to supplement my travel writings with my own photographs. But, I don’t have any formal exposure, or essential degree nor do I possess any fore knowledge of the photography techniques to pursue this passion of mine. However, the only thing that gives me courage to persevere is my sole dependence on my sight, that is what I see when I open my naked eyes and what I want my amateur lens to capture and project. I like my vision, because a photograph often provokes me to weave a story around it or on it. I also do creative writing and sketching in ink as a hobby and am an amateur there as well, though I also did have my first art exhibition in Delhi, India, some months back but it was for amateurs. Now am writing short stories on the ink sketches I had made.
I prefer clicking pictures of nature, landscape, wildlife, flora, and architecture and am fascinated with the mutative properties of living things like fungus, rotting things like food, fruits, bodies and balding, dying trees. I have also found myself often playing with textures and light and darkness in photography and I can lose myself in clicking pictures through water droplets settled on glass panes; particularly taking shots of diffraction of light through water. When am not doing any academic writing, I prefer to spend my time travelling, reading up on art history and art iconography and looking at pictures of pre-historic rock and cave paintings and try to decode their symbolism.
I have been seeking an opportunity to travel to a new place and when this opening offers a personal mentorship programme with two of the well-known names in the world of photography and documenting of natural history, National Geographic Channel and Jason Edwards; then certainly, it will be a blink-and- you-miss-it moment. If given a chance, I would like to get a hands-on experience on photographing in terrains which am not conditioned to but aren’t there so many things also in life that one is not conditioned to? Thus, given this rare opportunity, I would like to challenge my conditionings and also pick up new ones, like learning photography from an eager mentor and learning through the collective first-hand experience of the place, the mentor, the hosts, the team, my equipment and my own mindful presence. After, my return from this photo shoot training trip, I would like to join any travel writing company, magazine, channel, publishing house or any similar and affiliated professional space which will be willing to accommodate me into their workforce and would invest trust in my abilities to present a place through my travels, photography and writing. I am open to relocating inside and outside my home country and wherever I find myself to be, I would try to exhume and resuscitate dead places and thoughts and portray the stories a place tells with or without the help of living, breathing things. But, if I donot like the story being told to me by another person or even by another place, then surely, retaining the original, I would also try to re-tell it, rewrite it, starting humbly on both the legitimate and illegitimate history of that place or object with the hope and courage that my photographs and their accessory writings, narrate the story which my eyes see, observe and feel.
Sometimes, while travelling, I have felt that some natural landscapes seem to be resisting or fighting. They are at unease with their surroundings, although this unease can be caused by both a manmade structure like a building or a street light or it could also be a single natural monolithic rock or a mountain in the midst of an unending flat landscape. Since, travelling is a time bound necessary evil, hence, often I have carried back the sheer discontent of a particular place, back with me, held captive both in my mind and my camera. After physically and geographically leaving that kind of a place, I have been able to revisit it’s angry, surly mood only through the photographs I had taken while being there. I would also say the same thing for places that by being so silent are an assault on the senses and whenever I have reviewed the pictures of those places, I have inadvertently heard loudly, the buzzing traffic of thoughts inside my own mind. A place can grow in me and a place can stunt me. Photography is an unreluctant mistress to travelling and thus I hope to be the lord and lover of both.
My Travel Map:
