I’ve always believed in one very standard function of all photography which is to hold the vision of the onlooker hostage to reality. It is no secret that the world we live in seems to be intoxicated in the opium of time, and the passage of it, and somehow, in the pursuit of this event less motion, we seem to pass over our beings just as we pass through billboards that line the metropolitan highways of the country, without shedding a conscious look. Photography invites us, in pausing this perpetual tide that seems to be running to nowhere in particular, into a conversation with our own ways of thinking, by pushing us to the middle of a grand white rock that stands, with fortitude, against the centuries that run through the river beds of Punjab, and every place. It is just us there, on that rock, alone, and the pebbles that flow are rendered naked to the pair of lonely eyes that seem to be dipping their feet in the running current. This isn’t a treatise on the nature of photography, and I don’t proclaim myself to be an expert on art-consumption, but these introductory remarks serve as the very foundation of the poem that is about to follow, because it only through the photographs of a very close friend (go see more of his photographs on his blog) that I was able to stand still, and look inwards in the crowd of refracting sunlight.

men of my country, can’t often afford cars

there is, of course, an economic history of
the income disparity, but this sheet is, today
a canvas for my intimate fantasies, and the men
of my country have a role to play, similar to that

of the CBFC, in forcing distortion upon my ‘unnatural’
tendencies, but as the history of protest at the FTII
stands to tell, art and motion are hardly ever kempt
like the body hair on the men of my country

the hair-removal industry shapes a significant portion
of my country’s economy, yet, women have had consumption
liberty, much before they were given the first coaches
along the city’s arteries, but in this confusion

a crematorium of  identities
this  poet is lent, a few moments of
unfettered debauchery

— the little space, that escapes

the chains of black office pants
and distressed socks of white and grey
windows to a blasphemous Nudity
a passion usually restrained
to a language of domestic barbarity

— tranquil ankles, resting at a traffic light,
as drying lakes, un-draining into a sea of honks   
and material monstrosities, as the men of my
country, bend their knees, on their EMI’d
scooters and mortgaged realities, to travel
from their masters, to their daddies

there  is a line that runs, as the fabric
rushes up, where the hair strikes against
a patch of smooth skin, like the shore
comes forward to meet the sea, like ivory
dreams that glisten against flaming coral reefs

and in the low and high of the sooty tides,
and upon the slope of those ankle hills
i  quietly find uncomposed romantic poetry.