April is one of the bad months of the year. My blood pressure goes up when April arrives. The energy is drained. Creativity deserts me like rats deserting a sinking ship. I try to prime myself, and I know in the heart of my heart that it is futile.

Do you remember the Mark Twain quote? “April 1 – This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four.”

I start biting my nails. Tension builds up. April causes my ‘toes to curl up inside my shoes like tendrils of some sensitive plant’ to use a PG Wodehouse expression mutatis mutandis. All this happens involuntarily. The art of photography deserts me. Such was the situation!

I could not think of any place and situation to click good photographs. I sat at the dining table when I decided that one had to make a beginning somewhere. A step forward. With determination. And I looked at the living area and clicked. ‘Not too bad a job,’ I told myself.

That did the trick. I realized that I had to move to a place where I had not been for a long time. And at a different time of the day. It has to begin with the Upvan Lake, I told myself. Two kilometer walk to the lake at the dawn refreshed my mind. The dawn throws a different light, and the world looks beautiful. The sun was rising from behind the buildings. Silhouettes and Reflections!

My eyes were on the still water in the lake. The water was not really still, there were very small waves noticeable on the reflections of buildings. And there were circular waves as if something had dropped in the water. Reflections and Ripples, I thought. Introspection and Consequence of Action represent these two metaphorically. Do reflections cause ripples or is it vice versa?

I clicked a few photographs, maybe a dozen and turned back. And I discovered the light came better from my left side. Had I not turned and seen the beauty to which I had turned my back on, I would have missed this scene.

Moral of the story – look at the world with new eyes, with curiosity and in different light. One understands something different because the perspective changes. With the insight, I walked to the Cadbury Junction. I used to go there early in the morning, but the new insight of ‘new eyes, with curiosity and in different light’ was fresh in my mind. So, I went there at the dusk. The red light under the flyover and the white line caused by the dividing part of the Metro bridge were aspects I had not noticed earlier.

And I walked toward the Cadbury Junction. The red light had stopped vehicles which were jostling for space. A bill board of the ‘Parivahan Mantri’ (Transport Minister) showed him overlooking the scenario – I hope he does in reality too. The bridges, one of a flyover and the other of Metro, traffic jams, and high rise buildings in the background sum up the Thane City situation!

This pic brings smile. I clicked it in Solapur which has 70 thousand beedi workers. She is seen rolling beedies here. She began doing it when she was just ten, got married early, has two grandchildren who are engineers, has a small but well built home of her own. ‘Why do you roll beedies?’ I asked. She said she earns about Rs 4500 to 5000 a month, which is why. She does not know the ‘financial independence’ word, but she has experienced it. The big smile tells this story and that makes it a great picture.

Perspective in photography is all about the ‘spatial’ relationship between objects within a photo. Perspectives in life are all about the ‘special’ relationship with people in our life. What say you?

Vivek S Patwardhan

“What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.”