Heartbreak Hotel

I’ve been told that my blogs are too long, so I’m going to write this real short.

After a near cardiac-failure (read: hard-disk failure – those I suppose are synonymous for a photographer) last week, I was backing-up my images today on an external hard drive and came across this photograph which I had made in late January. I remember so clearly – that day had been disastrous to say the least, nothing seemed to be working out, everything was going wrong – an affaire de couer totally messed up. I was mad at the whole world (okay, okay, just her) and thought that maybe a photo shoot would put me in a better frame of mind (as it always does).

So I stepped out of my house with thoughts of wandering around and returning home with a CF card filled with great images, and my heart filled with gay abandon. The moment I exited my gate, I saw this picture of Sai Baba (an Indian guru, yogi, and fakir who is regarded by both Hindu and Muslim devotees as a saint) hanging on a tree. Now for the surprising bit – this particular tree is not more than 10 feet from my exit and I must have crossed it possibly a few thousand times, but yet I’d never seen this picture there.

For a photographer who prides himself on being observant, this is not only inexplicable, but also unpardonable. One out of two ain’t bad, so I won’t pardon myself, but explain I shall. That cold, winter day in January (Hemingwayesque?) I was feeling low, dejected, rejected, abandoned by God (yes, that is extreme emotion, I know) and how I felt “allowed” me to see this picture of a “discarded God” which I’d quite literally been blind to all these years. On that day, my innermost thoughts, feelings and emotions of angst and pain determined what I saw, and not the other way around. I’d written a blog earlier, “What you feel, not what you see” (http://debeshsharma.com/2012/03/what-you-feel-not-what-you-see/). Maybe the opposite is true – is what we see, a manifestation of how we feel? Conundrum?

Since I said that this blog will be short, I will keep my promise, and will answer that question later. And if you don’t already know how I felt that day, here it is:

“Well, since my baby left me
I found a new place to dwell
It’s down at the end of Lonely Street
At Heartbreak Hotel.”