Photography as Darshan

Raghu Rai, a famous Indian photographer, passed away this week (26/04/2026).

Having grown up seeing his amazing photographs in newspapers and magazines it felt a bit strange to see those same images turning up on the small but all pervasive screens of the new social media. Over the past few days, while we collectively mourn his passing, friends have posted PDF copies of his book "Picturing Time" (2015) on Whatsapp; YouTube algorithms brought up some of his earlier interviews where, with his usual charm and wit, describes his own world view, the difference between "drishti", the act of seeing, and "darshan" which is much more difficult to describe: 

Kehte hain ke kann kann mein bhagvan hai. They say that God exists in every grain. This is not to say that you lift a stone and you will find God. The ability to connect. With anything and everything. Significant or mundane. Precious or ordinary. When you start caring for everything, everything around you starts caring for you in some way or the other, so you stand connected. You connect with every inch of space and respond. It’s having a complete awareness of things, and by that I mean not only the physical but also the emotional and spiritual aspect. Even a breeze blowing — what does it do to you and the entire space around you? This is what is so magical about human life and the human spirit — that some people appear from somewhere, some situations arise from somewhere to bless you with the unexpected — and that is darshan. This is the way I look at it.

It is quite amazing to think how Raghu Rai managed to turn up with his camera - almost Forrest Gump like - at almost every historical event over the past 60 years. He was there at Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri's funeral (1966); the ascent, descent and assasination of Indira Gandhi; Mother Teresa, Dalai Lama; The Bangladesh Liberation War (1971); Pokhran N-tests (1974); Operation Bluestar and Bhopal Gas Tragedy (1984), Kargil War (1999), not to mention his photo chronicles of some of India's greatest artists - Statyajit Ray, Bismillah Khan, Hariprasad Chaurasia, MS Subbalakshmi, S Balachander.

In the last set, these are my favourites :)

Oliver Sacks, Polymath

I am a sucker for obituaries.

Whenever I access magazines like the Economist or the New Yorker, this is one column I rarely miss. But last week I came across one in the Indian Express (originally, an NYT piece), and since then, I have been devouring just about everything I can find - opeds, features, and, of course, more obituraries. I found myself going all over the internet reading as many obituaries and articles I could find on one man: Oliver Sacks.

Oliver Sacks passed away a few days ago. During his 82-year life-span, he was described as a world-renowned neurologist, a world-champion weightlifter, a best-selling author, a naturalist, and a lifelong enthusiast of physical chemistry.

How many talents can the Gods bestow on one man?!?

NYT describes him as a person who - "...leapfrogged among disciplines, shedding light on the strange and wonderful interconnectedness of life — the connections between science and art, physiology and psychology, the beauty and economy of the natural world and the magic of the human imagination."

Now I find that Sacks was an old friend to another science writer I admire - Vilayanur.S. Ramachandran, author of Phantom in the Brain. In a conversation between these two profs, other famous authors are mentioned - George Gamow, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas and Peter Medawar -- all of whom, I am ashamed to admit, I had never heard before!

This must be the first time an obituary is leaving me with such long list of authors and books to read!

--------------------------------------------------------

LINKS

* Website - http://www.oliversacks.com/
* Oliver Sachs - Obituary - http://time.com/4016214/oliver-sacks-82/?xid=newsletter-brief
* http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/05/18/oliver-sacks-on-the-move/
* NYT Obit - http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/31/arts/oliver-sacks-wrote-awakenings-and-cast-light-on-the-interconnectedness-of-life.html?_r=0
* http://www.financialexpress.com/article/miscellaneous/oliver-sacks-best-selling-author-and-neurologist-dies-at-82-of-cancer/127834/
* Raghavan, RK (The Hindu) - http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/neurologist-writer-healer/article7629878.ece
* The Wire - http://thewire.in/2015/09/10/the-community-the-clinic-and-the-road-not-taken-10400/

Books:

- 1967 - On Migraine
- 1973 - Awakenings - on patients who suffered from a condition known as Encephalitis lethargica
- 1985 - The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
- 2007 book, “Musicophilia,” looked at the relationship between music and the brain
- 2001 memoir
 “Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood”
- “The Island of the Colorblind” (1997) about a society where congenital colorblindness was common, “Seeing Voices” (1989) about the world of deaf culture, and “Hallucinations” (2012), in which Sacks discussed his own hallucinations as well as those of some patients.
- gave us case studies of patients whose stories were so odd, so anomalous, so resonant that they read like tales by Borges or Calvino.
-  illnesses and disorders “can play a paradoxical role in bringing out latent powers, developments, evolutions, forms of life that might never be seen or even be imaginable in their absence.” A young woman with a low I.Q. learns to sing arias in more than 30 languages, and a Canadian physician with Tourette’s syndrome learns to perform long, complicated surgical procedures without a single tic or twitch.

Farish Jenkin's Fauna

Farish Jenkins - paleontologist and polymath, died on Nov 1, aged 72.

While reading an obituary put up by the Economist for Jenkins I was struck by awe and envy in equal measure. I awed by the fact that a man whose primary vocation was that of a soldier could also transform himself into great teacher & scientist in a totally unrelated field - paleontology. And envy towards folks who are able create an environment where you can defy categorization into narrow specialism.

As US Marine Corps captain, Jenkins trained as an artillery officer.  As an academic “hybrid”, he was anatomist, zoologist and vertebrate paleontologist in equal measure.

It is said of him that "he had no time for academic squabbles and protocol, brushing off rebukes and bureaucratic constraints. Charm was his first weapon, obstinacy his second. It was not just his clothes and vocabulary that were old-fashioned. He prized thoroughness. Unusually for modern academia, he showered praise on colleagues and deprecated his own triumphs. But he was a mighty foe when roused. He could swear like a Marine, “without repeating myself” and helped oust the abrasive Larry Summers from the Harvard presidency".

Farish Jenkins also left behind some quirky, memorable names for the new life-forms he discovered -

• Tiktaalik roseae (Tiktaalik = Inuit for a large freshwater fish) - a 375 million year olf fish with legs, a rudimentary ear and a snout for catching prey
• Gerrothorax pulcherrimus ("the most beautiful wicker chest") - An animal that opens its mouth by lifting its upper jaw - crucial to discovering the world's earliest known frog. FJ called it the ugliest animal in the world.

The entire text of Economist's memorable obituary can be accessed here.

-------------------------------------
LINKS & REFERENCES

The Economist (17 Nov., 2012) on Farish Jenkins - http://www.economist.com/news/obituary/21566602-farish-jenkins-paleontologist-and-polymath-died-november-11th-aged-72-farish-jenkins

Khybar Tabesh

Dr. Khyber Tabesh, a colleague & friend got killed today morning in Kabul.

Bad news has a way of catching you completely off-guard. This one popped up on my screen as an email from Ali Khan Yousafzai. "SAD NEWS" warned the subject-line and the brief message went on to say that we could post our condolences to Khybar's office in Afghanistan.

The matter-of-fact, almost routine tone of the message was as shocking as the news itself. Benazir Bhutto had been assassinated last week in Rawalpindi. Today another 25 people had been killed outside Lahore High Court. Was this yet another explosion, yet another futile death in Kabul? It was as if the fundamental questions had ceased to matter - how did this happen? when? why would anybody want to kill a gentle doctor??

Sitting here is Delhi, all I know for a fact is that at this moment, there is a cold room somewhere in Kabul where corpse awaits burial. It is of a person I knew just a few months ago - I had shared meals with him, cracked jokes and walked with him the colorful lanes of Sukhumvit Soi in Bangkok.

It is also the frame of a man who broke down in tears the day he passed out of Kabul Medical University, grateful for being spared the fate of those who opposed the Taliban. He had worked as an interpreter during the bleak years, helping visiting journalists with their horror stories.

When I asked him if things were looking up back home, he had said, "Well, things are improving...I guess its better to be a slave (to America) rather than be the slave of a slave".

He loved to tell everybody about how he helped Kabir Khan with the bollywood movie, Kabul Express and of his rapport with the Indian actor John Abraham.

He reminded me of characters in Khaled Hosseini's "Kite Runner"and of everything that could once again be grand and glorious about Afghanistan.

It is a pity he is no more with us. I have no idea who or what killed him. But his death certainly diminishes hope for a sad country.