Life is not a (b)rat race!

                                                By Sutirtha Saha

Some days back, Aparajita approached me to write an article for her blog. “Me?” I asked, “What do you want me to write?” She said “Anything.” So I thought for days and finally did some freewheeling .Hope you folks like it.

First, for some introductions. I am Sutirtha and I am happy to meet you too. My job limits me to a computer most of the time (except walking around to colleagues’ desks to exchange some gossip, which more often than not, does not end up being fruitful exercises, both having read the same Hyderabad Times) and lugging up and down the stairs to the cafeteria to catch up on lunch. Apart from that, my work life is mostly limited to binaries and we pride ourselves in producing state of the art cutting, bleeding, leading edge technology that makes people even lazier.

On the home front, I have two great kids and a great wife. All three of them are low maintenance folks (well, not quite so, the younger kid is very demanding but becomes quiet once I hand over my mobile phone to him in exasperation – he then spends time watching Doraemon on it or playing some games) and it is quite humdrum on the life front as well.

In short, it’s a humdrum life with an AC in my bedroom to take care of the heat in summer and a geyser in the bathroom to take care of the water in winter, a bank balance to take care of every month’s expenses and an “owned” home to take care of middle class uncertainties. So then, if life is so gnawingly routine, what’s there to write about?

Well, lots actually and I would dedicate the next few bytes to that. It was precisely during the course of this humdrum existence on a trip to a tulip field in Redmond in 2011 due to the insistence of a colleague that I happened to take a photo with my point-and-shootthat I liked.

Figure 1: Tulip Garden, Skaggit, Redmond (April 2011)

I came back to India from that trip, troubled. I took a good shot but I did not understand why the photo attracted me. A neighbor was conducting a one-day workshop on photography with a visiting photo guru around that time and I jumped at that opportunity. I realized after that all about rule of thirds, framing, composition, shutter speed, ISO.

After that there was no looking back. I lapped up Scott Kelby, Michael Freeman, Jeff Smith and a lot of other folks. I upgraded my camera to a Canon 550D ( an entry level DSLR), subscribed to photo magazines and photo blogs, read up photo critiques, bought Lightroom and Photoshop Elements. Very soon, I would be found rushing to the balcony with my camera on a stormy day to get the perfect shot:

Figure 2: Lightning strike on IBM building (April 2012)

I came across some bird photographers and they invited me to a bird shooting expedition. It needed waking up at 4:30 am, meeting up at 5 am and leaving for a forest around 90 kilometers from my home. As we parked our car in the wee hours of the morning, I realized that with a weak signal on my mobile and no GPS, if we lost our way, there was no way of getting back to the parked car. Getting to shoot birds in the wild for the first time was very disappointing. My friends were shooting birds for years and their equipment were far more sophisticated ones than the ones I was carrying. I had taken almost 600 shots, with only 10 or so photos coming out really presentable. But it really opened up my understanding about birds – I could differentiate an egret from a heron and a green bee eater from a cotton pygmy goose. I realized that there are a lot of varieties of kingfishers apart from the ones popularized on beer cans by the Mallya Empire. I upgraded to some better lenses and learned techniques of taking sharper photographs.

I started enjoying the various forms of photography – portraits, nature, landscape, macro, street photography – you name it, I had tried my hand in it.  I made friends with a few enthusiastic folks who were equally interested in learning photography and we would often meet before dawn and drive to some place to photograph some new birds, some new aspects of dawn or some aspects of humanity. Life is not a humdrum rat race (or brat race?) to the finish anymore. Deadlines are still important but what holds more importance for me is the wish to catch something more interesting, something that I have not captured still.

“I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough

Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades

Forever and forever when I move…”

Figure 3: The dawn breakers (February 2013)

Author's Bio- Note:

I am Sutirtha, a computer engineer, employed with a MNC, living in Hyderabad. I am interested in photography, writing and have contributed to many Chicken Soup for the Soul collections. When I am not shooting birds or landscapes, I can be found reading or watching some nice classic movie or playing with my kids.

Sutirtha Saha(photo blog:  http://www.facebook.com/fotosynthesizer)