070 - New Horizon
Season 5 beckons
This house is over 60 years old. Today we celebrated the last Vishu it will see under its roof.
Its truss work has gradually ceded space to termites, roots of the trees around have crept in and the floors crack like scars of an old wound upon such infringements. The doors don’t shut unless you orchestrate violence, windows refuse to lock for some unsaid rebellion.
This house, that always took its place in the imaginations of three generations for the word home, has been ceasing to be one since a while; soon it will cease to be a house.
With it will leave from the world a certain cycle of life — a man’s worldly aspirations and their fulfilments and eventual denouement. In its time, aided by feudal privileges and material desires it accounted for many firsts, ushered in the winds of modernity with every setting decade.
To believe in a Shangri La that is not lost to a past, but that lies within grasp ahead. That was the spirit that hung over it; foreseeing a new horizon and moving gainly towards it, despite inhibitions.
In a similar spirit, welcome to season 5 of Bombay Daak’s letters.
I was chuffed to find that David Carbonara also shares a special place for Mad Men’s Lost Horizon (don’t miss the two tracks he released last year around the episode).
“But the special thing about Engadine is what it does even to mediocre photographs, the ones you would take through a car window with a cheap phone to post on Facebook. It just looks relentlessly beautiful” — On Engadine by
(Hiking Engadine looks tempting!)“He kept everything, as if he were keeping it so that one day someone would go through it and see the kind of breadth of his whole imagination…”, actor Geoffrey Holder’s extensive archive of paintings
A Parcel of Land, Pratyush Paul’s photo essay on Morena, a village near Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh
Dear Alice without Chobani is a utopia of its own kind
Bombay’s Marine Drive via Uma Mahadevan Dasgupta