WRITING AND PHOTOGRAPHY

I Wanted To See That Menhir Of Butter

Why I take so many photographs, and why you should too

Why do I take so many photographs? They helps save words, and say more than words could, too.

Picture of my daughter running along a corridor, with my mom and husband, which I used in a story where she walks out of the home and is captured and brought home by a neighbor.

The story captures the tendency of kids to shoot away like a pull-back car when you tell them to stay in a safe spot.

Picture of me with a Reagan cutout. It dates me for an American without any words from me at all.

How I threw away shame and started photographing my commonplace

I once wished a writer on Medium (USA) had taken a picture of a block of butter Costco made her buy. She had to cut it with a scale.

She also had to buy a 400-egg carton as they didn’t have anything smaller. I immediately wished she had taken a picture of both.

I wanted to see that menhir of butter, and those never ending eggs. It sounded like being as close to heaven as is possible.

Jennifer M. Wilson was writing about how to Make Costco Great Again. Here’s the link.

I would have taken a picture of the butter next to an apple so people knew how hunky it was. Here we get 400g bricks, no larger.

As it was, the missing picture made me feel so deprived, I baked this cake. Actually I baked three that day, but I photographed only this one. That missing butter block kindled my bakeaholism. I bake just like I write, all in a bunch, soon as I think it, then I try to not even ice it. A great cake needs no icing.

That’s why I take the photos, I don’t want to leave my reader curious-thirsty.

If it is a recipe, it should work even if it is just a poem. The pictures should be explanatory.

If it is a shopping trip, it should show India in all its gory glory.

Also, the photography surprises me.

I wanted this picture for the rickshaw, but I got a bonus, the man in the dhoti and kurta. These traditional clothes are becoming uncommon.

This tailoring shop interior shows so much I could never tell. Wait for it in an article of mine. When the dress is tailored, I will bring the story to you from cloth to garment, with prices. I am getting a t-shirt tailored.

Who does that? I do!

I expressly went to this place to photograph this. Not one other person on that street would take a picture of this daily sight.

This picture of a grocery shop. Are there any small shops that face narrow roads in the rest of the world? The Swastika on the weighing machine is an Indian Swastika, which is a mirror image of the German swastika.

Bales of cloth for school uniforms. Each bale is a different school with its own uniform. If only they could talk, each has given of its length to a child with its own history.

The beautiful red Kaiser buildings. There are hardly 12 of them, I think. They are in a posh part of town. I wanted to use them in a story, but couldn’t build a tale around it. I wish someone who lived in a Kaiser building would come for dental work, then I would bang out a story!

The shop sells plastics and kitchen tools. That’s a stone grinder. Anybody seen one recently? They’re great for crushing chutneys. I’m going to use this picture in an article about a great grandmother who called all sauces, mayo and dips “chutneys”

In an article about cooking a veggie stew, I included this picture because people might not have seen a coconut scraper. Or a coconut. Or know how to break one. Or a maid who will scrape one for you. Or that the excess shredded coconut must be frozen in a steel container, else it will go green.

That finger on the coconut is my father’s. He helped take the photos for the stew article. He was surprised, but not uncooperative when I said the stew poem should be complete in itself and not force you to run to three other links.

I was once asked the difference between Sari and Zari, so I created this collage where the green saree has no Zari, zari being the golden border in the brown saree. This collage is in an article where a bank manager would dress like the right side.

I also captioned this picture, saying that the left side is “mildly festive”, meaning that there are sarees which are more festive than this one.

I could have had any pie off Unsplash, but I wanted one I had eaten. That is my LaOpala (India’s Corelle) plate. The original story I wrote with that pie picture got curated.

I find it very difficult to write a story with somebody else’s photographs!

This Punjab girl picture was taken by a cousin of a friend of mine. I was hunting around for a picture of a girl in a government school uniform, and she overheard, and offered her cousin’s old uniform, and services. Punjabi girls have long hair and typical facial features, which I could never describe.

A royalty-free picture of State Bank of India, because I took it. In an article about the bank manager. Maybe outside India, SBI isn’t a common acronym?

It is easy to explain the Madras screw in my Earring clasp article, once I add a photo.

Vishwakarma Puja is the worship of machines. Is Lord Vishwakarma the God of machines, or are the Machines the God? Use the collage picture of marigold decoration of cycles and trucks to decide.

I wrote about these silly little Fryums we used to eat. I couldn’t fry them to be poofy enough, also my kids ate the better ones. So I used my daughter’s smaller fingers to make the point about looping the Fryums on the fingers and making sure you eat the Fryum and not the finger. Fryum is an Indian brand name, but with this picture I didn’t even link it.

Also, Fryum isn’t like Twizzlers. You needn’t wonder what it means if you haven’t ever seen one. I used to think Twizzlers were some kind of twiggy twisty non-vegetarian sticks for cooking on a barbecue, twisty twigs that sizzle. Twizzlers.

This was in an article about how a family superior showed me her clumsy past, and how it improved things for me. In a 2-minute read. “She’s family but she’s a superior” – bang, in goes the picture of us on Ganesh Chaturthi Festival day, and those words needn’t be used at all.

Do you know why I am not linking those articles to this one, so you can read the easily?

You needn’t read them. I am not writing anything earth-shaking or world-changing. I do not have a Coronavirus vaccine.

What I have is my camera lens. My perspective.

I have deliberately not captioned any of the pictures, because a wise old woman grumbled about not being able to read the smaller font, and I do hope she finds and reads this article.