Just cups

This is just the kind of blip I do not like doing. But weekdays I am too lazy to take the camera out. So any photographic endeavour is limited to weekends. The weekdays are etched out in mundane shots, especially when little time is left at the end of the day.

Had an interesting conversation with a friend today. It began with our friend T, who is yet to get over being accused of almost being a terrorist last Sunday. The idea of creating a single label to describe a city or a people is rather naive. I mean, our perceptions differ so much. My friend, who has been living in Hyderabad for over two decades finds the old city scary and unsafe. But for us, who have been there about a dozen times, it has been most inviting. The old coffee shops with sugary and milky coffee served in white cups, old men reading newspapers well into the day, fruit sellers engaging in friendly banter, even a sort of welcoming feeling for us with our large cameras. .. everything has endeared me to the old city.

I remember one morning quite a long time back, sitting in the courtyard of the famous (and now infamous, after the bomb blast) Mecca Masjid with a million pigeons fluttering all around, pigeon feeders freely going right to the middle of a grey ocean of wings to feed the birds. No one seemed to bother the other. There were little children, elderly people, families, all soaking in the slowness of a Sunday morning. People on their way to prayer or back from it.

Perhaps I was relaxed then, perhaps I was only ignorant, perhaps I only imposed the state of my mind upon the scene I witnessed. And so, I saw peace and calmness. I saw people living their lives and not rushing like blind mice. Every time I have been to the old city, it has only been encouraging. It has not been difficult to connect with people. What if I had seen Hitchcock when I was young and developed an almost irreparable antipathy and fear for those pigeons? Would I have felt the same way? So much of what we feel has much to do with our state of mind and to form overly general opinions is perhaps being a bit too self-indulgent.

I would imagine only a small percentage of people are the miscreants who bring disrepute to their kind, if I may say so. If we are unlucky to have encountered them we often tend to form inflexible stereotypes, thereby making us more akin to them than we would like to think.

Anyway, it's only cups today!