I made this video with my Instax mini Evo Cinema Premium, or something like that. This is my latest toy, and a camera that I really enjoy lugging around. The best part of this camera, is that it has an ‘era dial.’ I think I used the 1980 Era setting for this video. I made this video on a rainy day, looking out of my home office window on the 18th floor of my apartment block. The trees in front of my home have disappeared and replaced by concrete.

The main point is something else, however.

This area was a flourishing forest three decades ago. Now, we have a concrete jungle. I love the environment but when I look out of the window, I must admit that by living in this area, I contribute to the forest’s disappearance.

This is what humans do!!

Read a book called ‘The Burning Earth,’ by Sunil Amarth.

We are all guilty. We are guilty as hell. All we can do, is to minimise the damage we do to the world by living responsibly. And we must oppose war, which creates massive environmental damage.

Mea culpa.

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The Burning Earth

Normally, I wait until I upload a video to YouTube before posting anything here. But hey, Substack autouploads to YouTube, but not as a Shorts video.

The opening lines of the song, “Pale Blue Eyes” inspired the title of this video, except I changed the ‘Sometimes….” to “somewhere..”

I was walking to a rendezvous with my college batchmates in Gurgaon, where I live, when I conceived of this video.

I was walking in Cyberhub, Gurgaon, and Cyberhub (the party zone) is next to Cybercity (the office zone). Office goers often visit restaurants and pubs in Cyberhub after work, while others visit to shop, eat, drink, and socialize.

I returned home around 1 am that night, slightly sozzled. We discussed the world’s problems without letting the world’s problems touch us.

As I walked to ‘The Drunken Botanist,’ I shot short videos on my Google Pixel 10, capturing people walking aimlessly toward restaurants and bars. All the while, I kept thinking, ‘Shit, hell. Schoolgirls died in Iran. People are dying there, as they are in Sudan, the Congo, Xinjiang, Burma…. And, we are walking along to the party, as though all is well with the world.’

To quote the lead character in the movie, “Three Idiots,” - ‘Alll izzz vell.’ Our government jailed - and recently released - the great man, Sonam Wangchuk, who inspired the movie. Sonam Wangchuk is a great man and one of the world’s great environmentalists, yet when he protested on an issue, the government deemed him a threat to national security.

‘Alll izzzz not vell.’

I don’t have war videos, so I downloaded a few from Envato, and created a few AI videos using Envato. This video, you see, is a ‘mixed media’ video, with music from Epidemic Sound.

Yes, somewhere there’s a party. Somewhere, there’s a war.

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Do you see that magnificent building? That’s where I worked many years back, when I lived in Calcutta (now called Kolkata). It is an old colonial building on Strand Road, next to the Hooghly River, and near Calcutta’s iconic Howrah Bridge.

Colonial buildings dot the city, and many road names still recall the colonial past. After all, Job Charnock is said to have founded the metropolis in the early 18th century.

Yet, many buildings are rotting and, unless preserved and repaired, will collapse. The smell of death emanates from these magnificent old buildings. I detest our colonial past, but the Brits left Calcutta - and other parts of the country - with some magnificent structures.

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Substack Live sucks when you are on the road. It is truly horrible. We have much to improve in India, no doubt, but we have good internet connection in most places. There can only be a problem with Substack, resulting in choppy connections.

There is a video!! You see me sitting with a man and a few of the women from the Santhal tribes. The Santhals consider themselves distinct from Bengalis and speak their own language. Thankfully, they also speak Bengali, so I sat with the women chatting in Bengali. My Bengali is not great but good enough to get by, with occasional lapses into Punjabi, Hindi and Chinese.

The men below are Baul singers - wandering mystic minstrels whose music blends mystical influences from Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sufism. The video below has horrible audio. I did not attach any audio enhancer to my phone, so I hope my GoPro recorded better audio. What does this mean? It means a YouTube video and a few posts will follow in due course.

This is not a hi-res video, to protect Substack’s servers!

There is also a short section showing you Rabindranath Tagore’s Family Home

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Lodi Gardens contains the tombs of Sikandar Lodi, a king of the Lodi Dynasty, a nobleman of the same dynasty, and one tomb from the era of the Sayyid Dynasty.

The dynasties of the Delhi Sultanate, in order, are:

1. The Mamluk, or Slave, Dynasty

2. The Khalji/Khilji Dynasty

3. The Tughlaq Dynasty

4. The Sayyid Dynasty

The Lodi Dynasty

The Sayyid Dynasty kings had almost no money, so they abdicated and lived out their retirement in a tiny town called Badaun. The Lodi Dynasty was the last dynasty of the Sultanate before the Turkic-Uzbek-Afghan warlord, Babur, traipsed into the subcontinent and established the Mughal Dynasty in 1526 CE.

I had taken a bunch of students for a photography walk and intended to make it a Substack live, but was warned off!

It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon. The fog had lifted; the sky was blue, and pollution levels were down, and people were out enjoying the day. Some picnicked, others sat by the stream holding each other cozily, and some played badminton. A young lad chatted with me when I was recording another video, proudly telling me he plays kabaddi.

It was superb to watch people in the sun, spending quality time together rather than wandering through a mall, gazing at their mobile devices.

There is hope for India yet!

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