of Endings & Creators
a photographer, a magazine, a restaurant
I was stirred, these past few days, to consider things coming to an end. It was nothing dramatic, nor did it feel so; but the thoughts rolled out and the cause for the spark itself feels slightly more significant now.
Endings: Thoughts on what passes, and marking an end.
Mother, Creator: A maternal photo project spanning years.
Looking for latitude: A new magazine for a new world order.
This week, that year: Black, or white?
With: Brand Zohran, AI in China, Bahubali Eternal.
🎧 Prefer to listen? Hit play above to hear this week’s dispatch in my mellifluous tones.
1. Endings
Or, things that pass.
I was moved to think of endings this week. The catalyst may not seem deep and profound; yet, stewing on it, and articulating this, could suggest more depth than how it began. But there it is- endings first have beginnings, and the two might not always feel like they belong.
We experience endings in small, significant, silly, sentimental, simple, and different ways.
When a good book finishes. What an epic tome was building up to, or simple story was charmingly meandering toward. You waited for the final act, the grand dénouement. Then, just like that, it’s done- and you’re left bemoaning the loss of a world you swam in, indulged in, got lost in, for weeks on end.
A TV show wraps. Even when a season ends, and you’re left wanting more, clinging to that feeling it inspired, despairing that you have to wait months for the characters to resume their journey, and you with them. Or when the show comes to an end entirely, like the feeling of emptiness many felt when FRIENDS or Game Of Thrones came to their final hurrahs.
When a trip ends. And you touchdown. Glad to be back home, but already wistful for the slice of the world you left behind; or wistful for the next, as yet unknown, destination.
Yet, all these examples, they are finite. You know at the outset a completion is on the cards, the offering is limited. It’s a pact with an end date.
Other endings you wish for. Look forward to. Hasten, even. A broken relationship. A dreary work project. A slow morning dump. A bad meal. A dull conversation. A vacuous dinner party. A bitter winter.
Some endings are less forgiving. They might come, seemingly, from nowhere. No suggestion of a finish, no hint of it being over, no warning. Abrupt. Brutal.
It could be when a favourite sportsperson retires. You know it is inevitable, it had to happen… but you don’t consider it till it is upon you. And then it tears your inner fan apart.
A break up that’s like a gut punch. Vicious, unexpected, leaving you hapless and helpless. A sense of emptiness, a vacuum. Despair, even, before any stray light makes a suggestion of illuminating your days again.
A beloved teacher announces she is leaving school. No reason, no logic can mitigate the disappointment, the sense of abandonment. She was a shepherd, a friend. How can she leave the trail thus unguided?
When a beloved restaurant shuts down. A favourite haunt, the kind that brings comfort and delight, conversations and silences and laughter, in easy, endless servings. One you have been to for years, and years. You have taken friends, family, out-of-towners, colleagues, your offspring, your parent. Birthday meals. Communal gluttony. Sneaky office lunches. Farewells from work. Goodbyes to the city. Welcomes to the city. Late night drunken hunger.
An ordinary place, a special place. Round tables, and square. Lazy susans spinning slowly. Bright lights. Pokey washrooms. Bustling, or quiet. Ambience is secondary. Food is not.
You see the menu change. Reprints, digital orders, QR codes, tablets… yet, you order the same way- you don’t need any menu. But ordering was a learning curve. It had to be honed, before becoming habit. Language was a barrier, an amusement, a frustration. You built your order, you explained it. Immediate understanding from waiters became the expectation, then the norm. How rarely the order deviated. Then a waiter left, a chef changed, the flow ended. An ending within a continuum. You relearn, reshape, reestablish.
All the while, the food keeps coming. The same tiny plates, the little bowls, soup spoons, black chopsticks, steel forks on request, wet tissue packets. Lager in green bottles. Coconut water. Warm water in beer mugs. And the dishes. Steamed, fried, cooked, barbecued. Cucumber, potato, beans, chicken, pork, mutton, cabbage, eggplant, celery, peanuts, more potato, rice, noodles. And almost everywhere, the chillies. The red, the dark, the bright; fresh, dry, oily; heating, numbing, stinging, burning, churning, infusing.
This was Sichuan food, and as you might have gathered from this sudden dive, it was an ending that is recent, and real. I suppose this is my way of trying to not write a ‘personal blog’, yet mark the end of an era. This, our epicentre of spice, friendship and gluttony was Sichuan Village, a long-running eating joint on Mosque Street in Singapore’s Chinatown. It shut on the fourteenth of November. Long may it burn in our memories.
2. Mother, Creator
I sometimes marvel at our ability to document every milestone, every day, every inanity of our lives because we have a virtually infinite image-making machine in our pockets at any given time.
I mostly enjoy how this allows us to preserve little moments, stacking up for nostalgia, when we may not entirely trust our own fickle memories.
I occasionally, already, enjoy when I touch moments long gone, with the flick of a thumb.
I often think we might run the risk of living life through these lenses; of the need to balance recording a moment, with living it.
Annie Wang is a Taiwanese photographer who has laboured on a project that traces such memory-making without making it functional. Her work, ‘The Mother as a creator’ is a striking series of photographs of Annie with her son over a period of nearly 20 years. These crafted moments in time are somehow both staged, and intimate.
Motherhood is a long-term process full of a myriad of complex feelings. This complexity cannot be expressed solely by saccharine images of Mother and Child, nor by the image of the Mother Incarnate willingly sacrificing herself for the sake of her children. All of these stereotypes of Motherhood are for me a tedious, unavoidable harangue which offers me no consolation. It is from this I derive the original motivation for this series.
I share these photos here, but urge you to visit her site, where she explains her motivations behind the project; but also for the briefest of captions each photo has, windows into a journey that is both hers, and his.
Brand Zohran
Character, Colour, Candidate: The bold and friendly ZOHRAN brand.
You’d be hard-pressed to have escaped the rise & rise of Zohran Mamdani, NYC’s new Mayor-elect. Wherever your politics lie, or your levels of attraction to his persona, his campaign could hardly be missed. I took a look at how his brand identity shaped it, and was shaped. That’s over at The Colour Bar, my newsletter that swirls in the collision of content, creativity, media & entertainment.
Looking for latitude.
The Equator is a new magazine of politics, culture and art, and one I’d like to watch. It wants to challenge existing- and perpetuated- notions of global events seen largely through a Western lens. “In a post-American era, the task of a new magazine is to engage the rich variety of this historical moment on its own terms, without compulsively asking ‘What does it mean for the US?’” After some initial missives, they launched proper in October, and the first batch of articles are now in the ether.
The founders include Pankaj Mishra, Mohsin Hamid, Nesrine Malik, Samanth Subramanian, and Suzy Hansen, with editing by Guardian long reads creator Jonathan Shainin. They write, in an impassioned “What We Stand For” section,
Equator is our collective response to a crisis that is as much spiritual and intellectual as it is political and economic. It is a venture that aims to create a more cosmopolitan home for thought and art than the one assigned to them by provincial Western periodicals. It also seeks to restore dignity to the concept of truth, and create a public space where the values of justice, solidarity and compassion can flourish.
This was a little film by Yto Barrada for their launch, with a old school vibe and tasty looking tropical fruit.
Across the globe, audiences are abandoning familiar sources of meaning, searching desperately for new stories to help make sense of the world. They seek not just information but transformation—fresh ways of seeing that can illuminate the darkness of our present and reveal futures worth fighting for.
We founded Equator to answer this longing.
In a time when so many of grapple with how we interface with the world around us- disappointment with mainstream media, lack of trust in our feeds, crumbling global edifices- I found this offering a possibility of hope, integrity and a worldview worth sharing. At least, that is how it feels to me. As its first wave of articles release, in the coming weeks and months we can see how it lives up to this ambition, and promise.
This week, that year.
The music video for Michael Jackson’s ‘Black or White’ premiered simultaneously in 69 countries on November 14, 1991. It reached an audience of 500 million viewers, the most ever for a music video. There was Macaulay Culkin air-guitaring and channeling his Home Alone self, the ‘rock’ music being called “garbage” by his dad, and the face-morphing toward the end that everyone was wowed by (those faces I still find familiar).
The song, the video, and its much-talked about extended end were all big- smash hits, controversial, then iconic. That extended cut with a panther and smashing cars was not something I remember ever seeing in the early heydeys of ‘cable TV’ in India, even as the video rippled through my barely-teen world back then.
The song stood for racial harmony, its multiculturalism worn proudly. Much water has flowed under, and over, that MJ bridge since. I wonder how you think the video stands up today, as our grammar of culture and expression of diversity has evolved… and our understanding of an artist marred?
Masala Peanuts
(where I share stories or tidbits I find interesting).
How AI is reshaping childhood in China: Government support and tech companies’ drive for profit fuel a rush to integrate AI tools, from robot tutors to chatbots, in education and caretaking.
If you haven’t heard of Bahubali, go look it up. A fantastical action smash hit movie from India a few years ago (in two parts). Now, we have the first look for a promised animated extension of that universe. With a coming together of some killer animation teams, it promises all the chops. (Much “it’s like Arcane” chat has ensued). Watch the teaser for ‘Bahubali Eternal’ here, with a chat with the director here.
Also, I couldn’t resist:
“everything that has a beginning has an end.”
Just loved it. Amazing