Act of Creation Begins with Boredom
You need to be bored, you need to be bored for so long that you finally get up and try filling up the empty spaces in the world with something interesting. I think that’s how art begins.
I used to write and photograph even before I arrived in Mcleodganj, and then circumstances lead me to spending most of my time alone. I was spending my time without any friends, living in an absolutely silent place for five months in the second half of 2014.
For most of the days, I spoke for less than 10–15 minutes, and my mother’s used to be the only call on my phone. I didn’t have anything to talk about, or anyone to talk. All I had was just myself, and it was a time before I started writing on Instagram, or did something with my photography. It was a time of absolute joblessness, a time where I felt incredibly incomplete within, and for the first time I had nothing to distract myself from these realisations. Even the Internet was really bad.
And this was the moment during July October 2014, when I started writing with a whole lot more intensity, started clicking each and everything, it was like I was so bored by my own existence, by the world around me, and bored in the absolute sense that I felt everything including me was incomplete, and I had a job in my hand to complete these parts with my own imaginations, my stories, my visuals.
And this is where the first creative shift came; I started writing and photographing all the time, because I was bored all the time. And slowly I started feeling complete, my cracks were being filled by my imaginations, and it felt good, the more it felt good, the more I loved being bored. For it taught me more about the world, more about the people around me, more about myself. Because I was learning to entertain myself without any external influence but my own thoughts, and vision.
And that’s when I began writing excessively, finally took up photography seriously, and eventually found myself becoming more confident, because I felt I had the superpower to complete this world around me, for myself. And so I learned that you can’t be an artist without being absolutely bored with everything around you.
And as photography, and writing became my mediums, I started creating these small bubbles worlds for me. I brought them together, experimenting with my pictures and poems. Everything I clicked was being perceived in a different manner through my words. The same mountains in front of my house had become a treasure trove of stories in my imagination. And with every picture of them, went a different story. Between all the boredom of those five months, I was slowly finding the ways to alter the realities that weren’t enough for me.
And this lead to the creation of my instagram account, the way it is at the moment. While I love to collect stories and experiences, I sometimes love to create them as well. For I believe that a landscape in all its might contains a plethora of stories that aren’t visible to the naked eyes, and through our imaginations, all that we are doing is giving the world around us a life, making it breathe, treating it as a person that changes their appearance on a daily basis.
So as the days went by, the mountains moved for me, deserts became a lady swaying on the tunes of breeze, rivers became oceans of mystical tales, ocean were naughty kids jumping around to gobble up the sun in the sky.
And there, somewhere in between, I ended up saving myself.
