ಭರತ | bharath

what my mind produces and my eyes perceives

[antharmukhi]

A Room for the Inner Life

there is a certain kind of silence that lives in a studio. The kind of silence that listens. Walk into it, and the air itself feels thicker, perhaps, with the dust of dried charcoal and the scent of coffee drunk at three in the morning from a glass that has not yet been washed.And sometimes, someone else steps into the room, the rarest gift: they see it not just with their eyes, but with their…

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[antharmukhi]

[antharmukhi]

~

Beauty, at this scale, behaves like a force; it grips, it insists. It does not ask to be admired.

You arrive thinking you have come to see it, but very quickly you understand that you have been called here to be seen.

It does not comfort; it confronts.

It takes away your sense of scale. Mountains rise not to inspire but to correct. To make you understand, how little of you is required for the world to continue.

And in that confrontation, every ordinary thing becomes unbearably precious, and alongside that walks its shadow: the steady, undeniable knowledge that all of it is temporary.

How ruthless that the longing for life and awareness of death rise in the same breath.

Nothing comes to us without demanding a small, irrevocable slice of our life. The cost was the person I was before I stood here.

[antharmukhi]

~

There is a certain kind of silence that lives in a studio. The kind of silence that listens. Walk into it, and the air itself feels thicker, perhaps, with the dust of dried charcoal and the scent of coffee drunk at three in the morning from a glass that has not yet been washed.

Here, no medium outranks another. Paint is not superior to ink. Ink is not superior to thread. Leather is not superior to clay. They mingle without hierarchy, gossiping across tables and shelves. A photograph borrows a mood from a poem. A poem steals a rhythm from a song. Ideas migrate freely, crossing borders as though borders never existed at all.

And sometimes, someone else steps into the room, the rarest gift: they see it not just with their eyes, but with their whole self. They stand before what you have made, and something shifts in their face and tilts their head, the way people do when they’re trying to recognise a feeling they didn’t expect to meet. They fall silent. Something passes between the work and the observer. Something that lived inside you now lives, however briefly, inside another human being.

The room expands in that moment.

Yet the deepest truth of the space is this: the studio would still matter if no one ever entered it. Because the real alchemy is not in the viewing, it was always in the doing. In the simple, stubborn act of giving form to something that did not previously exist.

To sit alone in this space, and create all by myself, communicating in a deeply private way with the world, and to live a grand inner life [. . .] that was always what I had sought.

[antharmukhi]

ಓದಿನ ಸುಖ [. . .]

ಹೃದಯಕ್ಕೆ ತಾಕುವ ಬರಹವನ್ನು ಆರಿಸಿ.

ಅದನ್ನು ಹೃದಯದ ಅಡಿಗಟ್ಟಿಗೆ ಕೊಂಡೊಯ್ಯುತ್ತೇನೆ.

ಆ ಬರಹದ ಸುತ್ತ ನನ್ನೊಳಗೆ ಚಿಂತನೆಗಳ ಹೊಳೆ ಹರಿಯಲು ಶುರುವಾಗುತ್ತದೆ,

ಒಂದ ನಂತರ ಒಂದು ಅಲೆ:ಭಾವನೆ, ಪ್ರಶ್ನೆ, ಅನುಭವ, ನೆನಪುಗಳ ಪ್ರವಾಹ.

ಹೀಗೆ ಹರಿದು ಹರಿದು, ಚಿಂತನೆಗಳೇ ತಮ್ಮ ಹೆಜ್ಜೆ ನಿಲ್ಲಿಸುವ ಕ್ಷಣ ಒಂದು ಬರುತ್ತದೆ, ನದಿ ಕಡಲ ಸೇರುವ ಕ್ಷಣದಂತೆ //

ಆಗ ಮನಸ್ಸು ಮೌನವಾಗುತ್ತದೆ.

ಗಡಿಯಾರದ ಸೂಜಿಗಳು ಸಾಗುತ್ತಿದ್ದರೂ, ಅವು ನನ್ನವರೆಗೆ ತಲುಪುವುದೇ ಇಲ್ಲ.

ಮಂದವಾಗಿ, ಮೃದುವಾಗಿ,

ಬಂಡೆಗಳ ನಡುವೆ ತೊರೆಯು ದಾರಿ ಕಂಡುಕೊಳ್ಳುವ ಹಾಗೆ!

ಪುಸ್ತಕದಲ್ಲಿನ ಪದಗಳ ನಡುವಿನ ನಿಶ್ಶಬ್ದ ನನ್ನೊಳಗೆ ಹರಿಯುತ್ತದೆ.

[antharmukhi]

Catharsis

Civilisation learned early that the human heart cannot store storms forever. So it built doors for them. Once a year, every culture lets the sky fall inside the body.Humans become gods, rage is given ankle bells. Grief is painted in vermilion. Fear is taught to dance until it forgets its own name.For a few sacred hours, the rules loosen their grip. Catharsis is not healing. It is the moment the…

Catharsis

[antharmukhi]

[antharmukhi]

ಅಂತರಂಗದ ಒಕ್ಕಲಿಗ [. . .]

ಅನಂತವಾದ ಕಾಲಪ್ರವಾಹದಲ್ಲಿ,

ಸ್ಥಾವರದೆದುರು ಜಂಗಮವಾಗಿ ॥

ಅಂತರಂಗದ ಆಳ ಪಾತಾಳಗಳ ಶೋಧನೆ,

ಹೃದಯ ಹೊಲವನ್ನು ಹದಮಾಡುವ ಸಂವರ್ಧನೆ.

[antharmukhi]

[antharmukhi]

The mountains said nothing—and that was the lesson.

I walk with ice beneath my feet and a sky soaked in lavender above, each step echoing into a vastness that asks nothing in return. I am not here to conquer peaks or to trace my worth in altitudes. I walk to meet a version of myself that doesn’t speak, but listens—to wind threading through stone, to silence settling like snow, to the silence that asks for nothing——until all that remains is…

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[antharmukhi]

To burn. To be light. To return to ash.

To hold this small circle of warmth is to hold the world. The gathered dead branches, are now a brief, golden heart. It beats. It speaks in whispering cracks. The flame trembles; the dark leans in. Soon it will fade. Its final, tender truth— it was here, it was warm, and now it is gone. That is the story: to burn, to shine, to return to ash.

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[antharmukhi]

~

ಹಂಬಲಿಸಿದರೆ ಹಂಬಲಿಸಿದಷ್ಟು, ದೂರಸರಿಯೇ ಮುಕ್ತಿ!

ಒಲಿದರೆ ಒಲಿದಷ್ಟು ಬಿಗಿಯುತ್ತದೆ ಬಂಧನದ ಕುತ್ತಿ!

ಆಡುವವನು ಬೇರೆ, ಆಟ ಬೇರೆ ಅಲ್ಲ.

ಹಾಡುವವನು ಬೇರೆ, ಗೀತೆ ಬೇರೆ ಅಲ್ಲ.

ಕರ್ತೃ (doer) ವೇ ಕೃತ್ಯ (action) [. . .]

ಅಲ್ಲಿ ಬಂಧನವೂ ಇಲ್ಲ, ಮುಕ್ತಿಯೂ ಇಲ್ಲ.

The day you start chasing freedom, you declare yourself a prisoner. [. . .]

Bondage and release grow from the same sleep.

Dream a cage, and the mind invents a door.

Freedom is not arrived at.

It is recalled, like a word known before language, like a body that never forgot.

It was never bound.

[antharmukhi]

Out here, a thing is only what it is. The cold is simply cold; the fire, simply warmth. There is no subtext, only text. It makes thinking a cleaner act.

I remember looking down from a high-rise once, at the endless circuitry of city lights.

The great project of Civilisation, which was nothing but a refusal. We refused to adapt ourselves to our environment. Instead, we made the environment to suit us. So we built cities, roads, vehicles, and machinery; a magnificent act of will. But then, like a bored king, we forgot when to stop. The more we improve our surroundings to make our lives easier, the more complicated we’ve made it.

And so our children are born into this Rube Goldberg contraption of our own making. Their sentence? Ten to fifteen years of formal instruction, just to learn how to navigate this complex and hazardous habitat.

The great irony is this: We refused to bend to the rhythms of the earth. So we built a new world, a clockwork world, and now we are forced to bend to its rhythms instead.

And so a life is chopped into little, digestible pieces. You adapt from sleeper to commuter to worker to consumer to commuter to sleeper again.

Out here, my only task is to be a creature within the true natural world, whole and un-divided. The simplicity is staggering.

In my longing for an exit. I’ve realised that the exit is not a gate in a wall, because the wall is partly made of me. Its clock ticks in my veins. Its hunger for more is a ghost in my own desires.

How do I exit a maze when I am one of its walls?

[antharmukhi]

When you’ve felt too much to keep feeling, and so you grow still, where the grandeur of the world humbles you into silence.

You no longer react; you receive. This is not numbness, but the distilled afterglow of emotions. The mountain doesn’t stir the heart; it steadies it. What awakens is beyond emotion —something eternal.

It seeks no meaning, only allows magnificence to be. The quiet that remains when wonder is complete.

[antharmukhi]

~

The skies hang low, heavy with unshed rain, and from the distant grasslands, a faint call of the peacock travels across fields - loud and insistent, their cries echoing.

For me their voices had become part of the background - familiar sometimes even tiresome. But a stranger, from elsewhere, stopped by, as though the sound had split open his heart; his face lit up with the kind of wonder as if trying to catch the shape of the call in the wind, his eyes wide, his breath caught in the simple wild music.

“Ah,” I thought, watching him, if only I could hear the peacock as he did.

How quietly we forfeit beauty to the drag of monotony; yet what is life if not this ceaseless circling of the same hour, the same cry, the same rain-laden sky? And still, in the smallest rupture of the ordinary—in a stranger’s widened eyes, in the sudden shiver of recognition—the familiar is made foreign again, and the world startles us back into wonder.

[antharmukhi]

[antharmukhi]

~

What is more generous than a window?

It holds the sunset like a sacred painting, then gives it back to the sky.

It frames the weather—a silent, moving portrait— and asks no opinion on the art.

It lends its shoulder to the rain for weeping, and to the sunlight for its golden nap.

It listens to the wind rehearse its old stories, lets shadows pass without question, and cradles the night until dawn knocks gently.

A window never keeps what it has seen.

It only gives, and keeps on giving— world after world, hour after hour.