Bhutan in Bangalore, through the eyes of a passer-by

Get a glimpse of the raw and earthy Bhutan, right here in Bangalore. It’s not the monasteries, young lamas walking on steep mountains, or an aerial shot of Thimpu, Bhutan’s capital city, that you will see.

Yes, there’s much spirituality in these places, too. But photographer Shibu Arakkal chose to, instead, capture the spirituality trapped in the “other” Bhutan. The olive foliage and their sepia barks, the constant aquamarine sky and a lush tranquil land.

Bangalore-based Arakkal shot these images while passing by the country in May. “That’s how the title of the show emerged, too. ‘Passing By’ has several meanings. It is literal because my assistant and I hired a four-wheel drive and covered almost the entire length of the country by road. I stuck the camera out of the window and kept clicking. Some of these images, therefore, have the feel of you zipping past Bhutan’s countryside. The other reason is more philosophical. After my daughter was born, I felt the need to pause, to think of the life that is passing me by,” says Arakkal.

For Arakkal, it was as much a journey of personal rediscovery as it was an exploration of technique used in clicking the photographs. Being a photographer who loves a good challenge, Arakkal swapped his digital camera for the now-almost-obsolete traditional film camera halfway through the journey. “A friend got this camera from Dubai. It’s got a mind of its own. It allows you to do stuff like pinhole photography, etc, but you can’t control much of how the photos turn out,” he says.

He is, however, proud of the results. “Pictures taken with a film camera have a soul. Digital photos somehow lack that,” Arakkal says. He has also taken the liberty of terming some of his images as ‘photoimpressionist’. “It’s this vague new term people have been playing around with. But they have not been able to nail it with the actual description. To put it quite simply, it has to do with the blurs in the photos that look like brush strokes,” he says.

Technically, Arakkal says he had the most fun in “going back to the basics of photography”. “Pouring your heart out into the pictures at the level of simplicity is the challenge. And doing that using a film camera is a bigger challenge. These days, you have other problems. You don’t find a film very easily. While having a process done, you have to wait up to a month. But I enjoyed it all. It gave me the kick of rediscovering the knowledge all over again,” he says.

While in Bhutan, he experienced how the natives are rooted by their faith in God and the king in the typical manner of the old-world charm. “This kind of journey helps one rediscover things in a very short span of time. For me, it might also have been because I was taking on a travel project after 7-8 years,” says Arakkal. Bhutan has reinforced everything that he ever believed in, he says.

The collection of 21 photographs will be on display at Sublime, The Collection, UB City between 11 am and 8 pm from September 20 to October 2. Call 22711488 for more details.