What lies beneath the Patina of city life!

As we traverse through our daily life we come across millions of images, but we only observe the large macro picture of success stories like Bill Gates (Microsoft) Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet and Mark Zuckerberg – our success stereotypes are so reassuringly confirmed. The larger than life biographers of these people their moralistic messages, their astronomic wealth and clumsy philanthropic pursuits leave us gasping in awe. They also tend to highlight our human inequities, because we compare and want to emulate our lives with these rich and famous people. Therein lies the greatest paradox, because a sense of the real is missing in these portraits. In our daily journey there are millions of other lives and stories which we ignore at our peril and do not give a second glance. The small men the struggling working class, those obscure individuals whose creative resilience and mere shadowy existence oppose the mechanization of our hearts, minds and soul. Tragically it is this real life, up close, with misery, discomfort and waste with a compulsive human side to it that lies beneath the patina of a mega polis. If we can only give a second glance to these images that have a muted melancholic sepia tone that keeps the grain from showing the larger narrative of life. Growing up in the ghettos the complicated & intense is the only way of coping. These ordinary people are never fleshed out, the back stories of struggling people who can rarely afford to bring gifts for their children – but who never forget to fight a daily battle to feed them and clothe them. Poverty is their greatest handicap, and when the laughter of day dies out, there right images fill the small by lanes where manic depressions dissolves into pain and palpable desperation. if we can grasp the extent of their impoverishment it can reveal a lucid portrait that delves deep into the abstraction of obsessive misery. Neurosis and pain are so lucid that their back stories always carry dark undertones of tragedy waiting around every corner. But the rich and famous of this world have scaled up their lives to such dizzy heights of affluence from which poverty ceases to look tragic. Millions of dollars are spent religions to propagate Christianity, Islam etc but by spreading it like a disease you cannot literate their misery. You don’t require meditation or prayer – but true spirituality with compassion and strong empathy can save them from bottomless pit of misery - Vinay Kumar>