(Photograph courtesy: Legendary photographer Raghu Rai . And photo of another Legend. Mallikarjun Mansur during his last days..)
Today, the news about the death of great photographer, Raghu Rai came up on my FB feed.. May his soul rest in peace. And that news was posted with a photo taken by him of Mallikarjun Mansur.
What came to my heartmind was the Obituray of Bhimsen Joshi written by SAeed Naqvi in Outlook magazine titled “The Voice of the Infinite”. (2011 ?) . That article too carried a photo of Bhimsen Joshi taken by Raghu Rai. That articles kind of seeped into my heartmind and stayed there.. Not long after that, i wrote a blog titled Classic Ends in which i quoted “The voice of the infinite.”..
It read “There is yet another reason why my recollections are hazy: I had given him a place in those recesses of the mind where memories reside five years ago, when he fell fatally ill. I had borne the tragedy of his departure then, placed him on the pedestal I keep in my imagination, alongside Pandit Mallikarjun Mansur, by whose bedside in Dharwad I was when he died. It was an extraordinary death. He had lung cancer. The doctors had given up. So his daughter was instructed not to keep him away from things he loved most. The last thing he asked for was a bidi to smoke. He was humming Raaga Jogia, almost inaudibly. His daughter placed between his lips a lit bidi. And his head rolled over. He was gone. I told this story to Bhimsen Joshi. He heard the story with a distant look, smiled and a tear rolled down his cheek.”.
And as i read the news about RaghuRai .. it all come back to my heartmind.. Life is in circles. In Zen terms, it’s like the bell that rings not once but forever in echoes. The circle is not repetition but deepening — each death, each remembrance, each photograph, each phrase, folding into the next.
In that article there was another para “Singing at platforms links up nicely with a story from Abdul Karim Khan’s life or rather his death. On his way to Puducherry at the invitation of Sri Aurobindo, Khan sahib had a premonition that his end was nearing. He left the train at an unknown railway station, spread out his prayer mat and sang his last song. He died on the railway platform. The news was carried to Sri Aurobindo by the disciples accompanying him. I have no doubt that many of these stories are apocryphal. They will remain so unless painstaking research brings out in bold relief a larger than life artist like Bhimsen Joshi.”
And in the blog https://kokorozendo.life/2011/03/05/classic-ends-immortal-stories-about-mortal-deaths
I added the life end stories of Richard Feynman and Art Buchwald too.
Now the photographer himself has stepped into the frame — the one who captured so many last breaths, last songs, last light. Raghu Rai, too, becomes the photograph. The infinite's voice, for a moment, stops singing — only to realize it never truly began, never truly ends. And not to forget, each one of us are also photographers and probably carries with us one of the best cameras nature could design. Infact two of them...
And we too will become a photograph.
Sooner or later.