the boy and the bull..a magnetic cosmic pull

life can be half empty or half full

The Nizami Murid calls himself a Malang .

ly one person can pass through .
The workers get their lunch on a system called BC Rs 450 for six days .
I have not tried their food and was too ashamed to shoot it it is bad but this is the cheapest best food for the migrant workers where I come all of them hail from Bihar ..once in a while my wife makes biryani and zarda for them .
They call my wife Bhabiji and as I was bought up in the Kurla slums 62 years back it has become part of my inner angst .The slums have not left me at all ..the beggars hijras would invite me to their slums in Dharavi but I never could make it the largest number of commercial and beggar hijras live in the Shastri Nagar Slums .
I also visit the Maharashtra Nagar Slums too my masters coat workshops ..here.
I have had the most hectic day yesterday a meeting with Mr Gautam Adhikari sab and his family back to work and a hurried trip to town for a film order dinner was roasted buff tongue sent by our neighbors I had it for a change than at 10.30 pm spoke to my granddaughters Marziya and Nergis they said they could not wish me because of Shahadat martyrdom of Holy Prophet and Imam Hassan .
Moharam in Lucknow never ends matam majlis never end even after 2 month eight days of Moharam.
We might go to Lucknow to visit them as they have relocated to their mothers hometown .
These are early morning stray thoughts giving birth to a personal blog .
Happy Morning to all of you ,wife has ordered va strawberry cake for my friends teachers at the Tennis court I will pick it up at 7 am.

The Drug Addict infested Shastri Nagar Slums

I have to pass this way to go to the Bandra Slaughter House Slums and behind the garbage bins at any given time the drug addicts dangerous notorious sit her shooting their syringes they are not scared of anyone and even cop vans that pass this way look the other way and this is a densely populated Muslim locality and all Muslim inhabitated slums are the dirtiest filthiest and they just love to fling the garbage on the road instead of the garbage bins perhaps they too are scared of the drug addicts I shoot garbage and I am not a fake sanctimonious activist that you find a dime a dozen ass licking some political party or the other .
Pimping the agenda of any political party gets you pocket money too I stay away from all political parties ..I am a photographer and I poeticize the ugliness of Bandra .
Bandra where I stay is not Carter Road or Chintujis Pali hill or Sharukh and Salmans Bandstand .
I stay on the dark side of the moon at Bandra bazaar road a few years back while we were going through the worst period of our life wife thought of selling the house relocating to some distant suburb leaving Bandra for good but God helped us and so did a few friends and we held on to Bandra .
And we are originally from Colaba but Bandra became a part of our destinys accidental inheritance .
And I will continue shooting garbage dumps they are a catharsis to the mind of this beggar poet ..
Mera pas Kachra Hai tumhare pas toh Sirf Swach Bharat hai lol

The Dabbawalas having lunch from their tiffins.

Most of the dabbawalas of Mumbai know me as I shot them on the only day they bunked from work to support Anna Hazares India against corruption at Azad Maidan and I shot them prolifically ..and I am a Mumbaikar and I love the Dabbawalas they are the breath and spirit of our beautiful Mumbai you can find a bit of every Indian city in Mumbai but you will never find a Mumbai in any other state of Akhand Bharat .
There never was and will never be another Mumbai in any part of India ,Mumbai is the only original smart city a city of dreams a city of hope and yes a city of our hard-working world famous punctual Dabbawalas .
And earlier I blogged at Flickr now i blog at Facebook and what is a blog if it has a borrowed picture and no fucking original content.
Yes blogging is nothing but telling a story to a crowd of people at a marketplace called Facebook.

Today I decided to get back to my humble Lucknowi roots to the city of my birth a noble tribute ..

In the earlier days when the sherwani was handsticthed and to give it the flow drape on the posterior it was pressed with a medium hot iron on a tawa ..and that is how Mr Raj Babbar Sabs sherwanis were made for Nikah.
I made this sherwani through the hands of a novice my maids brother he had just started making coats and a bit of cutting .I made this sherwani to wear in Hyderabad for Moharam but somehow never got down to wearing it and I wore it just for kicks with my Karakul cap .
The sherwani has sadly been bastardized by the designers and by those who have deformed it .It has lost its Nawabi ambiance it's sartorial spirituality .
Wearing a sherwani is nothing special it is how you carry as I only wear cottons and linens I made this in Irish linen dyed black.
And the beauty of this sherwani is it flows like a river ..when I walk .

A tribute to me from my sister on my birthday

A toast to the evergreen spirit of a man who is my oldest brother. An admirable human being, passionate artist who sees beyond the eye and the epitome of men's fashion.
He shoots straight from the gut, a daredevil, a champion of the lesser privileged, a malang - as he defines himself, a Lucknowi, a Bandra-ite to the core, a charmer with his aptitude to connect with people from any hemisphere, race, economic status or language, a poet exemplaire, Firoze Mohomed Shakir
Firoze Mohomed Shakir stands out in more ways than one - not just in his sartorial taste.
The First of the Shakirs!!
Wish you a life filled with love and joy in abundance. Stay awesome, stay you!

Farzana Suri