Fading Away - Unbound and Free

Text by Tanveer Khondker

‘Fading Away - Unbound and Free’ is my new book project with photos and writings about the lands of Nako, Tabo and Kaza, ancient villages in the backdrop of desert mountain walls and swelling rivers in the Spiti Valley in India. The land gripped me with its bold simplicity, unpretentious beauty and cavernous wisdom. Its presence felt like an explosion in my mind flooding every sense of my being. The land bares no burden of shame, no pretense of glory, no weakness to hide and no strength to impose. It’s an invitation to open doors and step into the vastness of infinite and unbound, to be united, to love and to be loved. The wind and the light and the smells whispers into my soul: ‘loneliness is a self-inflicted imprisonment of our souls’.  

The book is about the journey of stepping into the unexpected and the unknown. A place that stretched my imaginations, perceptions and perspective.

Today it’s a land in blatant conflict of ancient and sameness of modernity. The essence of life here is in such stark contrast to what I have known, what I have seen. An unspoiled life for thousand years, and now, like lethal drugs the greed of capitalization has entered its veins. In the name of prosperity, it is spreading its ominous tentacles; thousand plus year old civilization of enlightenment is being brought down like crushing landslides on the walls of these great barren mountains.

I have never been more aware of my conflicted soul. My presence here with my modernity, is the testimony of that inevitable force of destruction. My heart, with all its desolation wants to hang on to the purity of this land. My soul can’t help imagining how the transparency of this picturesque existence is being rapidly increased, How the saturations are reduced, how it is fading away. So quickly and so surely, we are losing it all. 

The sun glints through the mountains and the river, and the heart is pierced in moments of beauty and strange pain. 

I see it in

The slopes of the mountains

The banks of the ever-young rivers

In the lines of thousand stories on the old lady’s face

In the distant gaze of a young girl

It is fading away; it is slipping through my fingers. 

My heart bursts into silent prayer. I wish to soar above the great valley, under the warmth of the sun and with the wind of ancient wisdom under my wings