As ‘ashishwhy - Journalist by profession - Wandering soul in spirit - Living in interesting times' Biku has left us an archive of some of his ways of seeing. Photographic glimpses, shared with a community of peers and friends on Instagram. Beginning March 2013 and ending March 2021.
 

‘Walking with Biku’ is however, for those who loved him, young and old, who may or may not have been on Instagram, but were with or around him during some of the experiences and sightings he recorded in this form.
 

Friends may find fun times spent with him, workmates, family members, and others close to him may recognize surroundings and pathways travelled together, some may have insights into hidden contexts that are less obvious to instant or casual observation. Yet perhaps none can claim to have shared or known more than a part of the wanderings of his mind as recorded in this archive. 

So, as we walk with Biku through these volumes, for each of us there are also new angles, views, and meanings to be discovered in this trail of pictures and comments, in the funny categories and identities that are strewn about, in the ellipses and undertones of captions, and shades of mood captured by the photographs. 

The record is of course uneven, with vignettes from the surrounds of his daily routines and breakouts when working at the Times of India constituting more than three fifths of the archive.  Mostly as a solitary commuter, chronicling the seasons and the times in the city of Delhi.

From his travels outside, the 14 days of what he tagged as ‘#epictrip’ and ‘#idiotabroad’ to Scotland in 2014 are the most prolific. Next in line is his first encounter with England and Northern Ireland over 16 days in 2013. The record of his trips to historic Lucknow, and then to Naggar (2015) and Nainital (2016) in the mountains that he so loved, are necessarily briefer, as he was there for just a day or two – small breaks from his life and work in Delhi. Significantly, the last major trip recorded by him on Instagram (to Maldives in 2017), is the only excursion where his ‘fellow traveller’ is introduced.

A long hiatus of almost four years of no posts across most of 2017, and none in 2018, 2019, or 2020, and then why Biku returned to the Instagram mode in 2021, makes for curiosity and speculation. Yet the few images and lines that he posted in 2021 before that fatal April when we lost him to Covid, does bring in a touch of his presence as last seen or conversed with. 

Despite the gaps and elisions in the Instagram archive, there is a living sense of Biku’s conversation in these volumes - in what he observed and communicated, in the combination of openness and reserve, of the funny and the contemplative, of jocular sociability and lonesomeness, of the laughable and the grave, and indeed in what he left out or kept private. 

There are things to chuckle at, to wonder at, think about, or connect with. Unusual for the Instagram form, out of his 529 posts, there are only four where he is himself in the frame, barely a dozen of a few friends, and none of his family members except for two of wife Swatie and two of sister Chiku. 

What is there however, is a way of observing and relating - to colours and moods, to the sky above and the ground below, to shades of light and darkness; to objects in their time zones and settings, to places near and far, day and night, to the city and its people; to panoramic vistas and small particularities in everyday environs. There’s shared enjoyment in food, and of course as would be mandatory for Biku – there are his perceptions of the comic and the droll. With a sensibility and style that is ever youthful, never ponderous or pompous, and from which there is perhaps something for everyone to take home.

Withal, the elements of Biku’s perspective and modes of engagement with the world in these volumes, will stay with us and may continue to touch our minds and hearts in the years to come, even as we learn to live with his absence.