about coromandal

(wayne thibeaud)

The Coromandal Coast is the south east coast of South India along which runs the Indian Railroad’s Coromandal Express from Visakhapatanam to Kodaikanal Road.  It was the train I took as a child from my parent’s home on the sea to my boarding school in the hills of central Tamil Nadu.

Coromandal is about loss.  People moving from places to other places, what the old places are like, what the new places are like, what the people and ideas in each are like – both on a physical and metaphysical level.  And it’s about the stories we make up and the lies we tell ourselves and each other to help us to survive these transitions.  Coromandal is about negotiating territories, virtual and empirical.  Each entry is a gleaned from a source.   It is divided into a category: brave new world, chronotopes, departure lounge, unseen world.

In brave new world we fervently seek the endlessly elusive promised land that is, more often then not and because of its necessary perfections, either nowhere or hell. In chronotopes the time between events is collapsed which forces new confrontations and realities.  In the departure lounge we are aware of not being either where we just were, nor in the place we are going; the physicality of places in the past and future are lost and new intangibles take their place. Unseen world is the inner brave new world; really they’re the same only one is exponentially more honest.