The Glass Between Us
I remember sitting in the back of a taxi in Jakarta, watching the city dissolve into streaks of grey and neon. The driver, a man named Agus, kept his radio tuned to a station that played nothing but static and old pop songs. We were stuck in a downpour that turned the windshield into a waterfall, blurring the streetlights into soft, pulsing halos. It felt as though the world outside had ceased to exist, replaced by a watercolor painting that shifted every time we hit a pothole. In those moments, you aren’t really traveling; you are suspended in a private, liquid room. There is a strange comfort in being shielded from the chaos, watching the blur of lives passing by without ever having to touch them. We spend so much of our time looking through barriers, hoping to understand the shape of things, yet finding that the distortion is often where the real beauty hides. When was the last time you felt truly hidden in plain sight?
Tanmoy Saha has captured this exact feeling of transit in his work titled Driving in the Rain. It perfectly echoes that sense of being caught between two worlds, separated by a thin pane of glass. Does this image make you feel like you are arriving or leaving?
