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I quit my job at 28 to get my life back.

I did six years as a software engineer and barely noticed them go. Then I turned 28 and worked out that if nothing changed, I would be 68 before I found out what I had been in such a hurry about. So I quit, left Kathmandu, and moved back to my village. I am not an expert at any of this. I am a guy with a camera who tries things and writes down what happened.

Before anyone takes this as advice: my parents had already built the house, living out here is cheap, I had savings, and I can go back to engineering if this goes nowhere. That is why I could afford the risk. Your situation is not mine, and I am not telling anybody to quit their job.

Anish Wagle
Anish WagleSUBJECT & CAMERA OPERATOR

What is open right now

EVERY EXPERIMENT
Experiments currently open, with the date each was started
OPENEDWHAT I AM TRYING TO DO
01 SEPLearning photography

Never having physically touched a camera, seven days to learn photography — manual mode on every photo, and the editing too.

01 JUNLearning guitar

Starting from nothing, on camera, to find out how long it actually takes to be able to play a song.

Why I quit

I finished school, did computer engineering, and worked as an engineer for almost six years. Somewhere in there I stopped noticing the time going, and then I was 28. That shook me more than I expected. Nothing was wrong with the job. It was just that I could see myself doing it until I was old and never once asking what it had all been for.

Prayogsala is the Nepali word for laboratory. It started as the name for one experiment and stuck, because that turned out to be the shape of everything: try the thing where people can see, film it, write down what actually happened.

I am not selling a method and I do not know yet whether this works. I keep the record in public because a number you have to publish is much harder to lie to yourself about, and I film it because I would like to make a living this way one day.

And because I am an engineer and I have to over-engineer everything, the result is a whole website instead of a notes app. You are looking at it.

The shelf

EVERY BOOK

3

BOOKS FINISHED

Every book I get through goes on here, with what I actually took from it. Not a reading list and not a recommendation engine. It is a record of what has gone in, kept for the same reason the map is kept: I want to be able to look back at the whole thing at once.

  • BHAGAVAD GITA as it is
  • Siddhartha
  • The Alchemist

Nepal has 77 districts. I am going to all of them.

Not the ten everybody films. All of them, including the ones with nothing obvious to show, because those are where most people actually live. After Nepal, further out. The map does not stop at the border.

Open the map

DISTRICTS REACHED

1/77

A district fills in once something published came back from it: a journey, or a photograph taken inside it.

  • A young man in a two-tone beige t-shirt standing on an empty village road, looking at the camera, the road and houses falling away out of focus behind him.
  • A woman in a teal embroidered kurta standing in a garden, looking at the camera, with vegetable beds and trees behind her.
  • A yellow and black toy off-road truck photographed close up on a patterned mat, the background thrown completely out of focus.
  • An open purple umbrella drying upside down on a wet village road, a pair of pink slippers on the tarmac beside it, green hedges and a blue-painted wall behind.

Free to reuse. The credit line is pre-written on every picture, so crediting it is one click.

Come along for it

One email when something new lands: what I read, built, broke, or walked into. No algorithm in between, and I will not waste your inbox.

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