Clouds in the valley...

  They often ask, why do I paint you - Every year, this date Respect is good after seventy years, But the truth is we are late  Late to know your real life, Late to know your ‘death’ Now all that stays are statues, busts, And on special days, a wreath And we’ll never know what it meant to run Away to enemy lands, So much pain, to grant a bit Of freedom in our hands And even when you came you saw, Liberty - a bunch of lies, Nothing left to tell the truth You turned gumnaami in our eyes In seventy years, the world has changed Why then your tale to fuss? Because what is same, despite the times Is the battle inside us And it’s not to just not forget your life, These strokes of brush and hue, It’s to give us hope that perhaps there is, In us, a bit of you… 23rd Jan’2021

I took a deep breath and looked all around me, my mind desperately trying to cling on to the 360 degree HD wallpaper images on display on a crisp sunny, cloudless day. There, on the right were the twin peaks of Mount Lidgbird and Mount Gower, towering over the islands like ubiquitous sentinels. On my left, faraway glistened the sparkling white Old Settlement’s Beach, while in front was the languorous lagoon beach, children of all ages splashing in its shallow waters, while I bobbed on a glass-bottomed boat on the turquoise lagoon itself, marvelling at the massive green turtles that moved beneath nonchalantly. I was at Lord Howe Island (pronounced as ‘How’) on a tropical island vacation - can ‘holiday’ sound any more envious than this in the Pacific? Unknown to most travellers to Down Under, and perhaps even to a large proportion of locals, Lord Howe Island is NSW’s best kept secret. While Covid has crippled international travel altogether, and is intermittently maiming domestic travel ...

What strange days these are -  You might even think me a little insane, But am I really glad to hear,  My neighbours above sing a song again There was a time, not long ago ‘Noise!’ I would cry, in anger, plight ‘Have they nothing better?’  A bunch of friends, one Saturday night And every weekend I would drear, That the noisy friends would join anew, Bete noire, I would grumble, Alas, good times and friends: they are always few Then, the exile got worse, the summer cold Solitude felt lonelier than never before, And empty were the indigo skies,  With no more clouds and no downpour  The silence hard, the world had changed -  Unforgiving was the melancholy, Give me something from the past I knew -  That jostling world, where could you be? As an island,then, I got to see The beauty of the waves that splashed, All that I thought of noise before, Came back to me as sound, unabashed Then, when silence killed just all the days, I heard the guitar strum on a Sat...

I I had just finished watching Panchayat on Amazon - a fascinating series of an urbanite struggling to adjust to work in rural India, leading a lonely life, peeling lauki and rueing his days. A brilliant portrayal indeed! Television switched off, hands cradling my head, I stretch my back, and jog my memory - and think of the closest I have come to such an ordeal. Yes, I have stayed in a village and a mofussil, but work? Oh yes, how can I forget my days in a small town in Tamil Nadu - this adventureland being called Karur. In a sort of antonym of worlds, it all started in the bedazzling glass towers of my office in metropolitan Mumbai. At 9 pm - still mid-day in consulting jargon -my manager, Rana, an extremely erudite yet pragmatic leader (a rare combination, trust me, in a post MBA world) walked up to my desk with an ask - if I would volunteer to work for a fantastic project, the caveat being the need to work out of Karur. ‘Karur what? Where is it?’ I asked and swung back to my desk t...

If you cannot find Himalaya, Seek its presence all around you, Seek for the hills, the knolls, the mounts Even in this land of the towering few Seek in the heart of the austral alps, Seek in the voids of the Mungo bleaks, Seek in the winds and the bogong moths, As you talk to spirits on the Kosciusko peaks, So what they be wizened not in white, There are clouds atop each mighty crest, There Mount Gower, Lidgbird brood in grey, Their peaks the same old sacred quest And when you stare up at these heights, Feel humbled, mortal, yet sublime And in that moment, find Himalaya Inside of you, silent all the time… 6th January, 2021 Who would know I would find a piece of my long sought for inner peace, far from the mountains, in a nondescript island far away in the desolation of the Pacific? I was in tiny Lord Howe Island, 200 km from Sydney - wherever you go on this tiny 10km long island, you are bound to be overshadowed by the two local behemoths, Mount Gower and Mount Lidgbird, only 875m and ...