Clouds in the valley...

  I stand beside the bulging stream, As muddy waters flow, Though clouds have ruled the week for now, Inside, there is a glow A glow from vintage memories As the mind, it wanders free -  Warm and sweet, intense as well Served like a cup of tea Then, every raindrop, cold and hard Brings back a shard of time, From the Garo hills to the Western ghats, The winds begin to chime A little boy in a raincoat blue, Walks in hail to school, While a grown up soul then climbs in rain To splash in a cascade pool He ambles in the deodar hills, The Pelling rains are cold, Through clouds, the Kanchenjunga squints With vows of a sunset gold From backwaters to the coral isles, The echoes come again, Sajan, Shimla, Sindhudurg -  A common thread of rain   The worth of moments sunk in time Are best judged as a memory A drop of rain ushers a storm, This strong the past can be    My friends call me, it’s time to leave The rains, they say, are bleak -  Sieve the past , I ...

There is something special and prized about a window seat on any vehicle. It feels so engrossing to watch the world pass by. Talk about a window seat seat on a flight, and the stakes are raised, well, literally. It is then that I fight with missionary zeal to grab that window seat. Yes, and not on the wings please - they are absolute kill-joys! Taking off from a city, I find it a sheer delight to look outside the window and see the city shrink like a miniature model, my eyes scanning for landmarks that stand out. Any city, big or small, then seems to offer its best on a plane-platter, as I like to call it. My first flights out of home - Kolkata used to be during my higher studies, when I would return to a campus life for yet another semester, with a slightly broken heart, while leaving my city of joy. In those last moments when the plane would shoot beyond the sheet of clouds, a glimpse of the Hooghly river, shining like a silver string would offer a strange kind of consolation - and s...

‘Je … voudrais … aller … a … Nice.’  We were trying with great difficulty to narrate in French that we wanted to travel to Nice. Unlike other subjects taught at university, here was one curriculum we were finally getting to practice in real life. When we couldn’t, we would complain that the pedagogy was too theoretical. When we could, we realised - ooh la la - we had landed in Paris! Too late, mon ami, too late! Back in the days without Google Translate or Triplingo, life was not a cinch. Correction - talking to the snobs of Paris was not a cinch. They didn’t give a damn about English or Esperanto - rule number one to enter the hallowed halls of the bourgeois Parisiennes was to speak French. It was then a daily struggle to query about the simple things of everyday life - travel directions, train times, food, anything Hey, monsieur, is that rabbit meat or horse meat? My friends here are vegetarians...no no, not beef either - no boeuf, monsieur, no viande ! Vegetarian, vegetarian! An...