Clouds in the valley...

If you get to stand between god and man,  Whom will you choose if you can? The Art that glows with heaven’s play Or the Artist, who plays anew each day?   It was not even six in the morning, but I was waiting at the Taupo Marina, hoping for a tourist boat to take us to what is perhaps Taupo’s biggest man-made attraction, if not that of all of North Island – a 14 metre tall, rock carving of a tattooed Maori face at Mine Bay. The haunting face on the wall is accessible only by boat, hence my conundrum. I was in Taupo, a small town in the centre of New Zealand’s North Island. It is nestled by an eponymous lake, which is the bejewelled country’s largest lake by surface area, and also one of the largest freshwater lakes in all of Oceania. Situated in the volcanic heart of New Zealand, Lake Taupo has filled up a caldera – a collapsed volcano that erupted with great violence about 26,000 years ago, that still holds the record for the most violent explosion on earth for the ...

It is a bright and sparkling, sunny day here. Too bright to venture out, I prefer the shadowy solitude of my indoor sanctum. But sun and Saturday take me back, years ago, when the mind was desperate for just the opposite. Mumbai, May 2011 – the exasperated me had just landed in Mumbai to join work after my MBA. And the combinations couldn’t get any worse – chaos in life, a congested city to work (I always wanted to go back to my beloved Calcutta) and worse still, a job in the financial services sector! After my internship in a bank the year earlier, also in Mumbai, I had decided banking in Bombay was just not for me. And yet, when you seem to have antagonized life, you end up in a city you detest, with a job you abhor. On that first day, it was difficult to fathom which was worse The truth was, I felt stuck. In a city where the decibel levels never fell. Where people’s footfall was not discriminated by time of day. And worst of all, where there was nowhere to run to. ...

Can you hear the cicada cry? It has perhaps, nothing to say - And yet the sounds remind of home, Lost somewhere far away   A wooden house atop a hill, And a silver stream below - Red earth, those whistling pines, Home in the mountains, long ago   Lost in the hills, but still a home Where every journey starts, Where summers were blue endless skies,   And winters, stronger hearts   And hills that made me fall in love With melancholy clouds of grey, Lessons that there can be hope Beyond a sunny day   The cicada stops, I wake to ask If I go back, will the hills be kind? But then, home was never far away, Home was lost, in years behind...

People here often ask me which part of India I am from. It follows with which cities I have been to, and naturally, the names they enquire of are the biggest metropolises, roughly dotting the four corners of my beloved diamond shaped country. Oh, you are from Calcutta? What about Delhi? Have you been to Mumbai? Isn't Bangalore the IT capital of the country? etcetera, etcetera, etcetera Usual questions, until the other day, a colleague asked me, ' So, you have been to Delhi, Mumbai and Calcutta! But how would you differentiate the three, maybe in one word?' Interesting and difficult question - the ultimate elevator pitch, with the challenge of unfairly encapsulating an entire city in just a handful of letters. But I tried my best, closing my eyes and replying with the first word that came floating in my emotions as I thought back of the days and months and years that I spent in each of these places. I responded, 'Culture for Calcutta, Money for Mumbai...

'When did you take these photos?' Newton asked abruptly while I was trying to distribute the soup his mother sent in two portions. Newton was my lanky next door neighbour - No, he was no wizkid in any form of science, but had earned his moniker from gravitating on the floor of my living room every time he came, ignoring my moderately expensive Ikea ottoman sofa. But science or no science, the boy was interested in my photography and often took the role of critic and fan alike. Today, he was browsing through my photographs taken from a boat cruise a few weeks back which I had happily ignored as I did not get the shot I was looking for. I tried explaining the Newton. 'So it was a whale watching cruise?' he enquired 'Yup...except that I did not get the snaps I desired' 'But some of these are quite good!' The boy was always genuine in his feedback, so I went back to the photos he was parsing. 'But these are not what I wanted!...

The other day I was looking at the articles on my website, and I found some in particular, that really touched me. As in really made me feel connected enough, to smile at the moments of joy and feel melancholic at words of yearning and despair.   When I looked at the other articles, they were good, but didn't seem quite as intense. It was then that I realized that the fault was not perhaps in the words - c'mon, I can't criticize my own works, after all - but rather in the content. Most articles were describing places or events, while a handful were more philosophical. At this point in time, I realized I could categorize most travel essays into three categories: Descriptive, Narrative and Contemplative (you see, years of consulting will make you classify even the most banal of objects around you into something apparently spectacular, either making some 5Ts or ending in 3 similar sounding words!)   Descriptive essays would be those where you end up talking about the plac...

If you are lucky, Life sometimes takes you back to the most vibrant of your down memory lanes. If you can withstand the overwhelmia and still breathe in peace to savor a fresh set of memories, you can't get luckier... Why do I write this, you might wonder? After seven years, Nishant has gone back to Paris! Paris - the place where the insanity for Bohemia all began. Sometimes it all feels like fast moving scenes in some old pastel colored movie set - an imposing cathedral here, an art noveau edifice there; small, artistic shops selling bits and pieces of nostalgia by the Seine; gargoyles frozen in time trying helplessly to show onlookers what it means to gaze at the cityscapes from that altitude atop the imposing Notre Dame; the smell of musty books in Shakepeare, walking about in the autumnal rains in the imposing gardens (and rushing in to an old seemingly decrepit house only to discover gigantic canvases of Monet). Then, the first snows of winter - falling,...