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...

Seeing the obvious is easy. What takes effort is seeing what is beyond plain sight. As one of my managers had once said, often, it takes talent to see talent. For true value often lies right in front, but garbed in the most unobvious and unobtrusive of ways. The example need not be restricted at the workplace. Go out in the wilderness, take any sample look closely, and you are sure to have an ‘aha’ moment.  I had mine last weekend in Gerroa, a sleepy village on the NSW coast, with our simple but gorgeous stay overlooking the seven mile beach and along with it, a large swathe of wilderness, home to denizens of local birds. Cup of steaming tea in hand, seasoned with a whiff of indigo skies and drizzling rains, I looked out, trying to observe every little movement of the fauna. Not much later, I had a decent roster of Aussie birds - the overwhelmingly-coloured rainbow lorikeet, a majestic white bellied sea eagle (harangued unabashedly by the magpies), a sleekly terrific Nankeen kestre...

Summer has been very tolerant this year. There have hardly been days when temperatures have touched 40 degrees. On the contrary, there have been long spells of brooding melancholy - overcast skies, crackling thunderstorms, drizzling days and redeeming rains lingering on for day after cloudy day. For the pluviophile in me, it has been nothing short of pure monsoonal delight, the body ferrying from workplace to home, but the child-like mind already running through the muddy meadows and splashing in the rains. Unlike the locals here, whose coastal legacy has been to thrive on sunny days by the beach, I rejoice with the clouds - the sun is often too bright for me. But this is not the norm - it is an exception, with the La Nina bringing in wet summer for eastern Australia. The resulting bounty though has been phenomenal - regional and outback towns which were counting D-Day based on the number of days of water left in their reservoirs are now splashing in abundance, the muddy dying rivers n...

It is mid-summer here, and due to the La Nina effect, the otherwise arid and dry summer blitz has been gently tamed by mild weather, pleasantly interspersed by pensive clouds, sprinkling rains and a citrus sun. Yes, summer has been kind, especially after last year’s unprecedented bush fires. The vagaries of the weather have had one new impact on me – it has forced me to become more mindful of the world around. I now wake up every day and part the curtains of my bedroom, anticipating the surprise I will get to see – will it be a blistering sun staring right back, or will it be a brooding grey day? As the day passes by, and I go about on a walk, I feel myself more immersed with nature: the magpie larks are easily distinguished from their slightly larger cousins - the magpies, the breath of the hot earth alternating with the cool breeze is more easily perceived, and the shimmering play of light and shadow on the grasses makes me feel as if the earth is more alive than ever. But it is I, n...

I have come this evening at a nearby park for a stroll after work (from home). It is a pretty reserve, with manicured greens, a body of soothing water, replete with fountains and a flock of corellas on a nearby tree.  It is all very lovely, except for the fact, that despite the pristine beauty, it also seems lonely. Almost melancholic. The realisation feels a bit strange. Despite all the cloudy day beauty, I perceive loneliness, not solitude. Perhaps, we humans are programmed to align internally as per the vagaries of the exterior world.  I have seen this before - be it Kausani or Canberra, the cold just keeps people indoors, making the outer world a shade lonelier. Not just winters but also cold, dank, cloudy days such as today. I still remember, evenings turning dark as early as at 5 pm in Calcutta, immediately creating a sort of sinking feeling within, and urging to return to the warmth of home. Of course, you still had people thronging outdoors - though there would be much...