Clouds in the valley...

It was very untypical of us to visit a capital city such as Amsterdam, and yet not bother scratching off the must-dos and should-dos from our typically unending list. No, no tulip gardens, no windmills, no celebration of Rembrandt or salutation for Anne Frank - we had decided to visit our old friend Prashant.  In our 3 month long exchange program in Europe, while we were busy criss-crossing the continent, capturing images in the gigabytes, and literally wearing our soles off by traipsing across tinsel-towns, Prashant had, like a monk, found his mountain top. It was located in a small room on the third floor of a quiet building overlooking a canal not very far from the Rijksmuseum. Having invited him on countless occasions to join us in our sojourns, and after being politely declined in his unreplicable singsong voice, we had decided that if the mountain would not come to Muhammad…So there we were, Nishant and me, on a crisp October evening, meeting our friend after weeks with baglo...

It is a cold, windy day that broods with pensive clouds, unexpectedly stemming the otherwise balmy advent of summer. Wrapped in a shawl, I rev up the heater again as winter seems to make a brief cameo. I look at the silvery-grey nimbus clouds, almost inevitably going back to the one place where I celebrated monsoon India like no other – Mumbai, the Sahyadri , the western ghats and the Konkan coast. It will be extremely ungrateful if I do not mention of Kolkata and its bags of blue nor’westers, Lucknow with its red-parched summers that seemed to be most thankful of the quenching rains, and then the magnum opus chapter in almost every book, that is the Himalaya – even in the rains!   Yet, there was an almost redeeming liberation in Mumbai in a lot many terms – financially and more importantly, in terms of comradery. With like-minded friends who had long broken ice in surmounting the academic rigours and challenges of Mount Lucknow, it took our small group a few months to erode th...

Loitering around the village, I entered yet another house whose front-end vestibule room doubled up as a shop and display centre. Like in the other houses, or should I say shops, here was yet another humble artist engrossed in his world of colours and paints. He welcomed me with folded hands and introduced himself as a Bhaskar Mahapatra. The bespectacled artist asked me to freely look around his studio, which was a treasure trove of art, resplendent with colours and shiny artefacts, almost as if I was walking inside a kaleidoscope itself. Papier-mache wrapped coconuts decorated in rich colours, brightly painted woodworks, lord Jagannath’s juggernaut rath in all sizes, stacked in ascending order like matryoshka dolls, artwork on dried palm leaves, and a painted assortment of bottles, masks, handbags bedecked every shelf of the room, while piles of scrolls and manuscripts lay on the floor. What an atelier, the artist exceeding himself in every corner, I breathed to myself, almost with...

  Shimmering scales, Black in Spring,   Yet, containing the Sun within... It is another weekend in lockdown. Though Spring has arrived with its winds of warmth and breaths of benevolence, there is little scope to go out and revel in the new-found verdancy of the world. On a Saturday morning that is just beginning to thaw as the groggy sun gets up, I therefore gratify myself with a walk in my backyard. A warm cup of cardamom tea, a chair in the sun and the blue skies definitely begin to look bluer still. Something seems to scramble in the rocky agapanthus flower beds. I look closely and realise it is a fence skink.  It goes into hiding immediately. Any other day, I would have given a cringe - by nature, we seem to detest lizard-like creatures. Maybe chameleons, especially the green horned ones can qualify as cute ( such as the cover image, taken in Ovalekar Wadi in the outskirts of Mumbai - I had gone there to watch butterflies, didn't find much but was delighted to s...

  Like many Indian households, I grew up in a house with birds. Sadly, caged. Cramped in our cities, with very little garden greens to soothe our souls, we often use caged birds to usher in a bit of nature in our lives. Quite an irony, isn’t it? But that’s how it goes. Without understanding the cruelty that we thus impose, we often find in these beautifully plumaged birds a source of joy, excitement and even purpose. Just like all other human conquests, obviously. But all sarcasm aside, I did love these winged wonders as a child. I remember I had two badris - ‘ budgerigar’ was way beyond my lexicon then. So badris they were, from faraway distant Australia, one pistachio green and mustard yellow, and the other a tumble of teal, indigo and white. And then, in another cage used to thrive a bunch of finches - chestnut mannikin finches, red browed finches and the prettiest of the lot, the strawberry finch or avadavat, more commonly called the munnia . Looking at them prancing from swing...

If you meet me then on a cloudy day, Perhaps you’ll get the sun to see, That which lurked through winter nights, That the faintest stars could be set free Perhaps, you knew, though it matters not What matters are the clouds that roam, In a different world, a nimbus me Sails the skies and calls it home Perhaps, some things are best when left on their own They help to change the worlds around, If not the seas, the winds and vales At least the songs, their words and sound If the sun's rhymes don’t float at dawn, Fret not - there’s plenty more of the writing quills, Cherry blossoms when the spring sets in, Rhododendron blooms in the winter hills… 4th September, 2021

Thunder rumbled across the skies. There was that distinct smell in the winds – that of trampled vegetation picked up by the winds, aided with a dip in temperature - which hits you just moments before the heavens open up. I couldn’t help stopping all that I did – in this case, packing up, to leave the beach – and stare at the contrasts that was flooding my senses: Turquoise blue, shallow playful waters of the white sandy lagoon below as against, the dark indigo blues of a moody, tempestuous sky above; The lull of the lapping waters of the sea, devoid of crashing waves as against the sparkling crackle of the lightning bolts; The taste of warm brine from my dip in the lagoon as against the taste of the cool moisture laden breeze; And then to cap it all, the sweaty, moisty warmth of a tropical island being washed anew with a coat of cool windward rains. Life loves contrasts indeed, the distinctions all the more perceptible when the contrasts are extremely disparate, thereby stret...