Clouds in the valley...

So, the rule is not to roam as a tourist, but to stay as a resident - that alone gives you the right to actually claim the badge of ‘seeing’ a place. Cosmetic tripadvisor-ed tourism is like eating the first starter course - okay, you have seen the Eiffel Tower and its golden spangles at night-time, and have clicked the must-have selfie in front of the Mona Lisa - but ask yourself, have you actually walked on Parisian streets late at night and seen snowflakes of winter descend to start the first strokes of a white heaven? Besides the tick mark on the Louvre, could you actually go to that old rundown yet delectable house of a Rodin or a Delacroix and imagine the artists bubbling in their creativity ages back? If no, then you have seen but a fleeting glimpse of her veiled face, you have not even brushed her hand, forget about the passionate lip-lock. There is just so much more hidden in the jeweled box of every city that a fast paced week-long stay does little justice - yet, in the timele...

I garnish my spicy mutton kasha with a generous sprinkle of chopped shallot and coriander - having accomplished the magnum opus in bengali non-vegetarian, non-pescatarian cuisine, I have earned my stripes as a genuine Bhojohari Manna (the non-pescatarian disclaimer above is required as nothing comes above bhapa ilish, no not even koraishutir kochuri or a cold winter morning). I must admit, despite my usual modesty, that I have genuinely honed my skills as a chef - it takes me less than half an hour these days to whip up a teriyaki chicken or a pan fried salmon. I guess, with commitment, care and sometimes, a bit of compulsion, one can perfect any work of life. Many of my foodie-fans have often asked me where I learned the finer art of balancing the spices. Indeed, when I look back at where it started, now that is some story to narrate. I did happen to help my mum as an errand-boy in the  kitchen since I was a kid, but the real story starts not in the land of luchi and cholar dal, b...

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...