travel, travails and heck...

Sanchi lies serene, tucked comfortably away from the madding urban surrounds, the hillock not overwhelmed by concretization… its sanctity safely cocooned in relics carved over centuries while the sanity of its message resists being pushed into oblivion… in histories embellished with violence of the empires and their subsequent repentance, the stone remains a stoic spectator, a glimpse of…

Fathoming the universe, yet still baffled by dreams, such are the vicissitudes of life… the more we know, more the contradictions… sleeping birds being a case in point… for a species used to crumbling into that suspended space of consciousness for hours, there a tinge of envy as one sees the avifauna managing with just minutes, and that too while managing to keep a tab on the world that’s forever…

Spiders and their symmetrical solitudes

Spiders, like most insects, are cringey at first but tend to grow upon one’s thoughts… tactical predators, mathematical geniuses, eight-legged freaks, masters of silk, artistic abseilers… spiders weave their own little worlds, an ability once revered by older cultures, from cave paintings to the lore of Brutus… and now inextricably intertwined with the human conscience, manifested in the…

Eagles on their stopovers…

Eagles, there is such pensiveness in their cold stares… although I find most avifauna steeped in a wistfulness that characterizes the nature of their existence, it seems more accentuated in the raptors, as if exhausted by all that burden of death, stuck in this vocation… their cries are shrill, movements calculated… the hooked beak resembling a question mark… a potent weapon and an existential…

Lakhudiyar and the languid…

Prehistory, one feels at times, deserves to be left alone… for we aren’t doing much with it, except maybe for emojis… there’s no cultures to revere or ancestries to venerate, and consequently, no opinions to subjugate… hardly any narratives soaked in drama… just a clutch of unembellished facts aloof to sensational revelations or discoveries… content to float in the periphery of oblivion, head…

Birds, the restive kind…

Birds, the fidgety kind, anyone who likes to stalk them in lush, dense forests is well acquainted with the acoustic delights and visual disappointments… the chirps and rustles spark hope… the human crouches and crawls in a misconception of stealth, the avifauna revels in the foliage… both parties trying to avoid a startle, one looking for a clear glimpse and the other aloof to such…

Winter twilight, and winterline

Winter days in the mountains are meek, the sun slipping into a season long reticence, and those abounding this terra firma must simply persevere… there’s a silence that hangs like a pall over the landscape, and there’s a crispiness to the mists… both the flora and fauna go into a state of contemplation that comes with the necessity to survive… it’s a knot, the winter, where demises go quietly…

Mulling over moraines, treks across western Himalaya...

Moraines are the price one pays for cashing in on the luxury of strolling upon velvety meadows… an accumulation of the gradual geologies of glaciers, rocks piling up in a slow brood, grinding each other to dust… progenitors of all that is animate, these are the realms where the inanimate fiercely guard their privacy… ‘Tis almost oceanic, this seeming infinity of glacial debris, a precursor to…

Crickets and their comforting chirps…

Crickets and their brethren are basslines of the songs that abound the outdoors, vocalizing canopies or anything damp with their chirps and twirps… while the birds bebop from one branch to another, they skittle around with the same restiveness, punctuated with those quantum leaps every now and then… The chirps of crickets and cicadas have underlined many a childhood living in the periphery of…

Grasshoppers and their hopping hues…

Grasshoppers are intriguing, from living catapults that pleasantly pique a child’s curiosity to swarms of locusts that lay waste to agriculture, one of the pillars of human evolution, survivors par excellence that predate dinosaurs… there was this pumpkin vine at home this time around that had grew remarkably well, partly through the monsoons, and partly through a jet spray emanating once every…

Reminiscences from Bhyundar Khal, a high altitude Himalayan trek in Uttarakhand connecting the Valley of Flowers to Gamshali village near Tibetan border

The third wave thankfully got delayed, and after an excruciating 2020 where one would be looked upon incredulously for suggesting an autumn sojourn to the high mountains, this year was kinder, and barring some news about landslides and roadblocks on the Char Dham highway that seems more like the Tower of Babel than an ‘all-weather’ road, a mid-September evening found us in the familiar environs…

Trishul and its auspices…

Trishul is the kernel of the Himalayan vista from Ranikhet… no other snowy massif imprints itself upon the psyche of the town than the venerable trident, it’s stoic gaze sweeping the ridges and valleys through the seasons… Shiva’s weapon the centre stage of a panorama that manifests a fierceness out of every element… averse to life within its own ramparts but cradling it downstream… a canvas of…

On housekeepers, the avian kind…

Housekeepers is what comes to mind when one looks at the smaller birds prancing about the terra firma or waiting pensively at the waterside… while the raptors and mammals go about their mauling, impaling, tearing and digging like teenagers, leaving a seeming mess in their wake, the little ones tend to go about their business like a nitpicking elder, keeping it orderly and prim… We were being…

Musings on painted grasshoppers...

Grasshoppers … the negligent fiddler of Aesop’s discourse on responsibility who suffers from its improvidence… an athletic pest that like many of its brethren flaunts a flashy disposition… mostly vegetarian unless forced to turn omnivorous… wearing a rather amused expression that permeates through those compound eyes and large jaws… Startles are how grasshoppers mostly interact with us… whether…

Musings on cloudy weather… reminiscing a day spent hiking the traditional pastoral lands of the Dhauladhars in Himachal Pradesh…

Cloudy weather is innately reminiscent, irrespective of whether one is under its wrath or safely sheltered from it… ‘it doesn’t rain like it used to’, the lament underscores many a small talk, it’s evidence in the lowlands is karma one presumes, as is the opposite in the highlands where gushes of water become those of mud and slush, in disdain to the unnecessary infringements… Another year where…

musings on log bridges in the Himalayan hinterland, simple structures that are vital to access remote villages and the backcountry...

bridges, and one speaks of those logs thrown across an angry mass of water, with some mud and stone and a prayer or two instead of metal and mortar, evoke mixed emotions, a cocktail of relief and trepidation… deadwood lying down yet standing tall with enough life in it still to face the wrath of the elements… for when wading barefoot over torrents or skipping boulders, there is no room for…

Musings on Scaly thrush (Zoothera dauma), a secretive ground foraging bird common in the Himalayan region...

The thrush is the busy bee of forest beds, its careful rustles comprising the softer notes in the symphonies of coniferous canopies… in the faunal domain, there are some that aim to dazzle and some that excel at inconspicuousness… the thrush belongs to the latter, preferring to ply its trade in the infinite anonymity of the woods, the dark and brooding kind… I wasn’t having much luck birding,…