Tag: himalaya

Nature

Flycatchers and their fidget…

Flycatchers - Grey-headed canary-flycatcher

Flycatchers often seem bound by invisible tethers… zeroing in on a branch and launching rapid sallies from there again and again to pluck food out of the air, all in a theatrical lasting a few minutes at the most… always fidgety, their restive disposition making the onlooker feel the same after a while… they are …

Nature

Twilight on icy tomes…

Shiva peak, Pangi valley, Himachal Pradesh, India

Twilight – one part of it is hope, the other is resignation… a submission to the forces around and beyond… impatience giving way to forbearance as the last of the light tucks itself into a lunar solace… a time of the day when thoughts become atmospheric, sacrificing their precision, anesthetized by a sense of nostalgia… …

Nature

Blackbird blues…

Grey-winged blackbird

Blackbird singing in the dead of the night… – every time I sight one of these demure thrushes, more silhouettes than full profiles most of the time, that earthy earworm of a tune by the Beatles automatically starts playing in the head, albeit the bird most definitely doesn’t sing in the dead of the night… …

Mountains

Meadows in an afternoon ire

Meadows at Dayara Bugyal, Uttarakhand, India

Meadows for the most part are a release, either from the claustrophobia of canopies, or the tiring, involuntary ballets of moraines and glaciers… colourful tapestries that seem as close to utopia as one can get, expanses and imaginations unbridled, hope taking wings to the horizon… ‘tis where the waters frolic, exulting over their escape from …

Mountains

Meditating over mountains…

Meadows in Kashmir, India

Meditating over mountains is an exercise in peeling off multitudes… meandering around their geometries, mulling over whether to engage with the elements or take shelter from them, you look for those deep life lessons recorded over many a tome of the yore and now chopped up into bite sized, social media portions, but in vain… …

Mountains

Twilight deliverances…

Twilight in mountains

Twilight is by all means a magical time of the day… crepuscular congregations in full swing as the skies grapple with those sudden transient spurts of colour fading into the dusk or the day as soon as they appeared… twilight is when the sun really gives a few glimpses of it’s true artistic potential, for …

Nature

Plumbeous and its riverine plump

Plumbeous redstart

Plumbeous redstarts endear one with their restiveness, nudging and ingesting hapless insects trying to fathom fast flowing waters… a songbird punctuating rivers and streams, it darts around from boulder to boulder tracing parabolas in the air, adding to the din of the river with short, shrill calls and animating the surroundings with a flurry of …

Nature

Dipper and its daredevilry…

Brown dipper (Cinclus pallasii)

The dipper tends to send a few shudders down the onlooker’s well-cloaked disposition before one begins to marvel at its foraging, combing the surface of frigid waters emboldened by gravity before diving into their shallow depths for a morsel… seemingly foolhardy but in reality, one of those evolutionary ingenuities… I knew that the brown dipper …

Nature

Elephants and their smiling disposition…

Elephants at Corbett National Park, Uttarakhand, India

Elephants are such content beings, relishing every morsel, making a difference to every inch of the jungle they trudge through… flummox the blind they might, get agitated by the unceasing fragmentation of their wide expanses they do, but for a creature sharing human lifespan, the tolerance and wisdom in their sombre gait goes way beyond… …

Mountains

Mountains, and ends Gregorian…

Himalayan panorama from Ranikhet, Uttarakhand, India

Mountains make their own weather… they also, perhaps less acknowledged, make their own time… where durations are defined by degrees of experience rather than dances of gravity… there, more often than not, time is intensity, be it physical or sensory… mountains make their own time, I’m pretty sure, whether plodding through fresh snows or getting …