soliloquies in the outdoors…
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 …
Reminiscences from Bhyundar Khal, a high altitude Himalayan trek in Uttarakhand connecting the Valley of Flowers to Gamshali village near Tibetan border
Musings on views of Trishul peak from Ranikhet
Musings on Scaly thrush (Zoothera dauma), a secretive ground foraging bird common in the Himalayan region
Musings on an old Parsi cemetery, Ranikhet, Uttarakhand
Spring in the mountains, a time when the sun is finally emboldened enough to begin scrubbing away the vestiges of winter, the cold begins to lose its bite and the canopy starts humming to the wind… the brooding dark winter is a time to contemplate, whilst on the other side of the vernal equinox, ‘tis …
Birds are one in the faunal realm that share the joie de vivre of running, meandering (out of breath) just for the sake of it (and some foraging, maybe), a seeming purposelessness that is whimsical and resolute at the same time… while other animals chase you, or recede into the thicket at the sound of …
‘twas perchance that we got to know of Chenap valley, which we did as our original plans went awry at the last moment… tucked in ‘twixt religious fervours, highways and hydropower more hedonistic that utilitarian, and the never-ending scrapes of JCB for last-mile connectivity, ‘tis purported to be a quieter alternative to Valley of Flowers, …
Pachyderms, especially the elephant, much closer to humans that any other of their brethren, are a placid kind, a tad too much for their own good it seems at times, trudging countless miles without the frills and tantrums of well-provisioned wayfarers, if one were to think of a living analogy for taking it in one’s …
If one were to look at the innate motivations that pique one’s curiosity about temple ruins – somewhere in the middle of the animal instinct of seeking shelter from the elements and the intellectual cycle of constructing theories from the deconstructed – it’d be the simple appeal of geometry, large cuboid appearances staring from plinths …