Musings

India’s cold desert, Ladakh predominates in endless stretches of picturesque hills, streams, and barren grassland. Its fair share of flora distinctively offsets its elusive fauna, such that the sight of anything living, breathing and scampering naturally becomes a rewarding experience for travellers meaning to take back rare vignettes of their time spent in the far-flung hillscapes of Ladakh. The rocky trails leading to Ladakh’s major attraction, the immaculate Pangong Lake, whose changing hues of blue far outshine a chameleon or any camouflaging creature, holds the promise of at least two such representatives of the wild. One of them is the docile, shy and fuzzy marmot that peeks from behind the boulders at the travelling cars, hoping to be fed with what their natural habitat fails to offer. Playful and snuggly, marmots easily capture hearts with their frolicking and scurrying. They are a curiously enlarged version of the squirrel.  Next comes a rather rare species of the z...

I woke up to the notification tones of my mobile phone today, the sleek device barraged on the morning of 26th January, 2017 by endless patriotic quotes, GIFs, videos, songs, and wishes, with the exception of one particular message and got me thinking, for real:   'Tears are words that need to be written'   - Paulo Coelho. So, what are tears? When life was testing me for real, I remember writing this verse, sometime between looking at a tear-washed image of me on the mirror, thinking of life's battles, and travelling back to my tear-less days of reciting   The Charge of the Light Brigade  as an adolescent, the effect of which clearly echoes in the following verse I ended up composing, quite unable to explain to myself why I did so, and later realizing that I just had to do it! So, here goes: My cheeks have tasted the salt of my eyes. When an infant, I had familiar fingers to wipe them. Now, it is for them, those that raised me  That I shed these d...