Musings

Many words have been attributed to winter: cold, dark, dreary, fruitless, death-like...pleasant. In fact, winter derives its virtue from the context in which it prevails. What is dreadful to many comes as a blessing to the blazing tropics. Winter may be a curse for all those starved, listless faces, who would wish for the Happy Prince’s swallow to pluck off and drop leaves of gold on them! Winter may be an inspiration for many like Robert Frost, to write enduring verses on  Stopping by woods on a snowy evening , admiring the lovely, deep and dark surroundings, at the cost of a poor horse’s perplexity! Winter is when a Johnsy, in her morbid fancy might connect the falling of the last leaves to the remaining days of her sordid life. While most trees reach out to the heavens, stretching their dying arms, the more blessed birches, firs, pines, spruces and conifers enjoy their evergreen status. Birds fly away to warmer lands, leavin...

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...