a cottage with a view

Talking of rejuvenation, I'm sure you might have read about Heidi, and the magical healing powers of the Alpine world.

I am glad, I got a whiff of the magic.

50 wood, 125 stone. map: black forest.

A keep (or any tower for that matter), has this ability to re-generate the lives of any troops that you  garrison within. It is also recommended to build these over cliffs, or at any higher elevation.

Now that you have seen the picture, you know why this must be so.

with my nose held high ...

I held the lift for him, and he stumbled in, slick with sweat and short of breath.

A jogger, yes. But not too committed - it was easy to see; the generic t-shirt(no sweat-wicking); the full length trousers .. (who wears trousers when exercising in the Indian summers ?) .. and then as my eyes traveled down, I saw it.
Canvas sneakers !
Blasphemy.
I couldn't help but smirk, thinking about my top-of-the-line Asics Kayanos, the kind of shoes that you should be using when you mean business.

The same Asics that have not been taken on a run for more than a year.

leke prabhu ka naam,

... because that's how the antaxari used to start, and I hope this new stint here continues for some time.

... because how else could you start the day - if you lived at a place like this, lorded over by the Kanchenjungha ?

No wonder, in all our tales, the Gods resided in the Himalayas.

to new beginnings ..

The winter morning sun, apart from warming the chill in the bones, is good for one more thing - 

It makes everything so bokeh-licious !

Wish you a Happy New Year !
May you shine forth. Always.

its time..

A new morning, 

.. or a new year. 

Its time to shake off the dew from your wings; and fly off to something new.

buenos dias

Some beginnings are worth waiting for; worth waiting through a long, dark night ...

more keede

.. of the non-kitaabi kinds.

neighbors

The good old beings I share the garden with ..

softly,

and slowly, because while there still remain many mysteries to unravel; the secret is to linger awhile, to experience the soft touch, inhale the light fragrance, and truly savor each moment before moving on to the next.

Just sometimes, the tortoise does win the race.

i was here

What today's route lacked in butterflies; it made up with dragonflies.

augmented reality

What I actually come across on my morning walk:

What I make believe I am seeing:

Wish I could do the same non-linear transformation on my resume too :D

The walk does have its moments though. 

Like the feel of the morning dew on your bare feet.

Like the air laden with the smell of wild shrubs. You don't get it in manicured gardens, and I don't know any other way to describe it.

Like the moment when you realise the gardener in a public park has seen it fit to raise papaya trees in a bed of roses.

:)

migration

So it's time for a change of seasons, and it's time for you to fly back to where you started from.

Back from a place you loved, to a place where you are loved.

But the memories will call, and soon you'll be back - for another season.

Bon voyage, mon ami.
For this journey and for the many more to come.

from the archives

Memories- its what they do. fade away...

Then again, why do they still keep tugging at the strings ?

It's a little trickier to bask in thoughts of things that were; than to miss them for the fact that they aren't ..

a repeat

Because out of every three readers of this blog, one is not on my facebook. (Those are numbers, not ratios :D but there's a nice saying about lies and statistics)

Because this is cross-processing and sepia time and general old memories time; even though the pic itself is just a week old.

Because its raining again.

i love

Is it just me, or can you also see the sky-heart in the pic ?

The first thing you notice as you ride out past the township wall is that suddenly there are very few people about; even among those that go by, hardly anyone is on a motor- vehicle. What you see instead, are butterflies: small, quick, bright yellow ones, large slower orange ones, orange ones with white stripes, orange ones with black spots, black ones with white spots, mousy-grey which seem most ordinary till the sun reflects off their wings...  If you go slow they tease you, flitting about your handlebars, promising to land if you just held out your palm...
That's probably all the movement you get to see. Absolute peace and silence reigns.

You are immersed in a whole cacophony of green; a long time of admiring well-laid out gardens and orderly conifers in temperate woods had quite blurred my memory of how wildly diverse the sights and scents of a monsoon fed forest could be! There's the bright green of paddy fields in which rice has been just transplanted, the dark green of the Sal, and all the in-betweens contributed  by a hundred other species of tree and shrub and bush and creeper.

By the way, did I say silence ? I mis-represent facts.

The crickets are still chirping at noon, each contributing its own note to the general rhythm. A couple of birds call out to each other, you can hear the knock-knock-knock in the distance of what might be a woodpecker or a wood-cutter. The silvery tinkle of a bell tips you off about a herd goats passing by somewhere in the undergrowth, a deeper tong-tong-tong gives off the position of the herd of cows. From further off, the breeze carries the gurgle of the swollen stream, jumping off the rocks, exuberant with its monsoon bounty.

The Indian jungle has a music of its own.

center of attraction

Yes, what you see there is dew.

Not rain.

It feels like a year since we have seen a good sunny day around here.. Days upon days of blinding curtain rain and steady-as-Dravid rain and looking as if it is certainly going to rain and a faint misty rain and - you get the drift. You name the type of rain and we have had it, and have had it again for a second, third and fourth helping. In a country which is reeling under drought, I bet there are a lot of exasperated people out there saying "Its not fair! Why, of all places, only in that little industrial town in the middle of nowhere ?"

I certainly echo the same sentiment.

So it feels really nice when little Johnny can go out and play, even if its for only one little morning.

on the japanese bridge

Do you know why the path was left untrodden ?

Well, so do I.

look - Arundhati !

This is in reference to a scene from Devdutt Pattnaik's book - "The Pregnant King"

A big part of the book was about the king trying to conceive a heir; and there were comparisons about "ownership" of women in a marriage which would frankly be outrageous in today's context. However, looking beyond these, the dialogues on "duty"- to everyone around - parents, ancestors, subjects, children, could set one thinking, as also the sections on the difference between right and wrong, given the context. How easy it is to imagine that there could be absolute rights and wrongs - that it would be easy to take decisions in life that could be viewed as either black or white, and not "depends" !

This scene was from the earlier pages of the book - when the difficult decisions had not come into picture yet. There were no promises to pluck the stars either, just the heady phase of strutting off, of exploration, of getting to know.

One way to look at it is Charlie's way: the fewer promises you make, the fewer you would need to break.

too good, too bad

Watched Devdutt Pattanaik's TED talk on youtube. 

Though I do not agree with all his views on how "systems" are anathema to the Indian psyche, I quite liked one quote on impermanence.

(wrt the eternal cycle) :  According to Hindu belief, nothing is permanent. Not even death.

Which does make a case for making life a little more care-free, and not really keep checking for the end.

All I can say that it was good while it lasted.