Tag: kumaon

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 …

Art & Culture, Mountains

Lakhudiyar and the languid…

Prehistory, one feels at times, deserves to be left alone… for we aren’t doing much with it, except maybe for emojis… there’s no cultures to revere or ancestries to venerate, and consequently, no opinions to subjugate… hardly any narratives soaked in drama… just a clutch of unembellished facts aloof to sensational revelations or discoveries… content …

Nature

Birds, the restive kind…

Birds, the fidgety kind, anyone who likes to stalk them in lush, dense forests is well acquainted with the acoustic delights and visual disappointments… the chirps and rustles spark hope… the human crouches and crawls in a misconception of stealth, the avifauna revels in the foliage… both parties trying to avoid a startle, one looking …

Art & Culture, History

Temple trudges…

Gurrjar Dev Temple, Dwarahat, Uttarakhand, India

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 …

Art & Culture, History, Mountains

On royal animists… Sun Temple, Katarmal

Katarmal Sun Temple, Almora, Uttarakhand, India

A temple is a kernel around which settlements, permanent or temporary, are spun… across history and religions, they have laid the ground rules for civilizations, defined the contours of culture and cradled the arts… one might say it comes at a price though… an opacity of belief and conviction beyond which societies offer little incentive …

Art & Culture, Mountains

on water of the woods…

Naula, traditional water system, Uttarakhand, India

the way we mistreat water more or less defines the way we mistreat the gods, cleaving away the elements to deprive divinity of its roots and imprisoning it in a seclusion that can leave even the most devout stymied at times… yet one feels that this thought is more of an urban construct, as a …

Mountains, Nature

On precipitation…

It might be a coincidence — though one gets a rather assertive feeling in the gut that ‘tis not — that the less we splash about in the rain, the more we swoon over petrichor in the annals of internet… Google Ngram Viewer testifies to the fact, with the usage of the word spiking around …