Tag: landscapes

Mountains

Nelong and mountains glum…

Nelong valley, Uttarakhand, India

Nelong valley, like many of its militarized brethren, lies glum… twixt blasts of dynamite scraping roads out of brittle rocks and some rounds fired hither and thither, there’s an eerie silence, uncharacteristic of mountains that can conjure music out of almost everything, animate or inanimate… but these are the ways modern societies define assertiveness and …

Mountains

Clouds in a benevolent mood…

Clouds in high-altitude Himalayan valleys

Clouds have this dichotomy of sorts, they can choose to dump their wares upon a hapless wayfarer and be at the receiving end of his million curses, or they can just prefer to hang out harmlessly, keeping him guessing… on higher climes, ‘tis more often than not a race against the clouds than time in …

Nature

Twilight on icy tomes…

Shiva peak, Pangi valley, Himachal Pradesh, India

Twilight – one part of it is hope, the other is resignation… a submission to the forces around and beyond… impatience giving way to forbearance as the last of the light tucks itself into a lunar solace… a time of the day when thoughts become atmospheric, sacrificing their precision, anesthetized by a sense of nostalgia… …

Mountains

Meditating over mountains…

Meadows in Kashmir, India

Meditating over mountains is an exercise in peeling off multitudes… meandering around their geometries, mulling over whether to engage with the elements or take shelter from them, you look for those deep life lessons recorded over many a tome of the yore and now chopped up into bite sized, social media portions, but in vain… …

Mountains

Mountains – mosaics, and mirrors…

Mountains - Valley of Flowers, Uttarakhand, India

In a sense, mountains are essentially ruins… tectonic crash and bangs that leave undulations big and small in their wake… lofty spires, breathing ice and snow… rock and water locked in a tussle, one trying to remain in stasis, the other insistent on making everything flow… tucked in between these geological forces are millennia… of …

Mountains

Pangi – notes from a hidden hinterland

Pangi valley, Himachal Pradesh

…When it rains, it pours… …Raindrops keep falling on my head… …Rain on your parade… …Why does it always rain on me… There we were, all primed up for Panpatia Col in the third week of September, supposedly having given the monsoons a wide berth… but then came a spell of rain that battered most …

Mountains

Come September…

Bhyundar Khal Trek, September 2022

September – a time of astronomical transitions and a last chance to take a long sojourn in the high mountains… for winters, save some initial sighs on never ending carpets of snow, make up for rather dull trudges… with the monsoons retreating – albeit with lesser and lesser predictability in the Anthropocene – one can …

Mountains

Where ice turns to water…

Nichnai glacier covered in ice, Kashmir, India

There’s a distinctive dynamic to these places, where ice turns to water up in the high mountains… as if the elements take a deep breath and all is still, a burble here and there, an avalanche or a rockfall in the distance… the elements go about their business in an eerie silence, and every small …