soliloquies in the outdoors
Waterfalls are a contrast, in terms of motion… while the rest of the inanimate prefer to either remain in stasis or relent to move with extreme reluctance, waterfalls are in a screaming rush, as if the oceans would dry out if not for their contribution… gravity and geology… water wanting to become fire… rocks weathering …
Lark – a bit smug, this one, the Ashy-crowned sparrow lark, especially the male, the missus still (relatively) demure and consenting… flitting around open fields looking for grains or reaping the rich entomological harvest of the monsoons… quintessentially restive, forever grouchy… happy as a lark? na… not this one for sure… For Shakespeare and Chaucer, …
Cuckoo, harbinger of rains, keeper of time… some resident, some migrant, all parasite… ‘tis a rather intriguing avian, the cuckoo… biologically, culturally, philosophically, or etymologically… at times endearing, at times appalling… ‘Twas a Jacobin cuckoo that we’d spotted, meandering through a rather sultry afternoon in Orchha looking for birds… as is the norm with this …
Tea plantations are neat, their symmetry soothing to the eye… like meadows, they exude a sense of openness as opposed to the dense melee of the woods… making the hills roll… but there’s this lilting sense that maybe this is too neat… for nature prefers order to be churned out from chaos, and these rectangular …
Birds … busy bees… forever restive yet surprisingly gallant at times… singing to beckon or wailing out alarms… never a dull moment in the avifaunal kingdom… thus one tries to kill the tediousness of doing lap after lap around this wide-open field lying amidst a slew of real estate projects in various stages of completion… …
Vultures, the gore in their subsistence often veils the nobility of their purpose and the mostly dire circumstances they face in this tumultuous phase of the Anthropocene… diclofenac brought that into the limelight for a while (a problem that is now manifesting in other forms), but that’s only for the woke, one reckons, while wondering …
Tahrs, they ruminate… like most of their ungulate brethren, both literally and figuratively… jaws in their slow, perpetual drawl… scuttling along hurriedly to bite the grass and then standing and gazing dreamily as they work on the cud… like most prey, their existence is marked by a stoical acceptance – expecting death at every step, …
Agamas, I somehow tend to find a kind of melancholy in their expression… maybe ‘tis a because of the head being held up high but in edginess rather than pride… or the furious activity one can feel even as they stand stock-still… in their reptilian universe, agamas would be the average Joe (or Jane), a …
Pipits are ubiquitous, and pipits are confusing… among conspecifics and congeners like larks, they mercilessly expose the novice birder… drab plumage, scrappy flight, there’s nothing to make them stand out, one muses, but for that restive disposition they move around with, bustling busybodies rummaging through the grounds, loath to fly and trying to compensate by …
Ice stupa, a progeny of the climate crisis… perhaps nothing is as adaptive as traditional wisdom when it comes to making the most of limited natural resources, but then this cul-de-sac called the Anthropocene comes about, leaving communities flummoxed, and livelihoods in peril… ‘Tis always enlightening to see subsistence farming in Ladakh, mushrooms of green …