Grasshoppers … the negligent fiddler of Aesop’s discourse on responsibility who suffers from its improvidence… an athletic pest that like many of its brethren flaunts a flashy disposition… mostly vegetarian unless forced to turn omnivorous… wearing a rather amused expression that permeates through those compound eyes and large jaws… Startles are how grasshoppers mostly interact …
Tag: photography
Dusk and its lingers…
Dusk makes one resign to the ways of the world, in a way that is not despondent with life but appreciates its fragility and transience… musings on dusk…
Birds and running – musings on thandi sadak, Ranikhet…
Birds are one in the faunal realm that share the joie de vivre of running, meandering (out of breath) just for the sake of it (and some foraging, maybe), a seeming purposelessness that is whimsical and resolute at the same time… while other animals chase you, or recede into the thicket at the sound of …
on crocs of Chambal…
crocs, in a sense, are a perfect faunal representation of the landscape of Chambal… there’s an overarching sense of the sedate punctuated by violent outbursts of activity… badlands – geography seeping into the society… serrations in the terrain and caste divides… law of the land that once caved in to dacoity, dregs of which still …
a desert drawl…
desert … arid, dryness… dehydration, oasis… the sands are, for obvious reasons, representative of desolation, dreariness and despondence… a rite of passage beyond which lie many a virtue – justice, fame, wealth, enlightenment… the ramblings on enjoying the journey rather than the destination doesn’t really ring true in these landscapes though… in the …
Wistfulness and birds in the mountains…
Wistfulness is a state of poetic realms, tinges of sweet sorrow sprinkled over the cocoon of contentment… so it feels rather amusing when one manifests it on to animals (in the guise of anthropomorphism) at first, but it makes at sense at times, when formal discourses on solutions to the evolution of evolution and genes …
On isolation in mountains…
Isolation in mountains, unlike those of confined spaces that breeds restlessness, is steeped in contentment… musings on mountains and solitude…
On servile shepherds of the mountains…
Shepherds, like cowboys, are a romanticized lot, maybe it stems from the fact that it remains one of the oldest subsistence activities of the civilized homo sapien, something that has stood the test of time and remain unscathed, come war or peace… it is quite baffling that an occupation so resilient has been looked down …
on cairns in the backcountry…
cairns are, in a way, a coarse representation of the tumult between the linear and non-linear perspectives to life… the former measuring existence set paths adhering to predictable, quantified templates, the latter proposing diverse, meandering paths to arrive at the same destinations… mountains as a metaphor are quite apt, for their traverses are an exercise …
Shrines in the high mountains…
Temples, unlike shrines, carry the baggage of civilizations – through the elaborate nature of their façade, the document evolution of subsistence and beliefs, the balances of power and associated antics… with shrines, especially those in the high mountains, one observes a relatively restricted role… as a placemark, they signify vantage points, as conservators they are …