Tag: travelwriting

Art & Culture, Rural

Holipura and its melancholic heritage…

Holipura village, Uttar Pradesh, India

Holipura Heritage Village, a small (and save for the glossy paint, largely non-descript) board on the road from Agra to Bah announces a potential excursion to those meandering in the ravines of Chambal… that ‘tis a short detour swings the decision in its favour as one turns the car down a narrow bumpy road for …

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

on mountains and seclusion…

Cloudy sunset from mountains near Asurbag Top, Great Himalayan National Park, Himachal Pradesh, India

mountains make their own weather, goes the old adage… what it forgets to mention is that they keep it too… only letting the last vestiges of moisture tumble downstream… in a fiefdom determined by relief, the environs are pristine and breathtaking… yet they exact a price, these pinnacles, for bestowing one with the true liberation …

Mountains

on undefined yearns…

Moraine filled mountains near Pangarchulla (~4,400 mts), Uttarakhand, India

the sense of expansiveness brings about a longing… a desire to partake in all but not knowing what in… one yearns for a past built upon the corrected plinths of the present… the mountain becomes more a curtain than a barrier, never refusing a passage but strongly suggestive of moving on…  the elements become a …

Mountains

the man in mist…

afternoon mist at the base of Thamsar Pass, Bada Bhangal Trek, Himachal Pradesh, India

A feeling of sadness and longing that is not akin to pain, and resembles sorrow only as the mist resembles the rain. – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow it starts with a feeling of vacuum, this vicissitude, as the valleys fill up with mist… the vapour dances on the grass and bounces off the rocks as a …

Mountains

the woods o’ winter…

I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says, ‘Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again’. -Lewis Carroll the woods of winter are an exercise in a patient build …

Nature

on the wallowing…

Hippopotamus in Zambezi River, Livingstone, Zambia

A man looking at a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard a hippopotamus as an enormous mistake; but he is also bound to confess that a fortunate inferiority prevents him personally from making such mistakes. -Gilbert K. Chesterton That what we term beauty is a high relative concept, and even the most unwieldy nuances …

Nature

on summer capers…

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.  -D. H. Lawrence The avifauna seem to treat the seasons without a shed of diffidence that other animals might care to display… be it the sun or the snow, …

Nature

on twilight jumbos…

They say an elephant never forgets. What they don’t tell you is, you never forget an elephant. – Bill Murray The pachyderm, as a whole, seem rather content in a general sort of aloofness to mortality… that there are very few predatory threats definitely plays a part… there’s no pricking up of the ears or …

Nature

on unnerving gorges

Creeping with awe to the verge, I peered down into a large rent which had been made from bank to bank of the broad Zambezi, and saw that a stream of a thousand yards broad leaped down a hundred feet and then became suddenly compressed into a space of fifteen to twenty yards. -David Livingstone …