Castles in the air

Where are we headed to? Is our moral compass aligned the right way? How far are we willing to go before we decide to turn back? Are we ready to risk everything for one rash moment of discovery? We're all full of unanswered questions, aren't we?
What am i doing here? I often wake to this question. A part of me eggs me on to continue sleeping and not pay heed to the question, while the music player is playing......

"......No one knows what it's like
To be the bad man
To be the sad man
Behind blue eyes....."

The other part, forget it, that's an entirely different story.

What makes some people rise above the system, to defy, to challenge, to live, to die? Can a few molecules of the right chemical in the right spot in our brain make us do the right thing? Is it so simple or is it a veneer?

Nothing is what it seems to be, everything an illusion. The only thing real is the fake. Life is just a waiting game, a real bitch. When death seems a far more hospitable friend than life, you know you've ventured out the wrong way of a one-way street.

Some days are bright and beautiful but most are tiring, unforgiving. Some are full of pleasant surprises but most are nasty sidekicks. And there are some when you're invincible, godlike, bursting with energy. You want to do something, be somebody, when you truly feel alive.


I'm a rock, i'm an island..... I have my books, and my poetry to protect me.....


People..Yes, people are all hypocrites........ Yes..... You can't not be one of them when you're one of them, ain't it?

In my spare time, I'm an architect. I like building castles in the air, tall strong ones, up on a hill with a moat around and a drawbridge......

Citizen 1211

Silent streams

A sudden gust of wind, and a few bright red leaves of a grand Elaeocarpus break free, only to be unhurriedly carried away in the clear waters of the stream flowing by. Unlike trees where the young leaves are red and turn green, the leaves of the Elaeocarpus, a species of wild rudraksh, turn a bright red as they age, sprinkling the brown leaf litter of many a rainforest floor with its colour. A journey that started as a bud attached to a branch has now reached its final stage; detached and sailing away past massive buttresses of other elaeocarps, wild mango and jamun, in the rainforests of the Anamalais. As they set sail, away from their branches, they are joined by others—walnut-like seeds of the same tree. They float past stream rubies defending their favourite perches, past Danios and spotted barbs in the water, past rounded rocks and overhanging bridges, past whistling thrushes and sallying flycatchers, past tumultuous rapids and scarlet impatiens, to gently settle in the arms of a calm pool.

Somewhere in the same landscape—not far—a sudden gust drops a few bright red leaves from another majestic elaeocarp. The stream flowing by is subdued and silent, unlike its gurgling neighbour a few miles away. The bright red leaves go with the flow, but there are no stream rubies here, nor sallying flycatchers. Harsh light streams through the sparse vegetation, in contrast to the soft, dappled light that a rainforest canopy allows. Far fewer rounded rocks remain, many now resting alongside roads as barriers. The water is slightly coloured, too, sluggish and slow to respond. The journey ends abruptly, as the stream disappears into a swamp in massive tea fields. Those few bright red leaves lend the only colour in a depressingly monotonous green ocean of tea, clogged in a mat of rushes and swamp vegetation. To understand the decay of streams, one has only to walk along a few in tea plantations.

Wherever they flow, streams have a character of their own. Whether in the mighty Himalayas or the equally impressive hills of peninsular India, from roaring rapids and rolling cascades to gurgling brooks, a stream is a strand that weaves life together. And fragmentation due to tea and coffee plantations sever the strand, converting fast-flowing streams to marshes and swamps. Vital meanders are straightened to drain away what appears to be excess water, but this in turn only leads to increased erosion and flooding. This is the decay of a stream, and the plantation landscapes of the Western Ghats mountains are riddled with such streams. Most streams that originate and flow through these areas end up being dammed, diverted, mined and polluted. Their gentle meanders are straightened, their laughter silenced; their only solace being a few isolated rainforest fragments and protected forests of sanctuaries and reserves miles downstream.

How do landscape transformations affect the life of the streams and the life in the streams? Our recent study on the Asian small-clawed otter, the smallest of the world's 13 otter species, threw up some pointers. In India, these otters are elusive mammals mostly restricted to the hill streams of the Western Ghats, the Himalaya and the North-east. For our study in the Valparai plateau of the Anamalai hills, we walked along numerous perennial streams flowing through the tea and coffee landscape, looking for evidence of otters. At first, the only glimmers of hope in the streams running through the stunted ocean of tea was the occasional grey wagtail or a flitting stream glory damselfly. Still, camera trap photographs and spraints (droppings) revealed that otters were using these streams. Coffee plantations with their shade trees, being more similar to forest, fared slightly better than tea for otters, despite the release of insufficiently-treated coffee wastewater into already-depleted streams. What was crucial for streams and otters were, however, the few patches of rainforest that had survived the onslaught of plantations. Retaining these while allowing strips of natural vegetation to regenerate along streams can help revive stream health and water quality, and prevent erosion and loss of wildlife habitat. It is in these strips that streams can still hum a part of their original tune.

Towering trees, an occasional herd of elephants crashing through and the sound of great hornbills in the canopy were constant reminders that much of the Valparai landscape was once like this. One early morning in April, in the adjoining Anamalai Tiger Reserve, we watched a pack of dholes frolicking in the shallow waters of a stream. They had killed a sambar the previous evening and had returned to finish the remains. A couple of hours later, walking further upstream, we glimpsed our first small-clawed otter. Too stunned to react, we watched it disappear into a rock crevice. All these months of walking along streams had finally paid off, however short-lived. Not wanting to surprise it any further, we quickly moved on, walking upstream towards our destination—an obscure waypoint marked on the GPS. We had barely arrived and were yet to recover from having seen the otter when we heard a growl that could only have come from a tiger! Moments later, the forest exploded with the alarm calls of lion-tailed monkeys in the canopy. We watched as a tiger walked down to the stream for a quick drink. The stripes of orange and black disappeared as suddenly as they had appeared, the cacophony was soon transferred to the neighbouring valley, and tranquillity reigned once again.

Most natural systems are resilient in nature and if allowed to recover, these streams too can perform vital ecological functions in modified landscapes and support a substantial amount of biodiversity. Native riparian vegetation binds the soil together and prevents erosion. Restoration of streams and riparian ecosystems in modified landscapes also help in reducing conflicts and providing habitats for native species of both flora and fauna. It also helps in reviving corridors for movement of large mammals like elephants and gaur. The fact that otters and other animals still use streams in plantations is hope enough that all is not lost in this blind dash towards development. 

Valleys of the mind

Queen - Is this the world we created?

Just look at all those hungry mouths we have to feed
Take a look at all the suffering we breed
So many lonely faces scattered all around
Searching for what they need

Is this the world we created
we made it on our own
Is this the world we invaded
Against the law
So it seems in the end
Is this what we're all living for today
The world that we created.

You know that every day a helpless child is born
Who needs some loving care inside a happy home
Somewhere a wealthy man is sitting on his throne
Waiting for life to go by

Is this the world we created
we made it on our own
Is this the world we devastated
Right to the bone?
If there's a God in the sky looking down
What can he think of what we've done
To the world that he created

Straw

A thin layer of windswept straw holds back the dusty brown earth from meeting the clear blue sky.
This thin layer sustains a million prancing wildebeest, demure zebras, nervous gazelles and indifferent elephants.
The parched earth soaks up blood from mutilated carcasses of buffaloes and zebras while lions, hyenas and vultures spar over a justified death.
A scrawny cheetah casts a long shadow in the amber light of the setting sun, warily listening to the unnerving calls of the lions and hyenas, having lived through another luckless hard day chasing down impalas.
Bat eared foxes hungrily examine termite mounds, mounds that stand out like islands in an ocean of grass

Crowned cranes serenade in the evening light while guinea fowls scramble to their daily perches

A masai clad in a red shawl saunters by, spear in hand, just another predator among other predators.

Cattle trample past, displacing gazelles and giraffes, invaders among natives.

Far away on the horizon, a fire lights up a star studded moonless night, hungrily lapping up vast stretches of tinder dry fodder.
A "Chucking" nightjar hawks around, grabbing fleeing insects, while a jackal is working hard trying to move her week old litter.
The first light reveals a charred landscape, devoid of life that held the land together. 

Unaware, A Canarium Bleeds to Death

Young and Unaware

Wounds That Never Heal

Hollowed by Thy Name

To Bleed is Sustainablity!

Sound and Fury

"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."


- in Macbeth

Blink

Everything around you is on such a grand scale. The forests, the destruction, the plantations, the egos. You are just an insignificant blink.

The Exposed Nest - Robert Frost

You were forever finding some new play.
So when I saw you down on hands and knees
I the meadow, busy with the new-cut hay,
Trying, I thought, to set it up on end,
I went to show you how to make it stay,
If that was your idea, against the breeze,
And, if you asked me, even help pretend
To make it root again and grow afresh.
But 'twas no make-believe with you today,
Nor was the grass itself your real concern,
Though I found your hand full of wilted fern,
Steel-bright June-grass, and blackening heads of clovers.
'Twas a nest full of young birds on the ground
The cutter-bar had just gone champing over
(Miraculously without tasking flesh)
And left defenseless to the heat and light.
You wanted to restore them to their right
Of something interposed between their sight
And too much world at once--could means be found.
The way the nest-full every time we stirred
Stood up to us as to a mother-bird
Whose coming home has been too long deferred,
Made me ask would the mother-bird return
And care for them in such a change of scene
And might out meddling make her more afraid.
That was a thing we could not wait to learn.
We saw the risk we took in doing good,
But dared not spare to do the best we could
Though harm should come of it; so built the screen
You had begun, and gave them back their shade.
All this to prove we cared. Why is there then
No more to tell? We turned to other things.
I haven't any memory--have you?--
Of ever coming to the place again
To see if the birds lived the first night through,
And so at last to learn to use their wings.

The End - Jim Morrison

This is the end

Beautiful friend

This is the end

My only friend, the end

It hurts to set you free

But you'll never follow me

The end of laughter and soft lies

The end of nights we tried to die

This is the end

is waiting to cross the road...

Thinking like a Mountain - Aldo Leopold

We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes - something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view..........

We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness. The deer strives with his supple legs, the cowman with trap and poison, the statesman with pen, the most of us with machines, votes, and dollars, but it all comes to the same thing: peace in our time. A measure of success in this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau's dictum: In wildness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.

Chasing Nothing

I'm albeit slowly beginning to realise that
There are things that can never be chased down.
In chasing, we're all like pack dogs trying to run down their quarry,
Who they know might never end up being that bone in their mouth,
But to chase is all they know,
And they will.

April Come She Will

April come she will

When streams are ripe and swelled with rain;
May, she will stay,
Resting in my arms again

June, she'll change her tune,

In restless walks she'll prowl the night; 

July, she will fly

And give no warning to her flight.

August, die she must,

The autumn wind blow chilly and cold;

September I'll remember.

A love once new has grown old.

                                                          - Simon & Garfunkel