Sahyadrica

Dunglagepu the tallest. It’s not like I discovered mountains or spirituality that I write this. It’s that I discovered that a place is to be greeted as an individual. I met one on a short trip to the base of the higher Himalaya where the night-time cold had just about dropped to zero. The days were warm, hot even on a climb of a few hundred meters, and mornings and evenings cold. On a clear day, a few cottony clouds clung to the snowless mountains – the winter snow had not begun – the sunshine nourishing my skin. Meeting a place by happenstance is increasingly rare in this world. A place which simply accepts you, talks to you, and leaves a lasting impression that quite, even if subtly, changes you – how I have yearned to meet if not search for one. Writing about meeting one is tough. It is always overwhelming to describe somebody, a place is perhaps the most complex persona to describe, be it a garden, a grove, or a landscape. An autumn in the mountains. Some places ought to be as th...

  A Backhoe Loader (a capitalist arm) feeding a Cattle Egret? As this JCB reclaimed a coastal floodplain for development, the egret waited to snack on disturbed insects. It is cliché when we say the only constant in the world is change. It is a paradoxical fact, always at the back of our minds when talking about what was, what is, and what will be. That history influences the present is as much a part of this phrase as the present influencing the future. When we talk about environment preservation, biodiversity conservation, and wildlife protection – all a part of the broader environmentalism – we often look back to find reasons for the present and make predictions for the future. Even a walk in the wilderness makes us wonder what it was like in the past but also what it would be in the future. Environmentalism is as much a science as it is a movement. Some mark the dawn in the west, with the Silent Spring published in 1962. In India, one of the most well-known grassroots movemen...

We're not scaremongering This is really happening, happening --Idioteque, Kid A, Radiohead, 2002 The once-in-a-few-generations calamity of pandemics has become all too frequent. Zoonotic – species jumping – pandemics are more recurrent in the last few decades irrespective of their origin in domestic or wild animals – or labs. The generation under 35 itself has seen or been through more than three pandemics – the H1N1 flu, the swine flu, and covid-19, in addition to outbreaks of Ebola, Nipah, and avian influenza that is still considered to be a highly infectious disease. We’ve witnessed a lot in a span of a year; from revitalisation of nature to our increasing intolerance towards wildlife, from a 17% drop in atmospheric CO 2 levels and two rare cyclonic events followed one after another up the warming Arabian Sea, from protests against the recent farm law amendments to protests against mining operations in areas of rich cultural and natural heritage, from flooding in the plains t...

Thoreau’s writings, especially Walking and Walden, have been crucial parts of my young adult life; I longed to be in the woods, alone, left to my own thoughts amidst nature – well, doing exactly as Thoreau now comes at a ginormous financial investment, so I did what I could and continue to do. Over the last ten years since I first read Walden, I have had plenty of such opportunities – I would add the timeless lock-up of eight months of 2020 which I thankfully spent reading and rereading Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. It’s a long stretch between the two, but for me, Walden’s cabin or Vonnegut’s slaughterhouse are linked in more ways than one. Left: Walden; or, life in the woods by Henry D. Thoreau; available here , Right: Slaughterhouse-Five OR The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.; available here ; these are the early (first ed) covers. Lately, I am lost on titles, I cannot stick to one; if that is how Thoreau and Vonnegut decided upon theirs, alt...

It started out as a feeling Which then grew into a hope Which then turned into a quiet thought Which then turned into a quiet word And then that word grew louder and louder 'Til it was a battle cry                                                   - The call by Regina Spektor Nature writing is a cycle. You discover, write, rediscover, rewrite. You finish a piece, but you never really finish writing. Ten years into blogging (twelve, today), I hinted at my writing process in a letter to my younger self . Since then this thought has been taking root in my mind: what have I learnt from punching keys and scribbling on notepads? When I say you never really finish writing, I mean it particularly for writing about nature. Nature writers don’t lose track of a story once it unfolds and is published. It is the piece that concludes, not th...