Sahyadrica

“You have to get lost before you can be found.” ― Jeff Rasley , Bringing Progress to Paradise: What I Got from Giving to a Mountain Village in Nepal The sun setting over your shoulder in a forest wilderness as a dark rainstorm approaches from the east is not the time for you to be out trekking on the cliff of the Western Ghats. But here you are: with your trekking friends and family, battling to conquer the fort, struggling with your inner fears; and here you want to be: beating down the stinging rain, and ever marching on. For you have shed blood and sweat on your way up. For you have prepared to complete this trek, and, more importantly, you have left behind the rat-race which you think life is all about: now, you are not chasing targets, you are chasing your ambition. You are encouraging your friends to tarry with you. You are their emotional leader, and although you know that the light fades and you’re being stalked by a rainstorm, you sit back on a rock to enjoy the view w...

It rained for the entire day on August 28, and a little more on the next, and has been for the past three days. Mumbai region received most of its share of rainfall on August 19, a day when I went to one of the most treacherous pass in the Ghats to trek on one of the most treacherous forts I’ve been on this year. It is raining as I write, but August was nothing like August rain is supposed to be, even if it was better than July. The region is still facing a deficit by more than 30% (September 1, 2012, Times of India ). Yet if you go a few hundred kilometers from the city, the paddy fields are saturated and bathed in an aura of a rich lemon-green. The monsoon outburst of life, natural and planted, is at its peak. Bagadwadi bathed in monsoon To call it an explosion of life is akin to the theory of the formation of our universe, the Big Bang: that single moment of an “explosion” that took us by surprise even after it has been approximately 13750000000 years since. Life, when ...