Sahyadrica

A subtle scent of Alstonia still lingers on the road I take to work – a leftover from the winter when these avenue trees had filled the air with their sweet, intoxicating scent. It lingers only in one particular place, near a secluded street that leads away from the main road where vehicular exhaust slaps against your face. As I meander through this road every day, I see more and more of lone parakeets darting through the air, squeaking as they fly to get somewhere in hurry, rather than flocks of them. I also notice more crows than sparrows. And I feel the exhaust and the aftertaste of being blasted by the soot of vehicles more strongly, piercing my lungs and leaving me breathless. My senses are heightened only when I experience these things as an outsider. If I were to sense it as a part of this landscape, I’d be seeing, smelling, and feeling the flavours of the city every night and every day, and so I would never have smelt the flowers, nor seen the birds nor tasted the fetid toxi...

It is hard for a person to put the human experience in perspective. A person will describe his experiences as a human experience, so will a community, and the experiences between two people and two communities will differ immensely. And they will differ between two cultures by leaps and bounds. To put it in a perspective, the human experience is a collective wisdom of not one but many individuals, communities, and cultures, with every bit from here-and-there. If someone asked you to put the human experience into words, your account will be different than mine, than more-or-less anyone’s – it will be heavily biased on a side you identify yourself with, whether that side is religious, spiritual, natural or philosophical. To get a fair view of the human experience, the perceiver needs to be a non-human. No intelligence has taken birth – or has been found – that can put human experience in a perspective. Yet some can, and we can more-or-less interpret it from them. A dog itself would...

“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...

I woke up to the merry laughter of birds, the melancholy music of rain, and a green aura, deep and longing, creeping onto the walls of the room and draping it in an indescribable glow. I spun my head seeking the source of the light and felt its warm glow upon my face, to which I stayed in my place, absorbing all the energy that emanated from the green fields filtering the early sunlight. Home The morning carried a pleasant breeze from the sea, the scent of which is peculiar only to the Konkan region. The sun glanced through a fissure in an otherwise uniform grey cloak of nimbostratus covering the eastern sky. I found myself standing in front of piling fields of bowing rice heavy with raindrops. Rice Thin streaks of smoke rose from the few scattered houses. Behind the house we live in runs a stream inundated by a makeshift dam – a useful source of water for the villagers – from where echoed the beating of clothes. A leopard killed a cow and dragged its prey behind the d...