Lovely Leh

 Lovely Leh...make it your base camp for a couple of days to acclimatize to high altitude conditions and then let yourself be pulled by the wanderlust call of solitude seeping through the charming high altitude desert, valleys and snowy peaks.

The full bowl of emptiness

The empty bowl full silence and peace. Luscious Ladakh! Full of pristine emptiness! So close to the unmanifest! Feels so so away from noise, chaos and clutter of our creations. 

A rainbow on the wings

The tiny tailorbird is always in earnest, noisy and imperturbable. It keeps on letting out monitorial tweets about anything and everything. It sounds sharp and forbidding, a kind of sword-in-hand-fighter. The green guy with tautly drawn tail seems livid about the way things are managed in the world. On sultry monsoon noons its cheeup-cheeup-cheeup ruckus has alerted me many times about a reptilian encroachment in the yard. It is such a small bird but the wondrous hardihood of raillery and persuasive eloquence might force you to bow down to it and say, ‘Hailed be thy cause Your Greatness!’

Oriental magpie robin is a very happy looking black and white bird. It has an exciting cavalcade of notes and sounds. A look at it gives you a feeling that it’s a very cheerful bird. It’s quite magisterial in looks; the prominent black and white gives the impression of a lawyer’s attire. I have never heard it sad and sullen. During the monsoons its freely cantering verses of love are a treat to listen. Its positive spirit is wholeheartedly revealing, so much so that you feel good after listening to its songs.

The only other guy who can beat the magpie robin in lyrical positivity is the white-browed fantail flycatcher. The birdie chap resonates with fun with his mesmerizing dips and dives to catch fleas. He seems very free; beyond fear and its consequential rigidities. He flip-flops artistically and sings with voluminous range of notes. I have never felt him to be desperate; his is a relaxed foray, almost a play with the fleas even though they have to pay with their lives if they lose in the game. A fun-loving guy basically, he spreads his white-edged fantail while he modulates and varies his notes. The notes sound lovely. His best signature note is ee-ee-oo-oo-aa-aa, a distinct composition for love, which is basically a lively whistle of six notes. Well, sometimes he modifies it to make it of eight notes.

The peacocks look beautiful but their hoot is too candid and much acerbic. It pierces one’s ears a bit ruefully. It’s meticulously ebullient with high-pitched notes capable of dislodging the ball of wax in one’s ears. They are the national bird so giving them more share of fame I would say their peee-hooo siren call sounds boldly virtuous shout of a rigorist.

The sparrows have chirpy effervescence. It carries the pleasant hustle and bustle of the birdie world. Their chorus is pretty coherent. It can raise one’s spirit on a bleak dawn.

The crow has vivid but confounding notes for human ears—as if the guy is busy in sharpening his cleverness and use it against the humans. Many times his cawing almost scoffs at the listener.

The babblers hurl their twein-twein-twein domineeringly. They are always miffed at something and protest vociferously. If the koel is classical, they are plainly massical. They launch their te-te-te as if in pursuance of a long unsettled dispute.

The doves are mostly silence-wreathed but when they speak—except the laughing dove which seems to laugh even while she is crying—they carry distant or blurred notes of pain and suffering. They are for relaxing and complacency; don’t carry the zipping enthusiasm usually seen among the birds.

I don’t have the mesmerizing and bewitching whistling thrush around me. But the coucal, almost at the opposite end of the spectrum in tone and melody, sometimes comes from the farmside and gives a factory hooter kind of echoing call. It sounds an exuberant denial of the humans’ sole right to shout.

Oriental white eyes raise barely audible little trills of anklet bells—an elegant softly jingling rhetoric if you care to listen to the complaints of such a little bird.

The red-vented bulbul’s notes carry lots of emotive significance. Their name sounds lyrical and poetic but they are always mired in competing concerns with fellow birds of all species. When angry they become awfully confounding even to a human watching the show.

The wire-tail swallows let out finely crafted chip-chip sounds as they swiftly dart in airy spaciousness, picking up midges midair and even chipping a lice from your head if you dare to come near their mud nest.

There are genuine echoes of mother nature in their—the birds—calls. In a world cluttered with controversies, I listen to their calls. Their chattering is a treat during the peaceful, intimate pre-dawn air. Wherever or whoever you are, mentally bruised, homeless, dissident or outcast, listen to the call of birds. Even if your world is crumbling, listen to the birds. No words, no advice, no preaching—just the sound of mother nature. They are the threads to the silence of trees. The trees are the threads to stones. And the voiceless threads of mute stones are the passage to the womb of nothingness. But to begin with listen to the birds. 

The master ceasefire catalyst

Ceasefire is a lovely term. With ceasefire, India, Pakistan and Trump all claimed victories in their own terms. With ceasefire, Israel, Iran and Trump again claimed their own versions of victories. Let's hope there comes a day when the same word 'ceasefire' allows Russia, Ukraine and Trump to claim their share of victories. In the ceasefire equation, it's clearly visible that Trump is a nice catalyst  agent. A powerful ceasefire agent. He used trade to facilitate the Indo-Pak ceasefire. He used B-2 bombers to effect the Iran-Israel ceasefire. Now the onus is on him to decide what catalyst role does he play to bring about Russia-Ukraine ceasefire. If he does it, I think he will be a very strong contender for the Nobel peace prize. Above all, let's celebrate this ceasefire. After all, millions of common Israeli and Iranians, who have no role in causing this war, can go to sleep peacefully after many harrowing nights. Furthermore, let's pray for peace in Gaza as well. The 'two-state solution' is the best. Let there be a safe and strong Israel. Let there be a Palestine state. And let Iran remove the Israel-annihilation clause from its state policy.

The small world of a poetic man

 

The birds seem to hold a nobler form of love. Wild free-will carried by their wings. The reflection of love on the screen of life seems tranquil, chirpy though, and wholesome. We on the other hand carry lots of false modesty on the grand old mule track of love. Our reasoning gets clouded with passion. Our emotions spin colossal tangle as we walk on the woodcutter trails in the forest of love.

Men are mostly snapping their jaws like sunning alligators trying to eat butterflies—to quench the insatiable hunger as well as provide amusement to the bored self. And women, beautifully enigmatic and amusing, scented breeze in their tresses, ravaging silence behind their gossips, they almost borrow happiness at a hard price in a male-dominated world. They have their pain and undulations while hanging between lucidity and illusion.

But the birds possess a nobler form of love, as I mentioned earlier. The wire-tail swallow couple, for example. They are the resident birds in the neighborhood. I see them flying around for most of the year. They are extra active during the monsoons. In the musty, humid air of July and August, they reflect extra dose of love, of being together, of caring and sharing. Despite their chipping quick notes, airy swirls and swift flapping of wings their love seems calm. Lyrical and real; very natural without any superfluous infusion.

Unlike young clandestine lovers in some town in a deeply conservative society, all sly and telling a lyrical lie, foul words stamped on perfumed paper with a luminous ink, the birds are free to spread their love on free wings.

The monsoon breeze is cooler. The swallows have a permanent nesting place on the verandah ceiling. They always modify the last year’s mud nest. There is a cable going over the yard and I see them making love on it after fixing the house. It’s never a hurried and pushed love like we humans. First they take their duties of setting up the nest and only then they allow themselves some pleasure. They seem so light—devoid of the extra weight of wisdom and knowledge. They are contended with the primitive trinket—mother nature’s raw bouquet of life and living—and do full justice to it till death’s slingshot brings them down.

There is a very lucid conviction in what and how they do it. But the mankind is different. Our love’s character is furrowed by pain. We are caught in childish entanglements with dramatized perseverance. The funny authors of our own huge shame and tiny fame. We die every moment to sign in the gold book of life. The streets are vice-ridden and in disarray, crowded with distinguished, arrogant and prejudiced people. The scene revolting and ridiculous. Duplicities drizzling. Ingenuous villainies abounding. Mirrored doors stop this street clamor and try to retain the beautified and glorified private interiors holding little patches of succulent swamps. An effort to create a minute trace of picture-card peace. Gold thread embroidery on the muddy clothes mired in arduous morass. Cosmetics layered over enfeebled charms. Almost like an illicit dose of love—like a married man climbing into a widow’s bed.

Beyond all this, I try to acknowledge and admit the possibility of real, natural love in the human world.

She, the wire-tail swallow lady, is plump now, carrying eggs. They are usually comfortable with my presence but sometimes play mischief and swiftly almost graze my just-shaven head, chipping away with a birdie joke maybe.

They do it now as I watch the labored journey of an earthworm in the yard. It started from a corner very early in the morning and after three hours I see it just a dozen feet from the destination, a little wet flowerbed with fresh mud. It seems a very adventurous earthworm. Luck, as they say, favors the brave. It has beaten many accidental possibilities in reaching this far in the journey. It’s a lovely sight to witness such a fruitful homecoming. To add my helping share to its struggle, I decide to keep a watch till it reaches home to undo any risk because there are many a slip between the cup and lips.

A squirrel has shifted her base. It had its nest outside the wall among the clumps of trees. But there are snakes there, so possibly it’s changing house to avoid encounter with the reptiles. So looking for a better lodge for its little ones it has made a nest of cloth strips, cotton and dry grass high among the branches of the parijat tree in the garden. There it comes bounding from under the gate’s lower grills, its kid held in mouth. It almost bumps into my feet as I stand guard to see the earthworm safely home. It takes a sharp turn and looks worried from a distance. A mother shouldn’t be stopped like this. So I move away and here it comes and climbs the tree to show their new place to the kid.