The pleasure of spotting a new bird

 

The knowledge of a new bird species is joyful. If you are studious type, you stand on sturdier conceptual pillars. I feel more evolved and loving, at least. Great Salim Ali’s book helps me a lot in this regard. It’s as comprehensive on the subject as the freewheeling flights of the entire range of birds in the subcontinent. Each word carries an enriching streak. The pictures give a brilliantly crisp snapshot of the ultimate birdie reality.

Here I see a new bird on the fence wall. I take long and short notes of its colors, wings, feathers, beak and everything possible about its appearance and run to pick up the masterpiece. With a great sense of an amateur birdwatcher’s emotionalism, I flip through the picture plates to spot anything matching my mental notes about the bird. Great Salim Ali will never disappoint you even if you remember a few basic points about the bird.

It turns out to be a white-browed fantail-flycatcher. It has a striking white brow. It has a distinctively white forehead and white underparts. It sometimes joins mixed hunting parties of insectivorous birds. So it possesses a pretty flexible, smart, circumstantial attitude. It flits, waltzes, pirouettes from branch to branch and tree to tree. As a tuneful tribute to the free-spirited winged birdie gods, it makes graceful sallies. Its call but is a bit harsh, a sort of authoritative chuk-chuk. But when it’s in love it makes delightful chee-chee-chweevi notes. Everyone mellows down after falling in love. Well, he is always welcome in my small courtyard and little garden as long as he catches flies as suggested by his name. There are plenty of them around.

Fahien, the legendary scholar-traveller

 

This is something from the yellowed pages of an ancient traveler’s book of life. With an unflagging persistence, he has written an indelible footnote in the book chronicling the cooing of adventurous spirits to know more of the world. It must have been astronomically breathtaking when he crossed the Himalayas and the Central Asian highlands. It’s about the legendary traveler, Fahien.

More than one and half millennia ago, Fahien set out on an arduous journey. He had been ordained as a monk at a very young age. One day, he came across a very old, tattered copy of Vinay Pitika (the rules of monastic order). The sumptuous literary opulence drew his heart with its velvety cord. He wanted to have a copy of the book at any cost. Showing amazing fortitude for his age—he was already sixty-two—he set out for India, the land of the origination of his faith.

Bravely fixing the jigsaw pieces of a perilous journey, he managed to cross the Himalayas. He wandered all over India, visiting many monasteries to get the book. Finally, he found the book in Sanskrit at a monastery in Pataliputra. Sticking to his mould, he learnt Sanskrit, translated the book in his language and sailed back home. He deserved a relatively smoother sea-ride this time to go back home at the age of seventy-five.

The resident oriental magpie robin

 

The handsome dainty oriental magpie robin has picked out a particular bough for its night perch. It’s suitably located among a dense clump of leaves to give it a comfortable night stay beyond the feral cats’ encroachment. And the winter takes everything in its icy folds. The moon looks shivery with its beatific three-quarter smile. The winter means submission. The fast and the furious streak in us turns slower as if in proportion to the slower blood movement across veins and arteries. But then all of us know the seasons inevitably change. The spring is patiently biding its time at some virgin locales. We also have to wait and allow the cold to spend its freezing stores.

The lonely oriental magpie robin is a warm company to the forlorn writer in an old countryside house. I can feel his position. It’s sad to be alone at cold nights. I believe none of us is in dumps and depression. There is hardly any sun during January. The stars twinkle sometimes at night but then the fog quickly takes possession of the skies. The smog flaunts its vile vanities—even in the countryside around the Delhi NCR. The winter air is like almost being in gas chambers but still we aren’t paying any heed to the urgent climatic issues and with a flagrant indifference are adding to the concrete high-rises, spanking new complexes and thousands of new vehicles on the congested roads.

Beyond all these pressing matters, the oriental magpie robin spends his nights among a clump of kari-patta, guava and parijat branches. These intersect nicely at a safe height. The location of his favorite branch is proved by the bird-drops on the jasmine leaves below his nighttime shelter. There is a natural intelligence in creation, far bigger than our thoughts. For its nighttime homecoming, it need not look at a watch. Its coming-home time is exactly twilight, at 6:20 PM in this part. I have confirmed it a few times. It lands home exactly at twilight and breaks the eerily quiet moments with its blithely uttered charrr-charrr notes. It seems a kind of prayer before retiring to spend a cold night all alone and see another day.

Shooting the stars now

 

A pig is genetically modified, its genes edited a bit. Its heart is then transplanted into a man. Organ harvesting will be a routine thing in future. But it would be interesting to see how the pig hearts function in our anatomy.

An Italy court has pronounced noisy toilets as human rights abuse. Well, if there is prosperity and you have well off people around then you have to eavesdrop on neighbor’s toilets to have a feeling of human rights abuse.

The effects of climate change are no longer ignorable. Our technologists have a grand idea. They are planning to dim the sun by putting scattering particles in the atmosphere to reflect away the sunrays. Didn’t I say sometime that we have long crossed the threshold and our hopeless solutions to our self-created problems will create still bigger problems?

The scourge of communalism

 The aftermaths of the politics of hate and division. After Manipur now Haryana is burning. And with the slugfest 2024 for power looming large, I am afraid the communal scourge will continue spreading. It's not a question of how many people died from this community or that, or how many shops or temples or mosques were gutted. The main thing is the spread of communal virus. A murder suspect cow vigilante, sadly still out of the bounds of law, uploads a video on social media that he will be joining a religious procession held by the Hindu rightist groups across communally sensitive areas. It was a clearly inflammatory step. The administration should have known there would be a reaction against him as the minority community still remembers the charred bodies of two of its people. Moreover,  the recent ghastly killing of three innocent Muslim men by a security personnel on board a train in a hate crime and the subsequent communal rant on video must have also added fuel to the fire. Sadly, such social conflicts will rise in India. They help certain groups to come to power but in the long turn they are sowing the seeds of another division of India. Those who claim to be the protectors of this country are in fact eating its foundations like termites. President Obama is right in saying that India may fall apart if this type of systematic and doctored division of society isn't stopped. But look at the Iirony, those who really love this country and cherish the dreams of India being a progressive and integrative society are surely to be termed traitors by the nationalistic hyperboles in mainstream  media and social media. Only God can save us now!

https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/communal-violence-erupts-in-haryana-s-nuh-district-spreads-to-gurugram-5-dead-dozens-of-establishments-vandalised-101690914548639.html