Hello, Europe!

Paris – Venice – Florence – Pisa – San Gimignano – Siena – (back to Florence for another day) – Rome – Barcelona – Sevilla – Cordoba – Granada – (back to Barcelona for another day) – Bengaluru.

Santosh and I are flying out of Bengaluru in a couple of hours and will land in Paris! The 21-day plan is as mentioned above! Santosh is a great planner; he will go back to Bengaluru from Barca and I’ll be doing the Andalusian part of Spain solo! My first time in the great continent and I’m so excited and so grateful this is happening! Have earned it after working my ass off relentlessly ever since I was 18 (I’m 32 now!) to save and see as much of this world as I can!

Also, of the many, many, many, many amazing things we’ll be doing, I’m bloody excited to read Kannada poems in all these great cities of France, Italy and Spain for our Padayaatre YouTube channel! Can’t wait!!!

Notes from Nepal: 2 | April 2022

(Notes from Nepal: 2 | April 2022)

On the mist-kissed grass and the moist ground fall the rhododendron florets. All too elegantly. A soft scatter, like a whisper. If there is grace in falling, it is because of the only faith that matters. The faith that Earth always holds us, even as we tend to search for it all around, ignoring what is always beneath our very own feet. Even if you rot, you rot and you become one with Earth. Why is it then, we do not talk enough about so consuming a love, Earth-love?

Notes from Nepal, April 2022: 1

There are welcomes you want to abandon yourself for. To throw yourself into embraces that birth in you a blind trust. To cross thresholds in a frenzy to sink into the unknown until you emerge being known if not knowing. To let the mist shroud you softly as you come alive, shivering into your sweater at the great altitudes. To love birdsongs without knowing their human-given names. To let the lust for beauty consume you shamelessly, ravenously. To be and to be and to be.

Kaziranga. Gorgeousness.

Half a minute of ancience, of the Kaziranga silence from half a year ago. Away from the human din, the world is full of forgiveness and beauty, and baboon calls (which started resounding the Forest the minute I stopped making this clip😄).

For the love of making and preserving memories

The romance of film/prints is an eternal thing. Revisiting photos that have so lovingly preserved our birthday-travel ritual as the city soaks in a soft drizzle (finally making a scrapbook). The human world is so troubled and so tender and is full of misery and magnificence. There is so much to see – the beautiful and the broken. And there is all the non-human world we so often stray away from. Why is life so painfully short for all the needs of seekers of beauty and truth? And when we go, where do the memories outside of us go?

A small note of gratitude to my mother

Dear mother who was once a farmer,
Thank you for not reducing the idea of ‘responsibility’ to birthing a child just to show one is a ‘responsible’ person. Thank you for teaching me – as a human being who once worked in a farm with her father – to be responsible for this planet as much as we can in our might, despite being insignificant little creatures. Thank you for teaching me that ‘mother’ Earth could be our ‘daughter’, too. Thank you for teaching me you never had to go to school to acquire common sense and humility to respect others’ individual choices in life, especially when those choices are different than ours. Thank you for always giving importance to ‘what’ we talk about more than ‘who’ is talking about it. We’ve grown up together in a way and have had our differences and have endured to be great friends who can talk about anything. And so, dear mother, thank you for being a friend, and for being my daughter, too.

An evening such as this in my Bengaluru

the city is differently alive
despite our proud, judgemental, ungrateful apathy and indifference towards it
its soil always parts with fragrance while soaking in monsooning ecstasy
winds, raging only a while ago, now cloak you gently
very soon, thicker blankets will unfurl on beds
grasses glance, green and always curious, through pavement cracks
gulmohurs fall, scarlet speckles on damp asphalted roads
like kisses that linger on your neck long after a passionate lover’s departure
clouds scatter, for they know we need to look at the stars – our everyday miracles
raaga Kaapi wafts in from the opposite house
in my kitchen, garlic and butter turn softer together on a pan
I think of all my loved ones who love good food
thank this city that allows me all these everyday luxuries
and then I think – after all, everything we love comes out of this Earth
after all, what we all love, is our only Earth

Himalayan Aves #30: Alpine accentor

proximity acquires new meaning
a sight so soulful that it doesn’t need a touch to make it more real
on the zenith of Chandrashila visits a companion, wings and feathers and all
flits about all around you – a strange intimacy you’ve never known before
you know it’s flying away any minute now
but you are home to a new love already
and its leaving will never hurt
for its wing-flutter still lingers in your heartbeats
a whole new world you carry within
and never felt lighter

Himalayan Aves #28: Slaty-headed parakeet

there are fellow beings who, right before your eyes
look like a chimerical allure 
beings with little beating hearts and boundless generosity
who make you a polyglot in your own right
if you perceive birdsongs and animal roars and growls
and you do not need any other language
to hold all that stirs in you like waves
you are an ocean in containing it all
discovering your own depths
as these parakeets are about to skim to the sky

Sallow Stutters

I don’t go to sleep, sleep doesn’t come to me
we are difficult friends, I’m told
but we are friends, all right
for it lets me see and listen to the world differently
the breeze speaks to the curtains
the sodium lamp on the street sometimes stutters
sometimes, a dog startles the air around it with a sudden bark
the clock goes on ticking
loud enough to make the passing of time somewhat sad
stars sail from one window to another
trucks rumble faraway

by not visiting, sleep reminds me
that the sun, though unseen by night
keeps Earth from spiralling into depths of naught
to remember that helps immensely

Himalayan Aves #14: Rufous-gorgeted flycatcher

tomorrow always arrives late
when you lie awake at night waiting for it 
but just how much sweeter its arrival
when it carries a miracle under its wings 

there is a bird to be seen
its songs filling the lungs of montane forests

the gorget, rufous
why did it have to be there at all
to be a sign? that beauty always exists outside of us
no matter how unbearable the world becomes within

Himalayan Aves #13: Olive-backed pipit

you can bask in the shade of a bare tree
pipit makes it possible
its wing-flutter ruffles something within you – a warmth
that makes the colossal Chaukhamba behind it less cold, less daunting

perhaps all that is utterly beautiful is incompletely understood
a blessing of the unknown
of a migrant who belongs everywhere
whether on foot or in flight