Into the Rajaji forest reserve on the trail of a nocturnal jumbo frolicking around the neighbourhood filching whole fruiting tress for snacks. The ride Just as you give up on the far-reaching concreted tentacles of the big city you see hope in shades of green. And if you leave early enough some of it will be a simmering aureate – the summer sun in a hurry to sear, to leave the earth smouldering for a scanty rain. The route to Rishikesh, till you enter the state of Uttarakhand after Ramnagar,
The tunnel was leaking, then that’s how I think tunnels are supposed to be – with little ducts drilled through to act as pressure valves which in turn filters in the outside weather. They could be also the same ones through which the sun sends in vertical beams during daytime which falls on the tarmac like blinding little spotlights. The Chenani-Nashri tunnel bypasses the snow-bound upper reaches, cutting short the distance between Jammu and Srinagar. But going by what lay in store soon after the tunnel I knew those winding
The Jhelum flowed with nary a ripple; houseboats moored close to the banks remained unmoving. Except when passing beneath the Zero Bridge the water shimmered viridian in the mid noon sun. The rains had come and gone, thankfully without any deluge and destruction, and by April summer was peaking – the river wasn’t running very deep and one could see the green of the algae and other aquatic plants. I leaned over the ornamental balustrades of the recently restored, all-wood historical bridge, gotten used to by now to the reluctant
Like most attempts at chronicling indescribable beauty, Amir Khusro’s much-quoted ‘hamin asto’ is from afar, in passing, removed from close quarters and ground reality. From the perched Taj hotel – itself a peeling, fading relic of what it was just a few years ago, understaffed but brimming with heartening sights symbolic of a changing Kashmir like openly affectionate dating couples and doughty women in western wear – the Dal Lake snuggled mistily into the gelid grey of the Zabarwan sub-mountains. The water wasn’t exactly a shimmery emerald like the Pangong
The urge to be ‘out there’, to be surrounded by vast open spaces, is as old as mankind itself. Making his argument about why it is not exactly a ‘concrete jungle’ but a ‘human zoo’, English ethologist Desmond Morris writes in ‘The Human Zoo’ that man ‘Trapped…by his own brainy brilliance, has set himself up in a huge, restless menagerie where he is in constant danger of cracking under the strain.’ Conditioned over millions of years to be on the move, to hunt and colonise new territories, we are living
