Colours and spring are the theme of the day of the last full moon of the month of Falgun. It’s a morning which is best spent with people you know. And if they respond to your request to protect your camera, then you can get the most marvelous portraits of happy people.
So here are some portraits, some groups, and some candid photographs from this day almost two decades ago. The years blur, the faces change, but Holi is always a wonderful party. You meet and chat with friends, friends of friends, and people you may only have nodded at when you pass them. You can have music, intoxicants, sweets, but most of all you have company, and those loose knots of conversation between which you drift like in the best of parties.
In this cusp between winter and spring, the weather in north India is unpredictable. Some years are warm and perfect for wet colours, but in some years you might sniffle for a couple of days. This week promised to be warm, but then the weather became unsettled, and the day has dawned cool. I think it is going to be a fun day today in the sun. A happy holi to you.
What you see in the photo above is a pie filled with juju dhau. The crust is made from tsampa, a flour made from roasted barley. It is a signature dish in the wonderful eatery in Kathmandu called Raithaane. We went there for lunch the day before Diwali. Unlike in an India city, when Diwali is a time of overflowing crowds in shops and restaurants, Kathmandu sleeps in Diwali. It is a private festival, and everything shuts down.
The restaurant was open for its last service in a week. A skeleton staff manned the open kitchen. Raithaane is doing sterling work in collecting old recipes from across Nepal for its kitchen. We liked what we ate and drank, and wished we’d thought of eating there a couple of times more. There’s always our next trip to look forward to.
I’m travelling in a really odd place where no network reaches. I will take a look at your posts and telegrams as soon as I’m able to.
Birding on water is full of contradictions. Waders prefer shallow water to feed in. If you approach them from land then they walk away into deeper water. If you take a boat and approach them from the deep then you have to be careful not to get stuck in the shallows. We kept our distance. Normally you don’t photograph birds in black and white, but for these waders in silhouette, it seems pleasing.
I’m travelling in a really odd place where no network reaches. I will take a look at your posts and telegrams as soon as I’m able to.
Strobilanthes is a strange genus. Like the bamboos, it contains multiple species which mass flower once in a while. Bamboos famously die after flowering. Strobilanthes do not. The basket Karvi (Strobilanthes sessilis), for example, mass flowers every seven years, and the small basket shaped bush lives on to flower again. If someone has written about how long a typical bush survives then I would like to know.
Different populations of basket Karvi flower in different years. In Kaas the mass flowering was supposed to be in 2023. When I went at the end of September, the weeks of hard rain had washed away the flowers. It was as disappointing as my visit to Erivakulam national park in 2018 to see the once-in-12-years mass flowering of Neelakurinji (Strobilanthes Kunthiana). That’s a story I’ve written about elsewhere. We don’t know the reasons for mass flowering, but climate change is messing with it.
I’m travelling in a really odd place where no network reaches. I will take a look at your posts and telegrams as soon as I’m able to.
As we walked out of the forest trail we’d walked for an hour before sunset near Chitwan National Park, a tractor overloaded with hay beat us to the exit gate. I guessed that like all the national parks and wildlife reserves in India, Nepal perhaps also designates a core zone and a buffer zone around it. In India the core zone excludes human exploitation, but the buffer zone protects traditional rights which local villages had while prohibiting new development. Hay meant fields, which meant agriculture. That would not be permitted within the wildlife protection area.
Outside was the town of Bharatpur in Nepal. A jeep waited to take us back to our hotel. An interesting sight nearby was the so-called Umbrella Street, a promenade covered with cheerful rainbow coloured umbrellas in a food court. This would be full of families and children on holidays, I guessed. Bharatpur is on the terai, and in summer it would be hot. The umbrellas would be even more welcome then.
Just before we left the buffer zone I saw a little temple to one side of the road. This was more indication that traditional rights of the villagers are still protected here. Within a kilometer from the gate we began to see two-storeyed structures along the road. The ground floors were invariably given over to commerce: anything from groceries and food to clothes and tents. This was one of the main trade routes with India, and our driver said that at times it was chock-a-block with trucks. Still there were people who put out wheat by the roadside to dry. Bharatpur had a pleasant small-town vibe if this road was typical.
I’m travelling in a really odd place where no network reaches. I will take a look at your posts and telegrams as soon as I’m able to.
When you visit Nepal’s famous Chitwan National Park you look forward to seeing rhinos. We’ve seen them in national parks in India before, so we know that they are bad-tempered and unpredictable beasts which can easily outrun jeeps. So when you are trundling along a narrow path in the forest one afternoon the last thing you want to see is a rhino moving towards you with another jeep behind it.
The driver immediately stepped on the brakes. It took me a second to realize that the situation was more complicated than it had appeared at first sight: the big animal was a mother and there were two cubs behind her. Rhinos depend on smell and sound more than sight. So you can see where her attention is by the way her ears are pointed.
When she began to look at the sides of the track for an opening I breathed a sign of relief. The suddenly there was a volley of loud clicks near me as a companion on the jeep began to take burst shots of the animals. Immediately the rhino’s head and ears turned towards our jeep. The naturalist looked stricken.
Another volley of clicks, and the rhino began to move towards us. In modern cameras the sounds are electronic and have nothing to do with the shutter. I keep my camera silent because I do not want it to disturb wildlife, or to create situations like this. As the beast came closer it must have smelled the engine and humans and decided that in spite of the strange sounds there was no danger to the cubs.
I could let out the breath I was holding as the mother turned to follow her cubs to a trail that she had already spotted before we saw the trio. As we passed the other jeep on the otherwise deserted track, we waved at each other. I could imagine the mother rhino grumbling to herself as she moved off to a swampy soak “Hardly any peace in the afternoons these days.”
I’m travelling in a really odd place where no network reaches. I will take a look at your posts and telegrams as soon as I’m able to.
Africa is the home of bee-eaters. Of the almost thirty bee-eaters known, twenty are found only in this continent. In my brief visit to Kenya I saw the Little bee-eater (Merops pusillus) sitting on a thorn bush in Amboseli national park. I was completely new to birding in Africa, and I hadn’t even got myself a field guide when I took this photo. Now I know it is found in all of sub-Saharan Africa. It has a green back, and its identification is the dark cravat that separates the bright yellow throat from the buff underparts. The band of blue above the beak that you see in this photo is special to the east African subspecies M. pusillus meridionalis.
There aren’t many places on WordPress where bird watchers can share posts. If you post any photos of birds this week (starting today and up to next Monday), it would be great if you could leave a link in the comments, or a pingback, for others to follow. You don’t have to post a recent photo, nor do you have to post a photo of the same bird as mine, but do use the tag “Bird of the Week” to help others find your post. For more information see the main landing page for this invitation.
The title is a line from a Bollywood song of 1956 which is a sort of unofficial anthem of Mumbai. In trochaic tetrameter, the title says something like “move a bit, pay attention.” There’s a video link to the song at the bottom of the post if you haven’t heard it, but I won’t attempt a full translation here. Instead, I’ll echo the song in images, and give you just a few photos of the odd ways in which you can experience a city that you live in it. I’m sure a tourist will see something else altogether.
The featured photo was from a curious experience I had. A photo shoot on the streets of Mumbai is not unusual; most often it is a movie or an advertisement shoot. There aren’t any wedding shoots here; I guess people travel to exotic locations for wedding shoots. I was curious about this bunch of youngsters who were just doing a photo shoot for nothing. Was the photographer trying to build a portfolio? Or the subject? Anyway, it gave me a nice opportunity to ambush the shoot and get a photo of one of the contradictions of the city.
The monochrome photo above is a spot I really like and go back to in different seasons to take photos. In the foreground is a 19th century building in the old local style, and the tower behind it is the stock exchange. I like that contrast as well as the nest of data cables overhead. I took next photo at a pretty iconic spot in Mumbai, but instead of the buildings, I concentrated on the road with the puddles from one of the last monsoon showers of 2023.
We stopped for a coffee after dinner at this place. We use it often, and we don’t notice it much any longer. But this evening I stood at the bar and looked at the windows. Glass and mirrors are wonderful for photos. That evening I saw the indoors and outdoors in one view. I liked that.
The photo on the left above was my first glimpse of the strange photo shoot that I wrote about earlier in the post. I liked the light, not just the one that the photographer’s assistant holds, but also the street lamp which looks like the moon. The second photo is a sunset on the Arabian sea. I pass this spot daily. But on that day, the light stopped me in my tracks. I was very happy that nowadays I always carry a rather decent camera in my pocket. And that reminds me that all these photos are taken with the same constant companion camera.
Let me leave you with a final image of Mumbai as a blade runner’s city, earth’s little satellite lost in its glare. You could imagine a Deckard walking those spottily lit streets, scanning crowds, retiring people. Looking out at the sprawl of mid-town Mumbai, with its old high-density chawls served by buses and the new high-density housing served by underground car parks, I sipped a scotch and imagines the sea taking its own back in twenty years.
Nagarkot is a village which lies on the rim of the Kathmandu valley and is famous for its views of the Himalayas. Last year, on the cold and overcast evening before Diwali we found a village fair going full blast in the school ground of the village. A village fair will have two things in common across the world: music and dance, and food. There was music and a little bit of dancing, but a better knowledge of Nepali would have helped us to enjoy the songs more. They seemed to be poking fun at local events. So we drifted off to inspect the food.
There was a big crowd around a couple who were frying eggs over parathas or a large tawa. “Looks interesting,” I said. I’m a sucker for eggs at the roadside. “There’s a special dinner for us today,” The Fmily reminded me. Next to the couple another roadside cook’s business had stalled somewhat. I wonder what it is that makes people wait for service at one place whereas the place next door does poorly. Is the quality so very different? After the reminder I wasn’t ready to make a comparative test of the quality on offer.
Instead I moved on to the bakery nearby. It was also doing roaring business. They had a nice big espresso machine, so I thought I would have one. Four pairs of young hands were involved in each order. One checked the machine, another ground the beans and filled the portafilter. One took cups from the warming rack, and the fourth served up the coffee as soon as one of the others had put a tiny biscuit on the saucer. Four young girls grinned up at me and asked “Did you like the coffee, sir?” “I’m sure I’ll like it when I taste it,” I replied and smiled back. A Diwali mela needs all hands on board.
Before dawn there is a time when the light is a mild and milky white. It is hard to judge distances on water. A fisherman was out in this light already getting ready to haul in a catch. One way to treat these foggy early morning photos is to turn them into high key photos.
Don't hold your breath 