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.
Greater Cat’s Ears, Abhali, Sahyadri Dew-grass, Cyanotis tuberosa, Valukaikizhangu, there are many different names for this plant. It grows in the linguistically diverse western ghats of India. I’ve written about it many times before, about its six stamens, about the flowering shoots, the tuber, and so on. I won’t write repeat myself again. This last monsoon I was happy just to look at an old favourite.
In the last two weeks I’ve shown lots of photos from around Patan’s Darbar square, and written a lot about it. Here I wanted to bring together a few final photos from the place. Most of the buildings are the traditional Newar fired brick and wood constructions. The lone stone temple visible here was the Krishna temple. In the twilight the dark stone set off the warm light on the second floor where a ceremony was in progress.
One of the reasons that I’ll have to go back is so see the palace. It shuts at five, so by the time we reached, not only was the gate closed, but the last tourists had left. Patan is reputedly the oldest Buddhist city in the world. It is said to be older than Patna (Pataliputra), the erstwhile capital of Magadha, which spread the religion across Asia. I don’t know what evidence there is in support of this claim. I have time to dig a little deeper into this history before I return.
Whatever the prehistory of the settlement, the early modern temples that dot the square in front of the palace are beautiful. Among the structures restored after the 2015 earthquare is the Vishwanath temple. These two stunning wooden pieces are from there: a window on the left, a door and its lintel on the right.
We spent only one evening in Patan, but in our long and meandering walk through parts of it I noticed an unusual sort of public art. They were photorealistic grayscale paintings of birds with a coloured circle as a background. All of them had a signature: one attribution for the photo, another presumably for the painting, all by the same two people.
There were so many things to do in that one evening that I did not really tailor my walk to find more examples. The three that you see here are all I saw: the sparrow, the munia, and the kingfisher. But the next morning as our car took narrow lanes through Patan in order to beat the airport traffic, I glimpsed several more pieces in the same style. This is one thing to watch out for if I go back to Patan soon. Unfortunately street art is shortlived.
Names are interesting. The European bee-eater (Merops apiaster) first came to the notice of the enumerators of species because of their prevalence across Europe, but it is basically a species of sub-Saharan Africa which has moved to the rest of the world through west Asia. It branches out towards central Asia, south Asia, and Europe from there. Fifteen years ago I took photos of them in the Camargue in France, and they seem to be the only ones I have. I must spend some time in Bengaluru lazing around the gardens of the town to photograph this bird again. It is an amazingly colourful bird and hard to miss.
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 jewelled steps are already quite white with dew, It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings, And I let down the crystal curtain And watch the moon through the clear autumn.
Li Bai (The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance, tr. Ezra Pound)
Night long on the jade staircase, white dew appears, soaks through gauze stockings. She lets down crystalline blinds, gazes out through jewel lacework at the autumn moon
Li Bai (tr. David Hinton)
White dew blooms on jade stairs, The night deepens, dampening silk stockings, Let down the crystal curtains, exquisite, she watches the autumn moon.
Here we go round the prickly pear Prickly pear prickly pear Here we go round the prickly pear At five o’clock in the morning.
T.S. Eliot (The Hollow Men)
I spot the hills With yellow balls in autumn. I light the prairie cornfields Orange and tawny gold clusters
Carl Sandburg (Theme in Yellow)
Mehendi and haldi: unalterables in a north Indian wedding
Come, now a roundel and a fairy song; Then, for the third part of a minute, hence— Some to kill cankers in the muskrose buds, Some war with reremice for their leathern wings To make my small elves coats, and some keep back The clamorous owl that nightly hoots and wonders At our quaint spirits. Sing me now asleep. Then to your offices and let me rest.
Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night’s Dream II.2)
Now adrift on the airflow, unfurled, alone, all that he glimpses—the hills’ lofty, ragged ridges, the silver stream that threads quivering like a living bone of steel, badly notched with rapids, the townships like strings of beads
Josef Brodsky (The Hawk’s Cry in Autumn)
Hammer and hacksaw, vise and screwdriver have the hard gaze and slow heartbeat of reptiles. I am visiting the hardware store
with my father. In a wooden drawer stained by dirty fingers a sea of nails rolls back and forth. The bare light bulb
burning in the middle of the ceiling cuts deep shadows in the men’s faces, silent men who smell of sawdust and kerosene,
On a cold and rainy day in Nepal I had the simple pleasure of sipping on warm aila with a little fried accompaniment. Aila is an alcoholic drink made of various millets fermented in yeast. It is typically a home brew, so its taste and composition can vary a little from one house to another. The accompaniment was freshly made kanchemba, sticks of buckwheat flour mixed with kala jeera and deep fried. They looked like they were rolled by hand. You’re supposed to dip it into the fiery red timmur powder before biting into it.
It reminded me vaguely of the delicious simplicity of home-cooked Bihari food. After all, the Newa of Kathmandu do claim descent from a kingdom in Bihar’s Mithila region, I mused. Perhaps they brought this style of cooking with them and adapted it to local circumstances. Aila and the weather gave free rein to my speculation. The Family was practical as always, “We should try to buy this timmur. I think it will be a nice taste to add to some of our food.”
Don't hold your breath 