Across the Himalayas

Home of clouds, the Himalayas have a very appropriate name. The mountains jut up into the sky above the weather, stopping even that huge global circulation which we ground-huggers see as the Indian Ocean monsoon. And what are the Himalayas but the immense, long drawn out collision of two continental plates. As the Indian plate sped northeast across the world, wheeling westwards, a ten million year collision raised these mountains and prised the Tibetan highland into the air from the mass of the Asian plate. About then, elsewhere, a plume of magma rose from the earth’s core and created the enormous African rift valley, setting into motion the changes that started a branch of apes to begin walking across the world. Now, a tube of aluminium filled with those same apes followed a high arc across the home of clouds.

Sitting in that crowded tube, I Iooked out over the shoulder of The Family at the monsoon cloudscape that passed below us. Abruptly I realized that some of the white was not the fluffiness of clouds. A closer look told me that we had left the lowlands behind and reached the high Himalayas. Below us was a rugged, folded landscape, where streams and earthquakes had carved valleys and raised peaks. This late in July the snow line lies above 5.5 Kms. So the peaks we saw were at least 6 Kms high. This is where weather stops.

In the next ten minutes we passed over heights that I would certainly never have reached on foot: a land of eternal snow. Few animals come this high. Among all the world’s migratory birds, only bar headed geese (Anser indicus) fly over these mountains. Coincidentally, we were flying parallel to one of their migration routes, the one they follow as they move between their wintering grounds north of Mumbai, and their summer breeding grounds in Ladakh’s Tso Moriri, west of Leh.

The landscape below us was amazing. Multiple glaciers flowed away from a huge snowfield. I wondered what it would be like to stand on one of those promontories below us and look down on the icefalls that I could see. The air inside the plane suddenly felt hot and stale as I imagined the bitter cold wind below, blowing loose snow over the ice fields. Sadly I was seeing these views as the last of the snow melts from these mountains. Even ten years ago, I would not have seen so much exposed brown below me.

And then we had crossed from one tectonic plate to another. Below us was another climatic zone, one where the monsoon did not reach. Wisps of cumulus floated over the bare brown land. From this height I could see many lakes dotted over the land, large and small. With the extremely low precipitation that this high desert gets, the lakes must be all fed by snow melt. As the earth heats up and the last snow melts, I wonder what will be the fate of the ecologies that depend on these lakes: the bar headed geese, the black necked cranes, snow pigeons, snow leopards, snow foxes, blue sheep, the cold-adapted vegetation of these lakes, and the many insects which live only here. Distance from the ground lets you think these thoughts.

Before I expected it, we begin our descent. Voices come over the PA giving the usual safety instructions. As we approach the ground I see the play of light and shadow over the bare desert which will be our home for the next one and a half weeks. I’m excited. I look at The Family, and she says, “Finally. I’ve been waiting to come here for years.” Below us we see a green valley, probably a sign of humans: the water from a stream used to grow the crops and trees that we like to have around us. We carry with us memories of ancestral landscapes and we try to reproduce them wherever we settle.

Before I have to put away my phone, I see us approach the town of Leh. Like every overgrown human settlement, this spills out from the valley where it was born, into its surroundings. Humans metastasize. That magma plume below the Afar depression which shattered the African continental plate 40 million years ago set into motion large changes on the surface of the planet.

The rain in Spain

Flying in to Madrid from Delhi a few years ago, our plane had taken a southerly course over the Mediterranean. It was morning when we came in over the Spanish coast somewhere in the province of Valencia. A half hour of flight remained, and most of it was over the countryside of Castilla-La Mancha.

The portholes of Dreamliners have complex optics, with a gel filled layers between the stressed outer layers and the innermost clear layer. All portholes on airliners create a bit of chromatic aberration, but I had the feeling that this was much worse than normal. It was very obvious in this photo, which I took just as we hit the coast of Spain. The best I could do was to avoid the edges of the porthole. Due to a Dreamliner’s larger portholes, this is not as hard a constraint as it can be on some other planes. There are a lot of breakwaters and docking areas in that port. I wonder which one it is.

We were to discover later that we had landed during one of the hottest summers that Spain had had in recent years. But even before we knew that, it was clear that we were flying over some pretty parched lands. This green low-land with its lakes was the last bit of green we saw in quite a long while. I took a lot of photos from the air, but seeing anything in them requires quite a lot of work. The photos that you see here required fiddly adjustment of contrast and brightness. Still learning!

The parched landscape around this town is more typical of the area we flew over. I found later that a large part of the flat country that we flew over has average annual rainfalls between 400 and 600 mm. No wonder the fields that you can see in the photo above look so dry. Eliza Doolittle should have fact-checked the sentence she was taught. The rain in Spain does not stay mainly in the plain. Not at all. Most of it is in the north or along the mountains. I wonder how quickly, and by how much, these patterns will change in the coming decades.

Mumbai- an overview

Each and every time when the plane begins its descent into Mumbai I feel excited about it. Coming back to the city I live in is always exciting, whether I’m back from a weekend in the deep jungles of Central India, a holiday in a big city in some other part of the world, a relaxing time in the middle heights of the Himalayas watching the sun rise over the world’s highest peaks, or the fussiest week of work away from home. Not for me the ennui that comes from the realization that I can have only four hours of sleep before I have to get in for a meeting. On the first day back in Mumbai even that work seems exciting.

As the plane glides over the densely packed apartments in the suburbs, the vast stretches of high density housing clutching desperately to hillsides (only to slide off sometimes in the monsoon) I realize that I am in a minority here. For some the four hours of sleep are a part of their daily routine. But even so, there is something miraculous about an enormous mass of people so focused on work that everything goes like clockwork. You don’t find this in Delhi, Kolkata, Bengaluru. So, as the plane slides over the blue tarp covered roofs on hillsides, the multi-storied acres of the suburbs, as a taxi speeds past the stalled development in mid-town, I love coming home.

But which part do I love? The calm oases of gardens, full of flowers and trees, birds and insects? Or dense crowds, sometimes a crush? Everything, I suppose. I started carrying a camera in my backpack years ago to capture every mood of the city. I’m glad that over the years that equipment has shrunk to a little phone in my pocket. Mumbai offers an unending cascade of images, if that’s what you are after.

Or, if you want, there are lovely restaurants and specialty food shops. Once upon a time, word of mouth was the uncertain means of getting to know them. Now, of course, the right new is just a thumb swipe away on your phone. There are foods, fusion of India and the world (Lebanese influenced on the left, Norwegian inspired on the right), which you cannot get elsewhere. I see a touch of this in Bengaluru too, a smidgen in Delhi, but the taste for the new is definitely more widespread in this city. It gives odd hybrids, but some really good stuff.

I know a few people who visit once a year, and love to walk the streets of Mumbai, looking for the odd and zany. One of them told me of a street vendor selling used dentures. I haven’t seen something that crazy. But the oddest of graffiti (why would you even bother to write down that particular stray thought?) or odd evidence of constant hustle (not exactly a Lincoln Lawyer, yet) can come your way even when you aren’t looking. That’s why a camera in your pocket is useful.

Hustle is the way of life in the city. The guy around the corner from your workplace, the chap who serves you the best vada-pav in town, or the bhel-puri guy setting up his stall there, they are all in the city seeking fortune. They are totally focused on it, like the cabbies who take the late night shift and have time to talk to you. They come here, thinking of making money and going back to their failing farms. But they stay. Their wives come to the city a few years later, they raise their children, who, sometimes, get the kind of job they want. But they never go back to the dust bowl they left behind. If you really look, under the blue tarp roofs you will find the Indian middle class. Everyone else in the city is the one percent, even if they spend two hours commuting to work, or think hard before buying their first phone in five years.

That’s Mumbai for you, the Mumbai of an old film song in the voice of Mohammad Rafi and Geeta Dutt. That’s the Mumbai that doesn’t stop even when terrorists attack. Hustle drives Mumbai. Everyone came here to find fortune, the Portuguese, the British East India Company, the Scotsmen who followed, the Armenians, the Baghdadi Jews, the Parsis, the Chinese traders. And it will remain the happy hunting ground of fortune seekers until the sea reclaims the city that was raised on the sea bed. It’s this transient place that I love coming back to.

Sunday in the air

While cruising in a Dreamliner over Asia at this time of the year one sees nothing except a sea of clouds. Dreamliners fly at an altitude of 12 kilometers, with a cruising speed which is over 90% of the speed of sound at that altitude. At the end of July, Asia is covered in a blanket of rain clouds. So you get the best views when the flight takes off or lands. Today, as I flew out of Narita airport in the morning, the ascent to cruising altitude seemed to take twenty minutes or so. This is long enough to get a lovely view of Japan from the sky.

The river visible here is the Tone, the town is likely to be Tsukuba, and the distant hills to the north is then the range which includes Mount Tsukuba

We took off in a roughly north-easterly direction, and then circled back south and west. We flew over Kujukuri town almost immediately. The plane was pretty low when I took a photo of the marina (top) and the stream of mud which seems to have been washed out to sea recently. Interestingly, Google Earth shows a similar plume, so this erosion seems to be fairly constant. People were still advised not to go out to sea, so I was surprised to see the wake of a boat in the lower part of the picture, near the shore.

We climbed slowly. The most striking sight I saw next was the Tone river with its multiple dams and reservoirs. I took several photos, but the one I liked most is the view over a town which is probably Tsukuba, looking north towards Mount Tsukuba in the distance. The ragged remnants of tropical storm Nangka were too far to the north to affect the weather in the Tokyo region. As you can see in the photo, there are only scattered clouds.

It was a great sunny day, and I had a lingering view of Japan as I left. We flew over Tokyo and Osaka. But by the time the craft reached Osaka, we were already above the continent wide sea of high altitude cumulo-nimbus. You feel rootless suspended between the clouds below you and the emptiness of space above you. We dropped below it eight hours later when we landed in Delhi.