State of rest

Corpus omne perseverare in statu suo quiescendi vel movendi uniformiter in directum, nisi quatenus a viribus impressis cogitur statum illum mutare.
(Every body must persist in its state of rest or of moving uniformly in a straight direction, except in so far as it is forced to change that state by impressed forces.)

Isaac Newton

Mahaparinirvana. It’s hard to imagine a state of peace deeper than the one that is achieved when a person who has attained nirvana during his lifetime passes away. That is the theme of the sleeping Buddhas that you see so often in Buddhist iconography. The statue that you see in the photo is in Bangkok’s Wat Pho, the Temple of the Reclining Buddha. It was a very hot day when I arrived here and sat in the shade to cool off. So I was in a state of peace, albeit lesser, when I walked around the statue.

Another place, another golden day. An afternoon spent taking photos of birds in the shallows of Odisha’s Chilika lake, ended with a glorious sunset. As the light failed I was forced to stop taking photos of birds. I was quite satisfied, and as much at peace with the day as a birder can be. It was time to catch the light through the reeds. Does that photo say “peace” to you?

I spent a month in Frascati one summer a few years ago. An old friend and a colleague was also there with his partner. A weekend before the solstice there was a program of music in the open at every square in the town. We spent the evening at an enoteca in a small square. Like many of these extablishments, you could buy jugs of fresh wine and sit at a table outside. We’d brought our own olives and bread, cold cuts and olive oil and salad. We sat there with the food and wine and listened to the music as we talked. I only had an old phone to take photos with; it didn’t do well with low light. Six months later I heard that my friend had tested positive for cancer. I met him once again after that, but this is how I remember the couple, by that last peaceful summer.

So many of my most peaceful memories are near lakes and by the sea! This is a photo I took on a rainy day on Lake Inle in Myanmar. Some villages on the lake (they build their houses on stilts planted in the mud) farm lotus, and use the fiber from the stems to make cloth. I bought a shirt made from this fabric, and found it was very comfortable after a couple of washes. In that moment I went wild photographing water drops at rest on the leaves with my trusty old Panasonic Lumix. You can see the reflection of the gray sky in the large drop in the photo above. The people on the lake live a hard life, but, at that time at least, their lives seemed peaceful.

How much space does a person need?

Tolstoy’s answer was six feet. Let me change the question to how much land is available in Mumbai to each person. The land area of the island city of Mumbai is close to 68 square kilometers. The number of people in this area was last counted in 2011, and was 12.5 million. It may have decreased a little since then, but this number will serve. Take away a quarter of the city’s area for roads. That gives us about 35 square feet of space per person. That’s a rather small room. Take away another half of the land area for offices, and you decrease the space to 12 square feet. We begin to approach Tolstoy’s limit. What chance, social distancing?

In a place like this you learn to be alone in a crowd. You can spend a quarter of your life packed like sardines into a can called a suburban train, and live a complete life in the space between your earbuds. You can get off the train, walk home to your 35 square feet bed-sit, and count yourself a king of infinite space. But you may have bad dreams.

Which is why work-from-home is a wonderful idea. As long as you have a job which you can do over the internet, what is it really that brings you far from your family and friends, from that familiar place that you grew up in, to a crowded city like this? We discovered the freedom of the internet during the pandemic. Immediately after the end of the lockdowns, we began to travel during the week, working on a laptop that you could take anywhere that gave you a wifi connection. I saw sunrises over deserts and mountain lakes during this time. And I saw nomads even more adventurous than me: kayaking between meetings, climbing cliffs with phone and earbuds in backbacks.

What keeps us bound to these cities? The concerts and dinners, the art and the collegiality of the workplace can be sampled a couple of times a week. But I love to walk the streets of the city, alone, camera in hand, taking street photos. Would I be able to watch people in this way in any place other than a city?

Softly drawing out memories

Have you ever been in an art gallery and heard someone “explain” a piece of art to a companion? If you have, then you might remember a touch of annoyance at what was clearly a wrong explanation. Later, when I think about such incidents, I’m amazed by the way exactly the same image can draw different reactions from people. That is a lesson for me, when I create images. What I show can be totally different for different people. The grass flowers in the featured photo evoke in me a sense of their softness. I have memories of walking through fields of kans grass (Saccharum spontaneum) and feeling the soft bunches of flowers brushing against me. To enhance that feeling, I made it into a high key photo, so that your eye cannot easily focus on the edges. The soft morning’s backlight cooperated with me in this. I also remember the touch of coolness in the air. But what does this image convey to you?

Images contain much more than the single purpose you might have in mind. This is why images are obscure ways in which to convey meaning. When I took the photo of this spotted owlet (Athene brama) nesting in a hole in a concrete block I though it showed the adaptibility of all living things. Today I think of it as a study in contrasting textures, the hard shadows on the man-made structures contrast with the soft fuzziness of the shadows on the owl’s feathery coat. In order to emphasize texture, I desaturated the colour of the bricks. Who knows what I might see in the image a week from now?

I look on people’s memories as an ally in the making of images. When I spotted this cliff covered in moss on a bird-watching trip, I took a few photos so that I could study the identification of mosses later. But someone else said “Ooh. It looks like a rainforest in miniature.” Sure it does. He leveraged his memory to make a photo. But then a bunch of other bird-watchers came along and started taking the same photo and saying the same thing. That’s how association works in our minds: creating recognition, triggering mimicry. That’s something that politicians and advertising work on very much better than poor sods with cameras. But today I can turn those same images into a question: do you really have to see the contrast between hard rock (!) and moss to recall the softness of running your hand over a moss covered wall? Or does the lower image, with no rock showing, do as well?

Spiders are among my least watched photos: too many people have an aversion which triggers instantly. I love the colours, although I’m shaky at their identification. But spider webs? They are among my most liked photos. Sharp focus is needed to capture a spider web. To me this is a fairly good spider photo: the light was just right to glint off the strands of silk in the web, I caught the colourful spider in sharp focus, and there is still enough of its environment to tell you how this wood spider strings its large web between trees to catch insects which fly about two meters above ground. Do you see the softness of spider silk when you see this photo?

Uttara, Dakshin, Purva, Paschim

Our first trip to South Korea was in late autumn. Gangnam Style was all the rage as we made our bookings and obtained our visas. The commercial web, Web 2.0, had begun, but had not yet colonized our life fully. So, we were among the consciously naive travellers that people still could be in the days when guidebooks outnumbered blogs. It came with all the surprises that a meeting of the warm south and frigid north Asia could generate.

Chinese Japanese
Badtameez sorry please.
Aaina maaina
The king of China
Incy pincy mincy
Out go you

Children’s rhyme, heard on a flight

Seoul was a hodge podge of contrasts; the traditional gardens and palaces, next to its high rises, enormous departmental stores and street markets. There were also, of course, the social contrasts that Psy’s song was about. Moreover Korea’s past hundred years was a lesson in the bloody history of the shift from the early capitalist history of global empires to the modern late capitalist notion of spheres of influence. Korea became part of the Japanese empire in the 20th century until WWII, and was recognized as such by the British and other European empires. During the end of empires after WWII, Korea was divided north and south by the Soviet-US rivalry. There has never been a world where west and east, south and north didn’t constantly meet and merge in the lives of people. If your own life is not lesson enough, then Korea is a place which brings this notion home.

But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,

Rudyard Kipling, The Ballad of East and West

Our first walk was, appropriate to the year, through Gangnam and its cafes. A meander brought us to an enormous bookshop called Kyobo. Most of the books were in Korean, but the foreign language sections were large enough to be pretty decent small bookshops by themselves. While browsing, The Family pulled out the book that you see in the photo above. That was a typical story of a meeting of the east and west. And us seeing it in that bookshop was a surprise in this meeting of south and north. We also found an English translation of a book by a North Korean who crossed the border during the March of Suffering. Of the books that we bought, this was the one that I most remember reading and talking about on that trip.

Saturday’s Still Life

Winter is the time for oranges. An orange peel stands in the sunlight streaming on to my work table in the evening. Shadows and reflections, light and obstruction, everything together in one shot.

Words’ worth

Nothing is impossible, declares the message on a barrel of drinking water mounted on a handcart. Impossible sentiments, echoed by advertisements for expensive shoes and worthless sugary drinks. The barrel, on the other hand, testifies to the seeming impossibility of getting clean drinking water from taps. The cart was parked on a lane behind Mumbai’s stock exchange.

A little further around the globe, in another city by the sea, an abandoned shop off one of Istanbul’s most visited streets speaks of three eras: the high noon of the Ottoman Empire is referred by the street sign whose edge enters the photo, the early years of the republic can be seen in the bollard, and the 21st century in the graffiti.

Kochi’s history as a major port in the thousand year history of Indian Ocean trade can still be seen in shops across the town. The Yehudi Kochinim had settled here at least 900 years ago. Their mark is subtle but visible everywhere in this ancient port city. It is part of the cosmopolitan air of the town.

The Art Deco frontage of banks in Wuhan’s Hankou district talks of another bit of history, the end of the Chinese empire as it collided with European powers and was forced to cede “Treaty ports” to foreign powers. Subsequent events gave rise to the Chinese nationalist movement which crystallized around Sūn Zhōngshān, aka Sun Yat Sen

From the shreds of one empire to the ruins of another. When we visited Hampi, the village which has grown around the remnants of the 16th century capital of the Vijayanagar empire, this design greeted us outside the gate of our homestay. The empire traded with Arabs and south east Asia, was counted among the most prosperous of its time, and then was utterly destroyed. This design, the kolam, is made fresh every day, to be walked on, blown by the wind, and its remnants washed away for a new design the next day. I thought it was a good metaphor for the rise and disappearance of empires.

Stuck in Nairobi’s traffic I watched the brightly painted trucks and buses that fill its streets. There is an energy in the city that I found very refreshing. These paintings are part of that energy. Our driver told us that there are artists who earn money doing them. All artists and artisans are referred to as mzee, a respectful term whose literal translation would be old man. But the artists are often young men, so appropriate for a continent whose time is to come.

The final message I selected for this post comes from the most ancient imperial capital that I know. Just after Alexander of Macedonia crossed the Indus, a young adventurer called Chandragupta took over the kingdom governed from Pataliputra, today’s Patna, and founded the empire that took Buddhism across Asia. Outside the airport of Patna I saw this mural in the style practiced by the women of Madhubani district. The style has evolved very rapidly in the last few years, and the content of this painting may have been impossible a few years ago. I found that it was done by a traditional painter. So, perhaps some things are not impossible after all.

Walking near the Periyar river

Periyar river, the lifeline of Kerala. It was a name that fascinated me. A simple name, meaning big. That’s all that the people around it need to know. But the river rises in the biodiverse Western Ghats, and in the short 244 Kms from its source to its mouth in the Arabian sea it traverses a wide range of altitudes. So, almost exactly five years ago we took a short trip to the Periyar National Park. We landed at the Kochi airport and took a bus to our destination. The road passes through the intensely urbanized plains. But then, as we crossed a bridge over the river, the urban clutter fell off. We’d reached our homestay, a small two-storeyed house near the entrance to the park.

We dropped our bags and headed out for a walk. There is always a lot to see just outside a national park. We walked back to the bridge we’d crossed. Power lines ran next to it and we were sure to find kingfishers and bee eaters perched there, at eye level. I had my big lens with me, but I’ll show here only those photos I took with the fixed lens of my cell phone. The river branched crazily here, as it reached the plains. A boat was tied next to a little side stream that we crossed. A group of langurs chattered madly as they ate leaves in the canopy of trees around the path.

The phone was also good for close ups. Here in the undergrowth is one of the numerous species that you could call a daisy. I love their complex flowers, five white ray florets and numerous five-petalled yellow florets in the disk. The arrangement of the disk florets and their shape should be a very good guide to a more precise identification, but I’m intimidated by the size of the family Asteraceae, the asters. Full identification is a finicky and time-consuming job.

Which trees grow here? The answer is plain when you look around you. But it is equally plain when you look down at the small landscape around your feet. A large leaf from a teak tree was flaking into pieces as it dried. I pointed my phone at it. Bamboo too, as you can see. And the small leaves of, what was it, jamun? Quite a variety. It would be hard to keep the jamun from being eaten by birds and langurs. But then those trees fruit so abundantly that you can always get enough. We reached the bridge, and then it was time for the big zoom and the end of my fixed-lens adventure.

Early birds

December was a month when I began to look back at the wonderful sightings of birds I’d had in the past year. Updating lists and filling in lifers (that is bird watchers’ jargon for first sightings of birds) I realized that I had an unusually large number in 2022. The Chestnut-capped babbler in the featured photo was one of my most recent.

But in that trip I’d also had my first sightings of an Upland pippit (left in the gallery above), a Himalayan rubythroat (middle) and a Yellow-breasted bunting (right). “Isn’t this unusual?” I asked. “We are making trips for birds now,” The Family reminded me, “we didn’t target special habitats earlier.” That is true. Much of my early list of birds was incidental. “We are also going with much better birders,” I added. Birding, like any other skill depends on practice, and there are people who spend all their days on it. It is good to travel with them, but that’s not how we started.

I decided to look back at my earliest photos. The oldest one I could find was of this Spotted owlet, taken in 2005 in Kanha National Park. That was our first trip to see wildlife, and it was wildly successful. We saw three tigers, one a mother with three cubs. Everything was new to us. Even the sight of the very common spotted deer could stop us in admiration. We later realized that the spotted owlet was not uncommon at all, but it stars as the only bird I have a photo of from that trip.

I bought my first camera with an electronic sensor soon after. It was an Olympus with a sensational optical zoom of 10. I realized quite quickly that you need to creep up on a bird even with that camera. Armed with this, I managed to get quite close to a Yellow-wattled lapwing in Ranthambore in the spring of 2006 (left). I didn’t know then that lapwings are a large family of birds. In summer that year, on a walk on the beach at Asilomar in California, I could approach a Brown pelican close enough for the photo in the center. That was the first pelican I saw. Later in the year, in Patna I took my first photo of a flying bird. That’s the Asian openbill you see at the right.

The Family and I became avid birdwatchers. I would look up tide tables, and once a month travel to the harbour areas of Mumbai to look at waterbirds. In 2007, before the terrorist attacks, all this was still accessible to the public. I learnt to tell the Great egret (left, above) from the Intermediate and Small. I saw flamingos for the first time (middle) and spent time learning to pick out the greater flamingos from the lesser. The two of us with one dinky pair of binoculars, that Olympus, and our first bird book, began to recognize Bar-tailed godwits (right), sandpipers, herons, and other water birds.

We also continued to travel. On our first visit to Bhutan we saw red-billed choughs (left, above) and their yellow-billed cousins for the first time. I learnt that there are different varieties of kingfishers, and the one you see above is called the White-breasted kingfisher. I never forgot the thrill of discovering its binomial: Halcyon smyrnensis. My list of corvids kept expanding, as I found that the family includes treepies. The one on the left above is a Rufous treepie.

We kept looking at birds wherever we travelled. A second trip to Bhutan in the spring of 2008 expanded our list enormously. In the panel above, you see a Russet sparrow (“There are so many different kinds of sparrows,” The Family said in wonder) and a Scarlet minivet from that trip. In summer on a visit to Ann Arbor, I spotted my first European starling.

In 2009 the first lifer I had was the strange bird called the Greater adjutant stork. I took the photo above near Guwahati’s biggest landfills. I realized that we had become birdwatchers, because hearing our taxi driver talk of a strange bird near the dump, we asked him to take us there. Later, in the more pleasant surroundings of Kaziranga national park I spotted my first Golden-fronted leafbird.

I guess I learnt that you can expand your list if you just spare a moment to look at birds while you travel. I noticed a Great cormorant and other water birds while visiting Kinkaku-ji, the temple of the golden pavilion, in Kyoto. On a visit to Sardinia, I took a photo of an Eurasian blackbird, another lifer. The numbers increase slowly. More than numbers, they are wonderful memories. Even the worst of photos can call back a lovely memory.

The morning I saw Chomolungma

When The Family decided that we have to start walking in the Himalayas, she had in mind the famous week-long treks like the Annapurna base camp, Har ki Dun, Phulara ridge, or Sandakphu-Phalut. But since I the job of arranging it came to me I immediately started thinking of day-long walks. After all, we’d hardly walked at a height before. The only trek that I knew which fitted the bill was one that a very experienced trekker friend had told me about a year before his death in the early days of the pandemic. He’d told me that it was a fairly level day’s walk, although you were 3 Kms above sea level, and that the real payoff was the view of four of the world’s five highest peaks from one point. In the photo above you can see the path winding up to Sandak Phu; it would have taken us four days more to walk up there for a better view. When we saw Chomolungma flanked by Lhotse and Makalu, the view was a coda to our friendship. I’m glad I finally did it. I’m glad I could show it to you.

The trek we were on was the Tumling-Tonglu trek, which is part of the Phalut-Sandakphu trek. I’d contacted a reputable company in Darjeeling to arrange the trek. We started from our hotel at 6 in the morning, and watched the sun rise over Kanchenjunga, as we drove to the busy border town of Manebhanjan. Treks along the protected bioreserve of the Singalila ridge start from here. The town was clearly involved with the football world cup. After a breakfast of paratha and alu dum, washed down with chai, we got into a Landrover and got off at Tumling. This Nepali village is at a height of 2970 m. We would then walk about two and a half kilometers, climbing a 100 meters to Tonglu village, where we would have lunch. Then in the afternoon we would walk another six kilometers to Chitre village (2500 m) just above Manebhanjan. Google told me that this was a two hour walk. Our guide assured us that it would be at least double that. I’ve noticed this problem with Google’s algorithms when you are walking in the mountains.

Click to expand

It doesn’t snow at this altitude in December, but there’s a brisk wind over the ridge. The temperature was around 7 Celsius, but the breeze made us zip our jackets tight. There are a few trees on the leeward slope, but they are stunted. There is grass, and many low bushes. Most of it was dry and unrecognizable now. When we come back here one April I’m sure there’ll be flowers. The temperature must have fallen below freezing at night, because we saw frost still remaining in the shadows. Sangay, our guide, looked at it and said “Winter may come early this year.”

Click to expand

There are few people here. The villages are tiny, and the number of trekkers is not large. There were some who’d stayed overnight in Tumling. We waved to a pair who were having tea outside the general store and restaurant made of corrugated metal, which you see in the photo above. We passed a little chorten, a stupa, surrounded by lungta, windhorses, things that we know better as prayer flags. The ridge line here is the open border between Nepal and India. The paved road is Indian territory. We were on the windward side of it, because of the gentler slope and that put us in Nepal.

Click to expand

The land never slopes entirely in one direction of course, so in the middle of a gentle climb you often climb down and then climb up again more steeply than you’d expected. I was enjoying this walk. After the experience in Leh in July, I’d not crossed the 3 Km mark till now. The walk was entirely pleasant. The breeze was moderate as log as we kept ten meters or so below the ridge. Soon I’d taken off my cap and unzipped my jacket. I stopped now and then to follow a raven’s flight, and once to marvel at a lone snow pigeon which banked in flight above us, its wings looking reddish brown in the sun. We’d seen a family of Kalij pheasants on our way up. I couldn’t see or hear any choughs.

The landscape was dappled with the shadows of clouds. The browns and blues of winter were a wonderful change from the dusty gray of the plains. I kept stopping to look at the rocks. Most of it seemed to be metamorphic schist or gneiss, with lichen growing on the surface. The Family had walked ahead, and she spotted the huts of Tonglu. Even without that it was clear that a village was nearby. A couple of mules munched on the dry grass. The spring water near us was draining into a large plastic tank. By 11:30 we had reached our lunchtime destination. With all the halts for views and photos, we had taken two hours to walk roughly as many kilometers!

Left to right, bottom to top

Sometimes you are just lucky. We stood watching four lionesses dozing. They weren’t moving. There wasn’t time to look for anything else before the light went. So I just took a few photos for practice, when one got up, shook herself a bit and then did a lazy stretch. She looked like she could do with a cup of coffee. If it is a promise of action that you want, that diagonal is exactly it.

Intrigued, I looked through the photos I took that day in Masai Mara. In that absolutely flat landscape how many diagonals did I manage to include in my photos? A zebra’s haunches not only provide bold diagonals, they are also the biggest contrast in that dusty tan landscape. The occasional Acacia provides the only vertical in the landscape, and the necks of giraffes are another angle. An elephant’s trunk and a lioness’ neck provide more gentle slopes to keep your eye from getting bored. Interesting how much your hand does unconsciously when you train it.