Tag: favourites

Alive

I’m in the mood to reminisce. About when I went so high, I was both ecstatic and sober.

The mountains, I mean.

There’s something about the hills, about the way they go round and round, the winding roads twisting and turning. The way you traverse through rocks and slides, staring at nothing but an expanse of brownish mass that’s so plain, yet so attractive.

alive 2

Who would look at a mountain and expect it to have been around for centuries, nurturing countless monkeys, squirrels, mushrooms, and buttercups?

From tiny dents that sliding rocks had created over the years and small shrubs peeking through large cracks. To even the bigger chasms that open up to disasters during the monsoons. Everything about a mountain is wondrous.

Who’d pause to wonder that such a life-giving creature could also be dangerous? If the earth makes one wrong move, the whole rocky magnificence will crash down upon us. And yet we pry at it, with scalpels and crossbars, and evil hearts looking to uproot the structure that feeds thousands of life forms.

As we ascended the Darjeeling hills, I looked down at the world of luscious greenery and turquoise waters glistening in the mild afternoon sun. The hills encase these small water bodies, protecting them from the evils of humanity. It was a sight I’d hold in my mind forever.

alive 1.jpg

It wasn’t just the natural scenery, just the joy and thrill of going up a mountain, made my heart race, in a good way. As we elevated, my heart elated. And so did my hopes of going higher and higher. Robert M. Pirsig said, “Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive.” That’s how it was.

The hills are alive, calling in a reverberating voice you can’t ignore. And that’s why I’d never say no to the mountains.

Counting Years

I see myself falling in love with great wine. It’s extraordinary that no two wines are the same. I love the mystery that each bottle contains, there’s such mild taste difference that even a day or two means a great deal. I’m still a novice in the area, but even I know how much the wine’s age matters.

numbers

So, It’s June

It took me over a week to note that in writing, but I think June is the best month of the year. I know some bloggers do a month-to-month post about the month itself, but I’m not one of them. I just happen to like June better than any other month.

June

It’s no surprise why: just look out the window. It’s been an awful summer, and it’s so good to plunge into the smooth breeze after the scorching heat. June is the only month when people are happy to leave the house in the morning or ride a bike in the park after sun down. It’s the month in between the mangoes and the monsoons. It’s neither this nor that, but it’s got the best of both seasons.

It feels great to wake every morning without your t-shirt clinging to your perspiring back. Or to not want to sit inside the refrigerator all day. It’s liberating, in a whole new sense, to step out of the house without drenching yourself in an “ice-cool” talcum powder that never works as well as they do in commercials.

What’s better than June weather? It’s cool in the morning, it’s cool in the evening, and it’s cool at night. The sun comes up when he wants to and smiles all day long. And all of a sudden, is something goes amiss, it rains. With no warning at all, just like in life. And then we’re smiling again, and staying up a little late.

Even the sun resonates with us this month. So much so that the sun has his heads in the clouds, while we have ours in the iCloud. Ain’t it wonderful to walk all day with the clouds looking over us?

I like July too, but that’s another month altogether.

Celebration-Worthy

Jubilance is victory. Something worth celebrating, or perhaps the celebration itself. Either way, where there’s happiness there’s wine.

And it’s extra special when you try to click a picture of the wine, and it turns out better than you had expected it to.

It’s Friday, and need I a better reason to celebrate?

jubilance

To Read Is to Write

to read

I met a girl who’d subjected herself to an impressive schedule. A fiction and a non-fiction every week, no matter what.

It seemed a vigorous routine. Like school homework. Do it, finish it, and move on to the next. Reading is learning yes, but to me it seemed like she forced herself to read, read, and read even more.

Which is not a wrong thing. Except it felt so wrong that someone who’d read so much wouldn’t want as much to do with writing. She had an aversion to writing, and I couldn’t understand that.

When I first got bored with my school routine, I took to reading. I wasn’t as aggressive as I’d like to claim, but I read a lot.

And I realised I loved reading. From Enid Blyton, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, and Sherlock Holmes to Harry Potter, and Narnia, it was a crescendo of curiosity. And I believe that was a good thing.

I used to sit under a not-so-bright lamp, all night, peering at the fine print. It was fascination beyond anything I had felt. I loved the way reading made me feel. I longed for the lure of the sentences, the way a story moved from one word to another, how every letter and every comma only enriched the narrative, and how every single dash or stroke on paper added so much value.

I loved absorbing more than the story — the size of the print, the blackness of it, and the tiny strokes that sharpened every curve. I began to see the beauty in a full stop, the potential in ellipsis, the continuity in a comma, and the definite uncertainty in a question mark.

And that’s when I understood I want to write like that.

I had, for years, admired the way writers played with words, the way Shakespeare shattered grammar rules and yet made it sound so right. And I wanted to do the same, in such a way so as to make another young reader stare swell in love with words — just as I had.

And that’s why I never comprehend when someone says they love reading, but can’t write. What do they see while reading, I wonder?