2025

Fauzan Ardhi/Unsplash

It is hard to write anything about a year when you have lost your father. Everything else pales into insignificance. But in keeping with the attitude of that very same father, 2025 was a year where a lot of other thoughts and experiences ought to be recalled.

One such was the parallels between Jim Corbett's village of Choti Haldwani and the Korean tourist destination of Jeju Island. Having visited both within a few weeks of each other, it was soothing to observe rural life continuing as of old only a few hundred feet from tourist frenzy. In the case of Choti Haldwani, there was also the matter of industrial forestry being ordered to a halt almost 200 years ago from today in a realization well before its time.

The series of visits to the Western Ghats in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu were a welcome reminder that the Himalayas are not the only claimants to mountain splendour. Remote, lush and dripping with life, the ancient mountains of the south warrant further attention. The southern part of India as a whole offers a alternative way of looking at India and that alone is reason enough to delve into details.

The multiple groups of foreign trainees and the monumental task of introducing them to India within the space of a few weeks was a task that I took immense joy in. As I told them, I know a lot about India but what I don't know is far far far greater. It was fulfilling to see them slowly grasp the complexities and impossibilities that made our country special and to also learn how our interests - reading, culture and food - often overlapped.

Health deteriorations and demises in the senior generation were difficult to accept but had to be. The sudden departure of a similarly aged colleague was even more so. His enthusiasm for nature and the accidental encounters in our neighbourhood forests were a part of many daily lives, including mine, and the crude cruel stop to his journey made everyone look for reasons and fail.

On a larger front, the casual hate, violence and other forms of stupidity that were provoked with the Pahalgam terror murders and then proceeded to infect society at large with cute neighbourhood uncles calling for 'Gaza'ing Pakistan and the forceful injection of politics into cricket was also a personal inflection point. What we become is largely driven by what we find pleasure in. If violence is our common love, then there might be not too much difference between us and them. In that department, all of us need to do better.

Discarded

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Every new social platform that becomes the talk of town automatically sparks a curiosity in me. I do give it a whirl only to find out that it was not my type in the first place. But that does not stop me for trying the next talked about thing. It was on a wave of such hype, that Discord first came to me and so I ventured forth. The dark UI overlaid with friendly looking characters seemed like a fun place but only for people who knew where to go adding to its charm and living up to its name as some sort of underground gathering. Unfortunately for me, I was then and continue to be overwhelmed by the infinite number of side-tabs, competing conversations and a fountain of activities that I find myself incompetent to handle. Usually I am able to invoke the 'sour grapes' mentality and let inaccessible things be but in this one instance, I keep hoping against hope that I'll figure out a hack to experience the place as committed Discord-ers do. Unlike all of the others which I had so far discarded, here was a platform that discarded me. Have been unable to make any gains in this regard for quite some time now but hey, 2026 is a new horizon.

Unknot

Pierre Bamin/Unsplash

As I was discussing with a schoolfriend also in his late 30s/early 40s, our bodies were getting to the stage of how our old PCs were in the early 2000s. Back in the day, PCs running Windows would start running slower with age taking increasingly longer to start up as to shut down. There was also a certain wait time before the older machine warmed up to reach peak performance and this tendency was becoming strangely true of our bodies too. In the years before, our muscles and joints were motion ready and able to display peak performance from the get-go on cricket fields and bicycle rides. Now in the course of a long morning walk, it takes a good 2-3 km of progress before with a burp, certain systems of the physical realm indicated that they were use-ready. The high intensity of youth had once required us to set aside time to pro-actively unwind. We had now reached a stage carrying so much legacy data that we were required to give ourselves time just to unknot.

Stimulants

Nathan Dunlao/Unsplash

In my opinion, it is a cartel. The world woke up and worked just fine for millennia without needing a caffeine infusion. But somewhere along the way, mass production was not leading to mass consumption. So the pushing began and before long, became self-propelled. In drawing rooms around the world, sombre first conferences of the day are held to find an excuse for a cuppa of choice stimulants. Businesses with a keen eye on the dependencies chose to push it further into a kaleidoscope of flavours for all tastes, minor twists developing major markets. Someone somewhere first said "I need my [chai/coffee] to get started". Whether that person was actually in need of a pick-me-up or was delaying getting to work we will never know but the sentiments were carried forward with enthusiasm.

Eclectic

Odiseo Castrejon/Unsplash

Amongst the words that convey their meanings through innate qualities, my favourite is 'Eclectic'. It contains the melding of eccentric and electric indicating both the lack of focus and the chaotic energy. Anything or anyone eclectic in nature make for interesting observation and company. Productivity, efficiency and results may be the end goals of many but raw eclectic uncertainty has a fan base of its own.

Remember

Ricardo Gomez Angel/Unsplash

Remember this cold December morning. In your bones, in your veins. The sun is a no-show and the fog a cold dampness long past its welcome. You will need it on a clear summer day when the leaves are bright green from the sun's fury and the very earth seems toasted brown. But you won't remember. On that day, you will simply wilt under the insane heat walking rapidly towards shelter not recalling that not so long ago, you had actively sought the sun's company.

Vectorized

23rd October 2022, Living Roots Bridges (Vector)

Simplifications are distortions, plain and simple. Vector images fall squarely in that category of information but their distortions offer a focused clarity. Shades are abandoned for blockiness of colours and disorder soothed into mathematically repeatable curves. The clarity of a photograph may be seeming but a vectorized version lays bare an object's reproducible soul.

Static Crush

18th November 2008, Boston

For reasons not very specific, certain objects acquire an importance beyond what mere frequency of encounter should dictate. So too was my association with this weeping willow tree of Boston. The first few times I saw it weeping over a body of water in the Boston Public Garden was when I myself was new to the landscape. An exploratory urge had sent me spiralling from the anonymity of the suburbs into the heart of what is essentially a town sized city. The Public Garden seemed like a reasonable place to start given that I didn't know too much about the city then. 

Then in the future came the escorting trips for family and friends who were visiting Boston. This wasn't New York or Chicago with landmark buildings to show off. Prudential Centre didn't have any sort of iconic ring to it and while views from Top of the Hub were decent, the only people who referred to Boston as any sort of Hub were Bostonians themselves. So it was that we often ended up strolling the Commons and the Public Garden leading to many an encounter with said tree.

Why that specific tree when even within the Public Garden, there were many of the species? I cannot say. But I made it a point to point it out to all who I was showing around emphasising on its 'weeping willow' name for added effect. How many were impressed by this fact-hoisting I do not know, but given the sheer number of photos I have of it through the seasons, that damn tree sure did leave an impression on me. If it had grown tired of seeing me, it gave no indication and as for me, I would still be looking out for it whenever and if I am back in Boston.

Possession

8th September, 2024

Often is the foreign trip which sends me on a buying spree. The first few souvenir shops always fail to impress me but by the 10th, I am already falling for some aspects of their tackiness. It may be a matter of constant exposure that my resistance breaks down or maybe deep down, I am that souvenir hunting, selfie powered tourist that I claim to despise. So there I was again, this time in Bangkok, surfing the (most of them probably Made in China) bonanza of tourist trinkets when I came across these two pachyderms. My heart settled on them immediately as a gift for my pre-teen nieces and with that intention they found their way into my suitcase. They travelled in their stately fashion to my home in India from Thailand but unlike many other items refused to move ahead. I too did not protest. Maybe the nieces were only an excuse for something that I had always intended for me.

Background

Kolkata Airport (CCU), 24th December 2022

I am obsessed with observing street and wall-art created exclusively for public consumption. Metro pillars, underpass walls and sides of urban buildings are now decorated with art of wildly varying quality around the world and I don't let any of that work pass by me ignored. I can't help wondering about the artist(s) who came together to set up this brush of everyday people with the good, the bad and the ugly of the principles of colour, perspective and culture. I want to imagine that they take a deeper joy in presenting their art to the world in places that are definitely not galleries but consequentially feature in most people's lives prominently even as they rush by to their next task. As a background, they might live until rain, sunshine and politics put paid to their existence but as projections of freed imaginations into the banal routines of their spectators' lives, they offer an inestimable value.

King of Kings

As a diehard member of the reading-over-anything-else community, I cannot claim any neutrality in the manner that I watched the first part of "Ponniyin Selvan".  It is not unusual for a filmmaker to let an author down. Even if the filmmaker is of the calibre of Mani Ratnam. So even as I watched the film, I kept hearing this voice in my head saying that the book(s) must be so much better.

10th November, 2022

As indeed, they were. Here I was, reading a relatively recent translation into English of Kalki's Tamil original. A fantastic fictionalized take on the life and times of the Chola movers and shakers of the 9th-10th century including that of Arulmozhi Varman or Rajaraja I, the king of kings. In 2024, I could sense the buzz that each part of the serialized story must have generated in the years immediately post Indian independence. While English was the only way I could partake of this new (to me) universe of impulsive kings, intelligent princesses and sorceress fisherwomen under the spell of the sea and the comet, there too rose another voice. The Tamil original must be so much better.

Slow

The National Book Trust (NBT) and its bookshop is a mixed bag. By virtue of its selection of titles and authors, it offers a refreshing alternative to the production line setups of commercial bookstore chains like Crossword. Because of the very same reasons, the gulf between the title's promise and the delivered text can be vast due to the author being a sarkari selection. The book "India Post: A Journey through Ages" I picked from the NBT's store in Dehradun is one such, purposefully written it would seem, to aggravate anyone with expectations of structure and story-telling. That it is (claimed to be) written to celebrate one of the most important applications of the written word makes the circumstances twice as tragic. Owning the book makes me happy for its existence but sad for its execution.

World Post Day, 10-0ct-2024, ToI

A Times of India supplement on World Post Day (10th October) looked at another aspect of the handwritten letter, its romanticization on celluloid as a medium of connection for lovers, soldiers, breadwinners and those displaced from home by their own success. The personalization that a handwritten letter brings and its physical journey from sender to recipient contributes to its value. The permanency of its words present a sharp contrast to the ever changing world that it navigates through. Even in the few days it had taken to reach its destination, things have been altered irrevocably but like every sensible person or thought it refuses to move at anything above its own chosen pace.

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2024/11/slow.html]

Morning Meditations

IMG: Dall-E 3

A sequence of tough days at work led to the eventual sleep-in. My daily almost dawn walk with the dogs was pushed down the sundial to more of a morning walk timeslot to allow me to dwell for a little bit more on the comfort of refusing to start a new day. The electronic drug-dealer in my palm served up UEFA Champions League highlights from last night. I partook of Bayern Munich steamrolling Dinamo Zagreb and Manchester City stuttering against Inter Milan mainly because swiping on to the next video felt like too much effort. The irony inherent in cheering for pinnacles of fitness and energy while representing the opposite end of the spectrum was not lost on me. It was still well within the definition of an everyman's early morning when the dogs' earnest confusion finally guilted me into abandoning my contract with sloth. The route was regular, the sniffs and woofs along the way routine but the advantage to a time-table, however externally enforced, is that it ensures that even the most shapeless of mornings eventually meanders towards a generally right direction.

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2024/09/morning-meditations.html]