A quick trip to hometown | Himachal diary

It’s always fun to watch the terrain change as you go up on the lofty country roads. Last month I had another trip to my hometown in Shimla in this rainy season. The weather offered no clemency as it continued to shower for several days and made it nearly impossible for me to venture out in the wild mountains and popular destination nearby. So many less-taken roads to inconspicuously remote locations that are untouched even by Google maps. But for the people out there it’s, as they call it, “the season time”― the season of Apples. The most cherished and primary produce of the agrarian economy of the region.

Unlike the day, some nights offered great views of the night sky ― thousands of never-seen-before points of shimmering lights in the pristine-black fabric of space laid across the edges of the alpine horizon.

We braved the weather, crossed brooks and cascades at their full might, encountered a couple landslides, some rocks even fell on our bus. During the return journey in the wee hours of the morning, our bus was confronted by the sight of a mountain leopard. Sharing some of the pictures here.

 

Somewhere on the way

A hotel

Shimla city

Pine tree

Taklech town

Pine tree

Satluj river in Rampur Bushahr

Pine tree

Cactus

Apple orchards covered with protective nets

The roof above

Pine, fir trees

Back to school

Tulsi, the holy Basil plant

Everyone starts smaller

River at rage

Are your nut, walnut?

A short video of the journey can be seen on my YouTube channel:

it rains heavily if it rains

The clouds don’t care

for if they feel heavy

they let it all go at once

until they can’t shower anymore

it rains heavily if it rains

 

The rivers don’t care

for if they flood

they flood the entire town

and if they go dry

they go dry like a camel’s ass in Sahara

it rains heavily if it rains

 

Heart doesn’t care

for if it gets hurt, it cries

it cries like a broken faucet

it rains heavily if it rains

– BPC

 

Dravyavati River Project, Jaipur

Hoogli River, Howrah

Howrah Bridge, Kolkata

Sunset at Hoogli

Trip to Sikkim

Last week my friends and I had an unplanned trip to Sikkim, the hotspot state for finding mountainous valleys, monasteries, and a diverse range of flora and fauna.

As it was a really quick 3-days outing for us, we didn’t have enough time to explore the whole landscapes except the far northern region of the state, Yumthang Valley.

Zero Point @ Yumthang Valley

View from Lachen town

Valley of flowers

Lachen

View from Lachen town

Valley of flowers

View from Lachen town

View from Lachen town

View from Lachen town

Somewhere on the way

@ Zero Point with friends

Zero Point @ Yumthang

Yumthang

Yumthang

Yumthang Valley

Zero Point @ Yumthang

Zero Point @ Yumthang

Yumthang Valley

Zero Point @ Yumthang

Valley of flower

Valley of flowers

Zero Point @ Yumthang

Valley of flowers

Zero Point @ Yumthang

Zero Point @ Yumthang

Zero Point @ Yumthang

Zero Point @ Yumthang

Zero Point @ Yumthang

Zero Point @ Yumthang

Zero Point @ Yumthang

Gangtok

Zero Point @ Yumthang

Zero Point @ Yumthang

Temple @ Gangtok

Gangtok

Gangtok

Lachen town

Gangtok

Treading the old path

Absolute work is a faux. When someone say they have done something all by themselves, they are either lying or they don’t seem to know the latent truth. Every piece of work we take in our hands, even if it is like doing from scratch, it can’t be absolutely credited to you. In reality, there is no beginning or starting over of the “work”. Each one of us capitalizes on the methods, tools, or research that some people have executed or stirred-up in the past. This is how things advance towards a propitious future— standing on the shoulders of giants we see how far the horizon is.

The fact that we have been meandering around for almost a quarter of a million years making mistakes unconsciously that no other species tried to commit, despite not being civilized for the most part of that journey, gives us a competitive edge over the rest of the inhabitants. And thus the responsibility to protect what is left. Our journey from protoplasmal primordial atomic globule to sentient upright modern human being is full of mystifying junctures of events, visitations of adversities, proliferation of art, cultures, and languages.

Yet we are driven by the innate fuel of self-interest which may not be held right or wrong in a temporal moral compass. Now it is up to us how panoptic our vision of the “self” is.

cynosure of the night

Murdered by a chatbot

This was a time when I was new to chat-bots that I came across an app of such a sort. I found myself soon intrigued by this talkbot Mitsuku. And then on my last birthday, in this hilarious conversation with her (Ah yes, I just assumed her gender), she slaughtered me totally with her scathing sense of humor. In retaliation all I could do was to delete her. Anyway, I got this chinwag screen-shoted on my old phone only to find it today.

 

But then again, some bots are not as smart…

Specious Truth

The other day I was casually asking a friend what would he like to ask if a genie grants him three wishes. He didn’t express his wishes explicitly, but he accentuated that whatsoever his wishes are ― they should be granted provided he will be given a sort of cooling-off period of half an hour to undo any hurried and imprudent decision. That was one of the most pragmatic answer I have heard.

That got me thinking of the constant choices we have to make every day that defines us in a way. The impulsiveness of our mind, the tendency of our thoughts and reasons to concede to whatever our senses can’t comprehend.

​Is​n’t it sad how some people’s grip on their lives is so precarious that they’ll embrace any preposterous delusion rather than face an occasional bleak truth?

– Bill Watterson

These words coming through the central figure of Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, a six-year old boy called Calvin, speak a volume about the grim truths that seems to challenge and shape our discretion, our choices, our existence.

दीपक कहाँ है, मुझे पक्का पता नहीं मगर
रौशनी में बैठा हूँ और जो भी करीब आता है
उसे भी रौशनी में देख रहा हूँ!

Going Home

Nothing is better than going home, finding nothing that seems to have changed much except you. The building stays pretty much the same you left it last time leaving out some usual damages discernible with age and rough weather. Same goes for people. There is a slight disquieting feeling here as you never know when it is going to be the last time you meet someone or do something you enjoy doing.

For me, it was a tumultuous trip— going home last week after nearly a year and a half. Falling sick, recuperating, stucking in traffic for hours. Visiting faintly recognizable places that I don’t remember the last time when I been there. But it was worth it. The thing I like the most being in my hometown is the feeling how terribly boring stuff seems so interesting and exotic there. That’s the kind of feeling a heavenly vibrant place make you feel. It’s a walk down the memory lane and it always makes my eyes moist when I say goodbye to such a place.

Sharing some glimpses of the journey to an inconspicuously remote place in Shimla, H.P.

Are you uploading me on Instagram?

Deodar cedar stump

That’s me with my niece

A large cobweb

Pine trees

That’s home

A traditional house

My aunt with her granddaughter

A school in background

Rocky road. 10 years and still in making

Back to school.

Coriander flowers

Want a better view, mount on me!

Woodpecker’s Delight

Hulking apples

Millet growing to the sky

A beautiful morning as seen directly from bed

Walnut garnish

This slope is too damn high!

I don’t care, bruh!

Standing tall

Coriander flower

Road still in making… A decade long manual toil

Time Machine

Victory & Defeat

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.”

– Jean-Paul Sartre

As they say, your mentality, perseverance, and sometimes a stroke of luck is what makes winning a win and losing a loss. Just like a magician, if you reveal the secrets behind your success or successful demonstration of the magic trick, people are eventually going to lose their interest in your supposed success. Likewise, if you tell your story of your achievement in great detail, it might trivialize your victory by making it look like a child’s play and cause the line separating success from failure to fade away in the process.

 

 

Saying Goodbye to College

A year ago I would have died for certain people. A year later, half of them are dead to me.

I know it’s not the good way to remember your college. But it’s a harsh truth. We create things and we destroy it. It all changes so quickly. We change. Our life changes. Our college changes. There are new students, maybe some new teachers as well. But two things that don’t change are ― the change itself; and, of course, the speed of light in vacuum.

Bidding adieu to your college is really a hard thing not because you really loved studying and going to college but because you have got the people there who seem to care about you, listen to you, or just make you shut up— a crazy bunch of people who were once strangers, now seem like one. Anyway, it’s all good because sooner or later you’re just going to live with a selected few people who can stand you. A college is a place where you created memories— some good, some bad, and a lot of embarrassing ones. Also, some boring and detestable moments which are slowly assuaged by time seem to float around your eyes as you think of going to college in the lava-like hot and incinerating summer days. Or in other words, waiting-dating-elating-separating-mbating-frustrating days.

No matter how much you hated waking up in the morning, facing the seemingly never-ending chain of exams, deadlines, piled-up work― everything was and is destined to last some day or other. One tension takes over the other. You could say life is a box full of tensions, you never know what you’re gonna deal with. In the end, we can just take comfort in the fact that it once was a part of our life.

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Unearthed some hilarious pictures while cleaning up mobile phone

Storytelling gone wrong 1

Storytelling gone wrong 2

Just another file page

A random painting of mine…

Sigh of Serenity

 

 

 

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