What does Sierra signify

Marcus Tullius Cicero etched "Dum Spiro, spero - as long as I breathe, I hope".  

 

I chanced upon Cicero's above quote while reading a book. I have often observed, as a kid, annual family holidays concentered either transversing to hills or beaches. Usually after a Saturday vegetarian lunch or a Sunday brunch of luchhi and kosha mangsho the family holiday meeting sessions kicked off with a fervour that lasted till late evenings over a long forgotten snack of tea and samosas gone dun and soggy. The sessions were multiple, often family friends included, budgets chalked out, the trains and lodges booked in advance, the cursory bedding and home-made snacks bundles' to be toted and tour attractions and local conveyance mapped out in an effort to save time and avoid being tricked off by touts in a distant land away from home. It was customary to ignore the whims of the children, as elders played the pivotal part in all parleys - monetary resource being the premier, and so we were herded to the holiday destinations often as a bale to be photoengraved for life.

 

For my family and our family friends, places surrounded by hills or mountains had always been presaged. As a child I followed my elders' footsteps yearning for the lush palisade, the lithic landscapes - the bulwark standing tall. We were not so fortunate to be born in times when camera phones, camcorders or digital cameras stood might and main before our eyes and brain. Every family owned a film reel camera though which did not rotate hands and often the family breadwinner was the sole custodian. We children had to rely on the magnetic sensor of our eyes.

 

I have been fortunate enough to lay eyes on Himalayas not once or twice but for times unaccounted for. Lost are the times too, when the anticipated annual holiday trips to distant lands chimed in our tiny hearts gladdening our souls. These are the e-days when places and pictures can be visited and shared with kith and kin via tablets, laptops and iPhones.

 

Even this day the impregnable Himalayas read my inner soul loud  -

 

When the creation was new and all the stars shone in their first splendour, the gods held their assembly in the sky and sang

"Oh, the picture of perfection! the joy unalloyed!"

 

Gitanjali, Rabindranath Tagore 

 

Eminence, robustness, placidity, extirpation, ruggedness, pastoral beauty - I usually run out of words eulogising those moments captured as a child. The beauty of experiencing the awe-inspiring majestic mountains lies not in text or images but by living it.

Imposing as it is it draws out human relationships, individualities of characters to the core in Satyajit Ray's 1962 film Kanchenjungha where Ray uses excellently the billowing mists and the circuitous paths of the range, that people walk on as they meet and part, to show confusion and finally when things begin to resolve the mists slowly lift and the setting sun sets the mountain peaks glowing.

I believe the Himalayas enunciate the truth and wisdom and the monastic life of  Swami Vivekananda is well reflected in his collection of works - Lectures from Colombo to Almora -

"...As peak after peak of this Father of Mountains began to appear before my sight, all the propensities to work, that ferment that had been going on in my brain for years, seemed to quiet down, and instead of talking about what had been done and what was going to be done, the mind reverted to that one eternal theme which the Himalayas always teach us, that one theme which is reverberating in the very atmosphere of the place, the one theme the murmur of which I hear even now in the rushing whirlpools of its rivers — renunciation!".

 

The melting pot of human race defying religion, colour, creed or nationality - the omnipotent Himalayas weds spirituality and philosophy is born out of this wedlock. The exalted landscape and the charming panorama, the inhabitants of the Goliath rocky range, the foot hills, the flora and fauna, the platonic enigma, the esoteric sages and depth of their cave hide-outs, the serene purified air and the gushing torrents, the austerity of the omneity pressing on us is what we need to glorify.

 

The sharp druthers inked on my soul for the vast expanse of this mountain range puts me on the reposing route to Cicero's dear hope -

 

"All the sweet vintage of all my autumn days

and summer nights, all the earnings and gleanings

of my busy life will I place before him

at the close of my days

when death will knock at my door."

 

Gitanjali, Rabindranath Tagore

The innocence of the infantine years

On my trip to Bali in March earlier this year, I was mobbed by local artisans trying to sell their wares in the Kintamani region overlooking the active volcano of Mount Batur and the beautiful serene lake partially blanketed by fog sweeping the area in cold temperatures. I was devouring the nature - silent, balmy, unflappable, aquamarine and kaleidoscopic when someone suddenly tugged at my dress and I gave in to the enamored web of the landscape surrounding me and turned around. The tiny fingers of the small hand laced with my dress, a pair of dove eyes and others flagging her entreating my attention - euphoric as I was with the nature and turned on more so to see the gleeful timid faces of nature's bounty - children of varying ages.  

 

 

Holding the little one on my lap and surrounded by the rest - Kintamani, Bali, Indonesia March 2013

The mother of the little angel, who happyily strode into my arms was nearby, along with her elder sister - seen at the backdrop of the image and all of us were captured in this frame for life. The little one was the toggle of her mom winning the hearts over of the tourists so that she could have her bread and butter in oodles by selling her stuff. In Balinese, which I did not follow but could make out with the help of our driver, the mother admonished the elder one for her wretched ways in marketing herself and the transactions that followed. Poor crummy girl, hardly six or seven years old, showed up a doughty attitude and with dogged alacrity pushed hard on the tourists nearby.  

 

In our times, at the age of six or seven, we had been coy lambs backed by ancestral and circumstantial opulence, our dopiness would not have rung a bell of a parent's pet child. Today's generation, a smarter lot than we were, soaks up the parental gestures and that's one big fib than all others - parents' fiery denial that they have a favourite child.   

 

"Happy is the son whose faith in his mother remains unchallenged" - Louisa May Alcott.

 

However, does a father or mother take pains in fraternising with their other kids, if they have reproduced more than one, or simply get by their cherished one who grows into an over-indulgent, foolhardy and prized person later on in life. The other children (or child) left behind clamor for assiduity. The barefaced truth under veil although is enjoyed by relatives, family friends and acquaintances. No one dare proclaim this for fear of kindling bitter enmity with the family.

 

If the oldest child is a son, favouritism is quite natural in most socities bound by old inheritance laws and the social taboo holding onto the son(s) taking care of parents in their ripe age. The youngest child of a family can be a pet, the tootsie and sugar candy protected by parents usually bushing up their acts of trouble making and tantrums thrown to have their own ways. In another case a child becomes a pet of the family on grounds of sully experiences faced by the parents with their siblings as kids. Talented, intelligent, clubby and expressive kid, again, is the most favoured in the family circles. Yet another example of favouritism points to biological versus the adopted kid. An ailing child often grabs attention of parents by virtue of necessity. This is misleading to the other kvetching child who ploys better lapping up parents' soft spots. 

 

Whatever the case may be every child is different and parents' varying degrees of attention is sure to backfire. Lugubriosity, low morale, ambiguity, paranoia and number of phobias grow latent in the heart of the neglected one to which parents turn a blind eye. Researches have pointed out that the less favoured one cultivates few friends, is cold and solitary, and pops up attention-seeking demeanor.

 

Growing up has enormous effects on the less favoured one, often sardonic and cynical about family life and relationships. Hapless are those who try to establish new relationships with the grown up less favoured one as they cannot dig in times burned up.

 

I absorb some well crafted views of experts running confidence building workshops for children. Emphasising on spending quality and equal time with all children in the family, and depending on the child's nature try pulling the twitchy one to kite-flying with a friend instead of enjoying a cinema and push the bookish one to visit a museum instead of enrolling him/her into dancing or roller-skating classes.

American science writer Jeffrey Kluger published a book about siblings that claimed parental favouritism is hardwired in the human psyche. In The Sibling Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us, he wrote: ‘It is my belief that 95% of the parents in the world have a favourite child, and the other five% are lying.'

Putting the spotlight on each child's positives helps the buds to blossom into self-reliant, selfless, self-sufficient, dynamic and vivacious sweet smelling flowers. There is no other way for parents but to be complaisant and tactful.

Turnpikes I knew not

The inkling for this leitmotif is mainly the pensive framer who sits on a reed mat on the tiled floors of the house every morning facing the French windows that stretches out to views of structured roads rimming the hollow woods and a row of hillocks. The beeline of peak hour transport makes the traffic labyrinth a piece of cake.

 

Most of us pay very little attention to roads - the fabric of commerce and connection, whose construction was a pre-requisite to sustain the growing population in faraway lands when journeys were dusty, wearisome and bromidic. 

 

History echoes that a road built in Egypt by the Pharaoh Cheops around 2500 BC is believed to be the earliest paved road on record - a construction road 1,000 yards long and 60 feet wide that led to the site of the Great Pyramid in Giza. Dionysius of Halicarnassus in his Roman euology states "The extraordinary greatness of the Roman Empire manifests itself above all in three things: the aqueducts, the paved roads, and the construction of the drains." Indisputably the ancient Romans pioneered, who, until modern times, the world's straightest, best engineered, and most complex network of roads in the world.

 

Looking back to an aeon, should I not be in seventh heaven? Reflecting that in the age we are in today with a phenomenal progress in trade, technology, vehicular transportation and social welfare crossing frontiers, roads are an undeniable chrysalis to the entire human civilisation. However the atrabilious attitude while I compose this fall back to my growing up years in a land which was crucially lagging behind in developing its road network and wherever the roads existed they were either in deplorable state or totally impassable depending on seasonal changes. So it is apparent that I do not nurture a peppy air either way - learning about the archaic Empire's nonpareil mercantile contribution to the world or looking at the improved six lane segments of the existing infrastructure through the French windows of my house in the sojourn nation.

There had been a city I frequented during my foster years where almost all the roads were incapacious and truncating that I was aghast to believe that this abode was precisely named which in Sanskrit connotes a prosperous growth centre. Even today, writing on the basis of the facts provided by my kinsfolk, it is far worse although my erstwhile visits to the city had been shunned for multifaceted reasons. I muse over the fact that had the Maharajah brocard still in its imperium as it was in the 17th century, the city would have been named antithetically. Icky roads, not conducive to a biking environment, jammed with rickshaws, private vehicles, buses, trucks and in light of the ballooning populace is chafing the city of its unique historic and cultural identity. Faulty infrastructure and languorous administration markedly approve that we care less for future generations and low carbon development.   

 

I pine for the livable transportation network integrated to urban planning in the land where I grew up. The chapter of scraping up "people first" road infrastructure, though started, has a long way to go. Redtapism, profiteering, political abhorrence and paucity of funds will and have always been the chronic challenges, exerting significant impacts, to architects of possible dreams.

 

Malcolm X once stated “Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.”  I harbor when new perspectives to these most ignored spaces of our urban landscape will parlay for our next generations who would cry out on visiting the city (es), I dropped by, "turnpikes I knew not ever existed"? To them our footprints should speak of profundity.

The seraphic seasoning of 'life'

I quote Robert Frost "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”

There are many different versions of "life" painted by life's very own essence since the concept of Universe dawned. Centuries have gone by, philosophical ethics unfolded, political theories garnered and science made remarkable progress spanning aeons, crossing boundaries and yet this whole Universe, its patterns and the big blue bubble where "life" germinated is still a wonder - the veil of its infancy is yet to be laid bare.

I love to bask in nature but do not recollect the genesis of my connecting to the life's handiwork. I have been very fortunate enough to echo Tagore since my budding years humming his icon"Listen, my heart, to the whispers of the world with which it makes love to you".That which is emerald in colour, fresh and in abundance and sapid to my senses had always appealed to me.

My childhood reared up in the nature's mystic fragrance and hues - thick coppice, lush paddy fields, the shaggy headed banyan tree standing tall and imposing at the mouth of the street which bended to an arterial road, the sunlight filtering through the dense śāl forests - the route we usually avoided taking after twilight hours but was whoopee to our tiny feet treading in the daytime kicking sand and mud along or stomping weeds or the dry fallen leaves and twigs, the tweedling colourful little birds mostly whose names I was unaware of nestling in the foliage near our home - stirred vibrations in my soul weaving a tapestry of radiance in the man-made epoxy world even after I husked out of my infantine years.

We had a neat manicured flower and vegetable front garden precisely supervised by my mom and Madanda, our weekly gardener. Between the scorching summer sun and school vacations both of them used to spend gruesome and tiring hours over gravel mulch for a trimmed landscape. Hibiscus was her all time favourite but she planted dear to her heart roses, gerberas, dahlias and marigolds in the winters so we all could enjoy the blooms up close on the patio.

There was a chhatim flower tree by my bedside window of the house where I grew up, whose enlivening whiff in the arid summer nights captured me alone and speechless - silence abounding. My old habit of reading books at bedtime with the windows wide and open during the summers often took my mind off to "all is quite in the garden now" - fireflies flashing its light, the warm breeze blowing, leaves rustling on the trees and the choruses of cicadas and tree frogs abuzz with silence gradually seeping in through the dark fabric of the starlit sky.

As children during school vacations we were paraded to the nearby woody and swampy riverbed with our picnic hampers. I was inept playing outdoors with other neighbourhood children. My favourite pastime then would be listening to the soft ripples of the river water gazing at its turquoise fathomless shape. Sitting on the grass underneath a tree my eyes would often wander at the blazing sky of the summer looking out for a hint of the overcast shadows and a splendour pour. Nay it never allayed my fancies.

But I enjoyed the traditional fishing boat rides with the others - the fishermen used to ferry us out towards the horizon with clumsy looking large wooden oars hacked from a single piece of wood. The hone of silence surrounded us sans our innocent peals of laughter amidst the water flowing in its fullness gladening my heart beyond measure.

My heart brews for silence and my eyes longs for ethereal portraits of nature at all times and in all places I visit even today. Growing up in a real world has been painful but years later hopping to different cities and countries, Tagore reminds me of the innate "Stream of Life" -

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day
runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth
in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow.

I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life.
And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.

For me, nature's been an inspiration to stay afloat, to see beyond the malevolent and bilk human mind, to dye my spirit with its colours, and that it is quintessentially the name of the game called "life".

The coiffure chat

I made an appointment with a coiffeuse last Saturday after a period of four months - thanks to the impending spring holidays in Bali I'm longing for later this month -  bidding adieu to the pesky frizzy every day wave affair. 

Ever since I was a toddler I was following my mum's footsteps - she had long tresses, charcoal black, straight but a little wavy, shone like fine strands of silk, thick and gorgeous that came tumbling down beneath her knees - I too genetically inherited her long thick straight but a little wavy black mane but not as beautiful and ravishing as my mum's. Her tress tales, even today although age has started to clip its sheen, invite many a lady's envy and leave them itching for the established attribute of a woman's beauty. She, of course, went an extra mile to take care of her free flowing extra mane. Regular oiling, having fish in her diet and applying homemade hair pack (mixing amla, reetha, sheekakai) once in a week, plaiting her hair before hitting the bed in the night, helped her wear those black long locks with pride. I remember, her telling me when I was a kid, that when she was in her school and college days and ran on a tightier budget she could not even think of buying a bottle of shampoo.

Prior to fleeing the nest my mum took care of my locks as best as she could juggling between her work, home, kids, and kitchen garden. Despite my screaming and countless tears, she used to brush my hair everyday with a desparation trying to emphasise my feminity and making a spectacle of versatility of her natural black mane. Poor me - little did I make sense of it then that a mother daughter tress tales would actually benefit me rebuilding my already inherited healthy hair years later!

I started treading the hirsute journey with a great ardor in my late twenties - when I was packed off as a marriage material. The thought of bridal finery only complete with a comely hairdo on the D-day helped me fan my pruriency on tangible sides of life - I kicked off with my hair! Thus began the odessey with my mane.

Invariably I wanted to get the celebrity glow on my mane and drifted from one cosmetic indulgence to another. Hopping to a regular salon and hair dresser did not end my tress woes either. Open to experimenting with different hair products and hair colours from taming frizz to volumnizing flat hair for hogging the celebrity style limelight I forgot to indulge in my wellbeing to relax and rejuvenate.

With a demanding profession and marriage came stress bearing enormous negative impacts on my health. I was inept to life's real face - struggling to keep up to it's daily doses even now. However, I was hell bent on weaving a magic and set my heart and mind to it for a postive and optimistic frame of mind and body. And this realisation made me fall in love with my long black mane once again! The bygone mum-taking-care compassionate times blanketed my emotional keel.

I now pamper myself to a regular deep conditioning hot oil massage for strong and nourished strands, whole egg and yolk-only treatments once in a month for lustrous and soft hair and religiously swear by L'oreal's INOA hair colour products and treatments to beautiful hair. There are lots of hair care posts on the internet available (hair care varies from person to person due to different hair textures) educating and inspiring people to improve their health and happiness. Topping it all is eating healthy and drinking water adequately ultimately helps you with the image turnover.

Talking about the latest trends, I admit being a poor resource on this and leave that in the hands of the adroit professionals at A Cut Above - my present salon de beauté, with confidence.

I love long layers which is very feminine. Maybe this is what I inherited best from my mum - never did I realise before that her gestures with my black locks in my growing up years was a candid coiffure chat she wanted to convey.

The twig gradually branching out...

A rare gem in a troglodytic life

I was three years old when my father gifted me a book on 'alphabets' as convent schools started early those days. Little did I know at that time, or do the wee ones ever ponder considering the age I was, that the opuscule of knowledge in the form of published documents would grow on me, explore and expand profoundly enriching and forming the largest archive of my budding life.

Both my parents went out to work and although I was not their only child, the embryonic stages of my life passed by as a lone wolf - coy and demure. The books made me quarantined from a normal childhood. Books reinvented me - I felt unalone intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. However I had no hands on experience with the practical life. The invaluable social resource was never there in me and the building blocks of relationships came tumbling down for me. This has never left me feeling blue though.

I was more than ecstatic, soaking in the solace of volumes of 'lettered' knowledge that appealed to me more, was readily accessible (both my parents maintain a library that is to be gaped at - maybe I had it in my genes!), and the most patient of teachers I knew not. Many would gag at the knowledge that, even now, I draw the musty smell of the old ones and the inky smell of the new ones that wafts to me everytime I open a book to read - making my head swim with delight. Embracing the regular reading habit in the initial years of my growing up helped me find a confidante while soul searching serious answers in life and calmed my frayed nerves.

Still and going on - I nurture and polish this gem of a friendship in my austere life for the unpredictable days ahead - impregnating my life's slips with wisdom. I can never recollect a single day till date when I woke up to the chaos of the world without my fingers laced on this "rare gem".

 

 

I'm presently reading the Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz (Palace Walk; Palace of Desire; Sugar Street).

 

More on the leaves and twigs of my life in my next blog.