Distant Ships On The Horizon

Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing,
Only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness.
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another.
Only a look and a voice; then darkness again and a silence.

- - - -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Tales of a Wayside Inn. Part iii. The Theologian’s Tale: Elizabeth. iv

And soon, too soon, we part with pain,
To sail o’er silent seas again.

Thomas Moore: Meeting of the Ships.

Fly High O Freebird.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach.

It is about a creature of high intelligence who was not appreciated by his flock - a gifted outsider.

A sensation when it was published years earlier in 1970, it features a seagull who breaks away from the flock and learns on his own to become an individual. He experiments with flying techniques in ways that seagulls would never do and, in that experience, finds freedom to fly in his own pattern. He risks disgrace, failure, and ostracism to go his own way, and in the process discovers experiences that the others could never know or enjoy.

Jonathan is no ordinary bird; he wants more than the other birds do. They're content to just do what they need to do to survive, but Jonathan puts his efforts into the glory of flying. He feels pressured by others - even shamed -- to conform to a more mundane way of existence, but he refuses.

He's utterly alone in his ambitions and experiences, especially when he learns to fly in the dark. Seagulls supposedly never do that, but he explores it and finds that he enjoys it. He brings his fear under control and sets out to break through the limitations imposed by the rules of the flock to become something entirely new to his species. It doesn't matter how lonely he feels; what matters is that he has become something amazing. The others view him as irresponsible and even dangerous, but Jonathan continues to go his way alone, content in being an outcast.

Eventually other outcasts join him, and they return to the flock to try to wake up the younger generation. Jonathan's guiding idea is, "You have the freedom to be yourself, your true self," and "Whatever stands against the freedom must be set aside." No limitation should be accepted. In the end, Jonathan is a Christ figure, both revered and reviled, and altogether misunderstood. He gives his message to a young disciple, who sees things as they are and prepares to pass on the wisdom.

Alpenglow

Mountains to me are more then rock and ice, they are the repository of my dreams, aspirations and ambitions.

Upwards they soar in a valiant attempt to breach the umbrella of the skies, and sometimes the clouds in the sky are brought down to shroud the mountain in mist. Adding mystery, aura and amazing views into the already perfect picture.

The sun rising and setting seen in the mountains is very unique as not all the landscape is lit up at the same time, if you are high enough you see patches of other peaks which glow golden and the skies which do a brilliant dance with the colors lighting it up.

There is nothing quite like it in the world to view and stand in stunned awe, mesmerized by it all.
It's also such a humbling experience as only when you stand close to them, can you really appreciate their massive size and girth which photographs can never truly convey (I've been trying for years to get their majesty down on film but as yet have never succeeded in their true portrayal - foreshortening can be such a bitch!!!) Its an ongoing quest which someday I hope will come to fruition .. till then I'll keep trying.

I am happiest when in their midst...And to the mountains is where I shall always return, no matter what.

White Limbo

This life of mine, if life I can call it, has become a strange affair, a kind of a metamorphosis in which every thing has changed.

Oliver Wendell Holmes once said that it was required of a man that he should share the action and passion of his times, at peril of being judged not to have lived, and for most of my early life I've followed this percept with uncommon faithfulness.

But now of late (the last decade or so) I find myself entangled in a web of days, time passing in a kind of a slow motion, yet seemingly the years flit by and I remain in the same place, unable to flog up interest in the world around me or the people who inhabit it..

I'm much like a meandering river still searching for a sea to unload itself of all that water.

This sort of detachment and apathy sometimes scares me.. but still I doggedly stick to the path
But to what purpose? What end?

I see myself upon the grim mile
The past hunting and future escaping
What was shall not be
Forever shall I thicken this belief

Frozen In Time.

Freezing Time is the only way to grasp Eternity for an hour..

And can eternity belong to me, Poor pensioner on the bounties of an hour?

Those spacious regions where our fancies roam,
Pain'd by the past, expecting ills to come,
In some dread moment. by the fates assign'd,
Shall pass away, nor leave a rack behind;
And Time's revolving wheels shall lose at last
The speed that spins the future and the past:
And, sovereign of an undisputed throne,
Awful Eternity shall reign alone.

-Last verse by : Francesco Petrarch Source: Triumph pf Eternity (l. 102)

Young Buds

Countless the twigs which tremble at Dawn,
When Young Buds Lean on each other in yearning..
As little by little the night turns around

(The frangipani tree in my backyard at dawn, lyrics adapted from Pink Floyd's : Set the Control For the Heart of the Sun.)

India Is Great

Mera Bharat Mahan....
Celebrating 61 years of Independence.
(Back of a truck on the way to Shimla)

As Jug Suriya wrote in his recent Jugular Vein column

"India is vast space; space to accommodate the clamor of giant cities, teeming with the seething energy of millions and the silence of empty solitudes.

India is space; space to include the pilgrim and the politician, the poet and the revolutionary, the street urchin and the merchant prince, Ahimsa and nuclear might, 3,000 years and the 21st century.

India is the express highway thundering with traffic and the slip road beside it with the sign 'For camels, elephants and bullock carts'.
India is mega dams and factories, call centres and shopping malls, and the voices raised in protest against all these and more.

India is a colour TV, garlanded with marigolds and a picture of Lakshmi on top, playing MTV while grandmother counts the beads of her mala and grandchildren dream of US green cards.

India is the roar and tumult of democracy and the forgotten face of a forgotten neta on an election poster stuck on the crumbling mud wall of a village deserted by all but the ghost of hunger.

India is the faceless anonymity of cities where neighbors don't know the names of neighbours and it is the 'Ram, Ram' of timeless greeting exchanged by strangers who pass each other on a lonely path.

India is the smell of incense and ancient stone, of parched earth when the first drops of rain fall, of the dust and sweat of rattletrap buses, of the sweet, milky tea served in an earthen bowl by a 'chai , chaiwala !' on the whistle-stop railway stations of night.

India is the crowded bazaar where two dozen languages and half a dozen faiths negotiate the day-to-day transactions of buying and selling, and haggling and cheating, and quarreling, and, above all, always above all, living together.

India is much more than a million mutinies now; it is a billion-plus narratives of itself, waiting to be told. Not just once upon a time, but once upon a future"...


India is all that and more to learn and experience

Alone in the Superunknown

Well, it's always been my nature to take chances

My right hand drawing back while my left hand advances
Where the current is strong and the monkey dances

Unmarked Helicopters

Ask the wind that blows
Which one will be the next to go?

I Will Follow You Into The Dark

In the evening
The horizon lights up
Swirls of pink and orange
Fading to blue and purple

There was really something very beautiful about this particular sunset over the Ganga in Varanasi.(where you normally tend to get golden or pale bronzed sunsets)

The title is inspired by a song by Death Cab to Cutie.. and specially in Varanasi having just seen the Burning Ghats it described my state of mind very aptly

If heaven and hell decide
That they both are satisfied
Illuminate the no's on their vacancy signs

If there's no one beside you
When your soul embarks
Then I'll follow you into the dark

The Dream of White Orchids

The Dream of White Orchids, originally uploaded by The Wandering Hermit.

Orchid Perfumes rise
As incense Wafted
By the Wings of Butterflies
- Basho

.

Afterglow

Afterglow, originally uploaded by The Wandering Hermit.

In the wake of the vanquished sun
The golden Afterglow

The Haunting.

I'm haunted by the Ghost of Memories from a time long past.

Watching the rain always induces a kind of nostalgia for me.. Sometimes when I sit watching the rain coming down through an open door or window (car window in this case) I can drift so far away from the present.. and the curtain of rain acts like a screen replaying images of faint, half forgotten memories of times past.

Haunted in the Rain., originally uploaded by The Wandering Hermit.

I often delve into the spoken and unspoken language we use to create closeness or to distance ourselves from others.
What subtle agreements are made in the exchange of energy between two people?
We all nurture ideas about ourselves, others and the world in which we live.
We believe in the truth that these ideas hold for us.
Do these truths exist anywhere except in our own imagined reality?

The Lotus Eaters

Pale watchers weary of watching stars
That fall, and fall, and forever fall,
Tear-worn and troubled with many scars,
They seek the Lotus and end life's thrall.

Where Do I Begin...

Begin at the very beginning, perhaps before the Dawn of Time itself
Begin at the very precipice of darkness before light first flared up..
Begin in the instant before the universe burst onto the scene....

The search for answers (if there are any) perhaps will one day satisfactorily answered
and maybe the answer to that ultimate question of Life, The Universe & Everything
will be something other than 42..

Till then keep wandering and wondering Across The Universe.

Fiona Apple Cover Version of Beatles original on YouTube

Watching The Watcher.

A Face In The Wall., originally uploaded by The Wandering Hermit.

Over the mountain, watching the watcher
Breaking the darkness, waking the grapevine
One inch of love is one inch of shadow
Love is the shadow that ripens the wine

Witness the man who raves at the wall
Making the shape of his question to heaven
Whether the sun will fall in the evening
Will he remember the lesson of giving


(lyrics adapted from "Set The Controls for the Heart of the Sun by Pink Floyd)

Orchidea.

Orchidea., originally uploaded by The Wandering Hermit.

If you were to be a flower
I wish you'd be a Wild Orchid

You so unique and wild.
With a soul different from them all
Different to touch, to hold, to look at.

Ebb & Flow

Evenflow., originally uploaded by The Wandering Hermit.

When the sun set in the evening
An orange moon began to rise
As if the sea itself were burning
And flames leapt towards the skies

We share this world, my love and I
Parallel these shores we reside
We live and love as time goes by
With each changing of the tide

Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Jonathan Livingston Seagull, originally uploaded by The Wandering Hermit.

"The gulls who scorn perfection for the sake of travel go nowhere, slowly.
Those who put aside travel for the sake of perfection go anywhere, instantly..."

Richard Bach.

The Roof Of The World TIBET

Tibet has been in the news recently and after having visited there last year, I am quite interested to see what will transpire in Tibet in this year when China holds the Olympics. Tibet will undoubtedly be the most controversial topic this year and as the games get nearer it will be interesting to see whether the native Tibetans can garner world sympathy and opinion to their plight under China.



These photographs were taken last year during my stopover in Lhasa, Tibet..

Although it was a peaceful demonstration still a lot of police were out and it was mostly young people who made up the crowd . In the afternoon the police cleared out the square of all foreigners and then dispersed this crowd with a lathi charge and tear gas, but they were back the next day too and shouting that soon they would resort to other means if their demands were not met by peaceful demonstrations... I guess the latest riots show that the ire of the Tibetans has finally broken loose of the government apathy towards them.


The Tibetans were protesting the Hanization of Tibet. Its a policy pursued by the Chinese government which gives people of mainland China tax rebates and extra pay for working in Tibet and often these Han Chinese look down upon the Tibetans as Second Class Citizens and consider them uncivilized and religious fools. Their food mostly comes from the mainland and the 2 communities seldom fraternize with each other. There are more Hans in Tibet these days than Tibetans and it is mostly the Hans who control key government positions and businesses even with the curio stalls around Lhasa there were many more Han Chinese than Tibetan owners.

This is one of the many reasons for Tibetan discontent specially among the younger generation who have grown up under such regressive policies and deny them a level playing field with other Chinese when it comes to jobs and education.

My overall impression after my visit was that the Han Chinese and Tibetans live together in a co operative segregation: language, food, dress. religion and attitudes divide them. People bought up on Noodles don't like to switch over to a staple rice diet and vice versa.



This is poster from McLeod Ganj, where the Tibetan government in Exile is Headquartered.

The Simple Life.

We poke our heads out of the semi collapsed tent and look at the final 1,500 ft of the Granite Wall on the Ganesh Face of mighty Shivling, in the Garhwal Himalayas.

Winds howls high up on the mountain, whipping a snow plume from the summit. Mounds of new snow cling to the towers and cornices around us, as they try to stick to the near vertical stone wall but more often breaking loose in flurries of powder as gusts whiplash across the mountain.

In the north the billowing clouds that had engulfed us ebb back along the Gangotri Glacier retreating into the depths of the Greater Himalayas.

For 76 hours the four of us have been pinned down by a blizzard on a knife edge ridge crest at 20,000ft. Strong winds have pushed and shoved our tents on their tiny ledges, half burying them with snow, twisting them into strange asymmetrical shapes.

Our food and gas are nearly gone, our supply of pitons and slings of rope have dwindled. We don't have enough supplies to go down even if we wanted to. To reverse the serpentine path we'd taken would take days. Days we didn't have. We'd agreed the day before to press on to the summit, but we hash it out again. It's not a decision to be taken lightly.

Questions rise in my thoughts: How many more days to reach the summit and how many to descend? How long till we eat again? Will the weather hold? and if it doesn't what then?

The four of us look down the 5,500 ft of cliffs, ice fields and narrow ridge crests we'd climbed up. But the decision has already been made by the fickle mountain weather . We've got no choice; we've got to get over the top and down over the other side that's the only way to get off the mountain for us..

In front of us the final rock headwall rises steeply to the summit. Beyond the summit lies the west face of Shivling, down which we'll have to descend to the Meru Glacier to safety.

On the northern skyline the jagged peaks of Tibet sit under a clear , cold sky.

As I pan towards the south I see a pall of dust and haze rising from the boiling Terai plains of North India. Down there in the heat -yes that's the real India.

That's where this climb had begun, where the dreams had been sprouted, in a baking city, two hundred and fifty miles away....

In Delhi: That crazy quilt of humanity baking on the plains through a relentless May sun, the air thick and steaming with the combined smell of smog and human sweat.. It was there in that heat that the thought had been born and the germ burst into fruition and now this is that dream's final swan song...

I'd wanted to climb this mountain, but had I bargained for this? Had any of us? As we pack our sacks I feel the hollowness of my stomach and a pang of fear. My heartbeat echoes in my head like a drum spelling inevitable doom, My throat is parched from dehydration, my lips numb and split from the cold, and the first touches of frostbite are evident on my fingertips and toes . I see all this and yet I am detached as if it really is not me, that this is not happening. It is unreal and almost dreamlike.
In fact my whole presence on the mountain feels like a dream..

In that dream home seems far away across many lives and universes. In it's place is a single purpose to keep moving for to stop is to die , for we are approaching the Death Zone where the line between living and dead is quickly blurred, there is just 1/3rd the oxygen which makes your mind wander and causes hypoxia and here the human body starts to feed on itself in order to survive. So no stopping just keep moving for that is the only way back..

As the others start out I take a last look back our route up here and then turning my face away from the known and step into the unknown.

I feel a surge of adrenalin as I attach my harness to the climbing rope,connecting me to the headwall and embracing it and start to climb...

Life has never been so simple, so free of everyday clutter ever before.

Break On Through To The Other Side.

I've been asked to write a series travelogues of my trips for a weekend supplement of HT called BRUNCH and one other Travel magazine....


Naturally am over the moon and I've been going through my earlier writings and collecting the bits and pieces of all those spur of the moment words written on paper tissues, napkins and even some toilet paper (Yes I do a lot of thinking there... Plus you can't let those spur of the moment insights slip by, you gotta nail them down when they appear because like inspiration they are tenuous things, coming along when least expected & deserting you when you need them most.)

" I seek my story where it lurks
Amid the unpublished portion of my works."

Hopefully this is the start of something which will end in book form eventually

When Smoke Gets Into Your Eyes

The Fallen..

The Fallen.., originally uploaded by The Wandering Hermit.

Falling head over heels for someone is not a good idea sometimes...
As this one found out..
So be careful and hope you choose rightly this season of love.

As for me I prefer to wallow in my solitude for the moment..

There Is A Light That Never Goes Out! Part III

There Is A Light That Never Goes Out!, originally uploaded by The Wandering Hermit.

And in the darkened underpass
I thought Oh God, my chance has come at last
(But then a strange fear gripped me and I
Just couldn't ask)
- Morrissey, The Smiths
uk.youtube.com/watch?v=INgXzChwipY




{Ever since I first heard this song I wanted to click something like this and the other day everything came together very unexpectedly and this was the result}

That Sinking Feeling

And I descend from grace
In the Arms of the Undertow
Soon to take my place
In the great below..