A wish & wisdom by the window

The Tribhuvan International airport in Kathmandu, has some real pretty faces and often presents to your eyes meandering queues of Nepalis packing their bags to work overseas. ‘Demand for Nepali workmen is high’ says a fellow traveler while lifting a bag that could weigh as much as my provisions. For three full years and more perhaps.

Work done in Nepal i am on my way back. A kind colleague who sympathises with my attempts at photography tells me that the view of the peaks ‘is a good thing to get on the lens from the plane. If you are lucky’.

His words firmly in my radar, I specifically ask for a window seat. Smiling one of the most beautiful smiles and after saying ‘ofcourse sir’ and a little later ‘have a wonderful flight sir’, flashing that pretty smile, the lass at the Jet Airways counter gives me hands over the baording card. Which after getting into the aircraft i realise entitles to everything else but a window seat ! An aisle seat with two young nepali boys on the middle and window seats for company. GREAT.

Soon we are airborne, and the peaks show up on the window in such majestic splendour that I let out a gasp of surprise laden pleasure. Hastening to pull out the camera and attempting to get a few snaps. Aiming and dodging my two young row mates on the middle and window and ensuring that their noses or hands don't form part of the picture of the snow clad peaks is quite a struggle.

They can see it too as I hoover-up as many snaps as possible as they give me a look that I would reserve for corner cockroach. And fiddle with the entertainment panel and watch an Ajay Devgun movie.

For a second, I cant believe this. These young boys could actually trade the beauty and majesticity of the mountains and the snow capped peaks for a Ajay Devgun movie on the entertainment panel! Alas, what has the world come to !

Without much ado and a presumptuous air I dismissed their intellect, intent and everything about them.

Soon the peaks vanished and I retired to my world of books and work. The next couple of hours vanished like a sugar laden sweet disappearing down the oesophagus. Not very later we were all set to land in Mumbai.

An announcement that was accompanied by what best could be described as a mild frenzy of of nepali boys peering through the window in other seats.

Greatly surprised I turned to the window on my row, which is when I noticed my own neighbours had pulled out their simple cameras and shared every bit of the window between themselves, cheek to cheek.

Perhaps they were sure they would see someone like Ajay Devgun outside the window, I thought, and suddenly they yelled ‘samundar’ ( ocean ), describing the waves and boats on the Bay of Bengal, with such energy that perhaps dwarfed my attempts to capture the peaks on the camera lens.

It was my turn to fiddle with entertainment panel and theirs to dismiss my intellect, intellect and everything else about me with presumptuous élan.

At that moment, one of them turns to me, grins a sheepish grin, points to the Bay of Bengal and says, ‘Samundar - me first time’. I broaden the sheepish smiles further and point to myself to say ‘Himalayas – first time’. The sheepishness of both our smiles intensify. He returns to look at the Bay of Bengal. And I to the entertainment panel.

I keep smiling. Realising that in the sheepishness of our smiles lay an acknowledgement of our different pasts, a happiness at the present and a deep wish for each other for the future.

I realise that there cant be better wish on Christmas day ! Merry Christmas people !

A wish & wisdom by the window

Himalayan Heights !

the Bhaktapur valley

This blog is almost a becoming a travel blog of sorts ! Truth be told, travel inspires me like none else. New sights, people and cultures that are different than the ones that I am familiar with hold a certain intangible temptation that wafts in and stays put.

So much so, several readers write in to ask, if I travel for a living! How I wish. I am indebted to all those readers, for it is that precise question that helped in the hastening of the realisation that my writing flows with ease when I write on my travels. A certain sense of indefatigable urge to share of the places that are looked at with a new set of eyes and hoping perhaps that it could kindle a possible reader to set sights on a new land.

sunset beyond the wavy mountains

To cut all the blah aside, I have been traveling. Work, took me to Nepal. Spectacular sights awaited my packed schedule with such perfect imperfection, that it resulted in perhaps the heaviest sighs mankind has heard.

However, a couple of hours wrenched from nowhere, waking up when the clock struck three and it was still as dark as middle of the night, shivering in the cold, snatching the camera, sipping green tea with perfect strangers and clicking odd pictures brings you this post.

By now you would know, this post is a fact assortment interspersed with some pictures.

the sunrise at Nagarkot ( which deseves far more than a separate post dedicated to it)

Nepal is a rather unique country. For starters, if you are an Indian, you don’t need a passport. A voter ID is enough for the officer at immigrations to wave you in. A lovely country balanced with the most snarl prone roads that makes Mumbai appear juvenile. This snarl prone recklessness despite some outrageously obtuse pricing for cars ( A Santro, I am told costs 18 lakh Nepali Rupees).

They have a 15 minute time difference with India. 15 minutes! Longitudinally speaking I couldn’t piece it together, given that Bengal and Assam that are further to the East, yet maintain IST. But hey, they are a free country and have the freedom to do as their watches will.

If that wasn’t this wasn’t tall enough, well the next difference indeed was. The calendar that’s followed is called Bikram Samwat and by that standard, the current year is 2067 ! While you could be waving in 2011, the Nepal is in 2067 folks!

And the one statistic though that made me not just jump out of a chair, but shoot straight to the moon was that they have 550 + members of parliament. For a country of that size, i imagined having a 100 was a truckload. But i am no geo-politic expert that answers stray questions on national television and fair to say that the Nepalese have their own strong mind.

I must only hasten to submit though that all of the above are empty statistics. The facts that perhaps must hold your attention aren’t really the facts but pictures. Pictures of the great Himalayan peaks as they catch an unfamiliar crimson even while the plains that you stand in are yet to say hello to the sun. And such else.

There is one other ‘fact’ that will keep me going back to Nepal again for sure. (Not counting the fact that the missus has issued an ultimatum that the next trip will be in her grand company, which like every dutiful husband would do : has been agreed to).

That fact..yes the fact... is the people! Ah the people! Absolutely delightful and beautiful people! An accent that drips concern, oozes love coupled with a genuine warmth and that goes the extra mile to lessen the Himalayan chill.

It was enchanting. Plan a trip people. Pristine beauty guaranteed.

Himalayan Heights !

A goodbye and a hello !

A certain ‘she’ wrote a seemingly simple mail sometime back. Articulate and without much extravagance, she said that she could ‘sense’ that I was an ‘interesting’ person from whatever she read, but the blog ‘looked dated’. I went over her mail a couple of times. ‘Looks dated’ appeared six times in three paragraphs.

That was setting one energetic cat amidst all the sedentary pigeons. That something needed to be done was becoming evident. Given that this ‘she’ was a regular on the blog and generally had good intentions. Plus this wasn’t exactly the first time I was hearing this. Numerous friends had mentioned it. Many times over. Yet, this time, for some unknown reason, it was action time !

Furtive thought trains lead to ideas that were vacuously vapid or those that required an extravagance of time and money. (Both of which were are in perpetual short supply). If not any of those, whatever emerged from convoluted whorls of the brain, were ‘already taken’ !

Over time, laziness set in. The blog looked the way it always looked, while several attempts at ‘good posts’ came alive as temporal eccentricities! Readers kept coming and going. Ofcourse, some of you have stayed on, which I would like to believe is a function of arrangement of words here, although, I have a lurking feeling that it perhaps a consequence of alignment of my stars.

Either way, thank you!

Many other readers left comments like ‘ I read your blog, the pictures were nice’ which said quite a heapful on the quality of the writing. But life went on. The sun rose in the East and religiously went to the west. The Chinese were conquering the world. Scandal birth rate competed with rabbits’. The milk man was regular and late. Rentals were up. Work kept me occupied. Life was normal.

It was then, that yet another ‘he’ wrote rather plainly, that no matter what I thought of myself, I was no Scott Adams. To dramatise that further, quipped that having Dilbert as a profile picture was akin to having ‘your neighbours kid as your facebook picture’. That dramatisation hit the nail far and deep, not only for the muscle to quake but also the bone to ache.

My erstwhile profile picture

The silver lining though, was that he had presented a seemingly simple solution : Just change the profile picture. ok. First step to the solution. Ok ?

Voila !

Immediately ( a.k.a few weeks) a few precocious folks that are in the know of such cerebral matters were asked. Several ideas were tossed at a speed that was impossible to catch. Many went over the head and some went overboard.

‘If your blog carries your name, your photograph must be the mascot’ insisted most of them. I had to politely explain to them that the attempt was at reader ‘excitement’ and not readership extinction.

Blessed with a plain and forgettable face, bulges in wrong areas and recessionary trends in the rest, I could make a pretty picture in an ad for ‘this man transformed himself using our product’ with a before and after picture.

To spare you a long and laborious story, a new logo was to be created. That stood for ‘Kavis Musings’. Amongst the few options that came up, the missus rooted for this.

“It represents you. Your pictures. And your writing”.

It was stated differently though. Something along the lines of ‘Somekind of a loud mouth with an air of self anointed importance, and a wide eyed grin, waxing eloquence over seminal topics of global importance, that range from the way Trash Cans are designed to spelling mistakes in hoardings’. (And so on. You get the drift. Don’t you?)

Which when politely asked to explain, was eventually translated to : “It represents you. Your pictures. And your writing”. I quite agreed.

So there. That’s my new digital identity. Hopefully, you will like it. And continue to shower your tolerance and genorisity by coming back here.

Quite obviously you will see huge hoardings in your hometown announcing the change. Incase you don’t see those hoardings, please keep looking.

Ohh! I almost forgot. That was blog post number 500.

A goodbye and a hello !