Faces of Trees

It is a desire of every human heart to live till, and experience old age. Trees are no different; they too have life and they too would like to experience the bliss of longevity.“Man-kind” has made this world his kind only; giving little importance to nature and environment which actually supports this world. Deforestation of tress, careless forest fires, logging and other human activities are inhumane to the nature cosmos and this greatly hinders the life span of a tree.

This estranging photograph of a tree found in the Eastern Ghats of India, clearly exemplifies the tree as not only a breathing being but by giving human features to itself, it makes us realize that trees are also “living, feeling” beings. It presents us the face of a tree, the body of an old woman bent with age and yet treading the path of life. This tree is a metaphor for nature, old age and our savage behaviour which has prompted nature to show its face, attracting us and yet estranging us, thereby making us realize its place in this world. There are also lessons to be learnt by us homosapiens; it shows how the young protect the old as seen here in the protection of the old tree by youthful neighbouring twigs and branches. The zest to live life till its last breath is seen in the weathering of the bark, but the tree’s enthusiasm is not dead yet, for the colour on its body is very much vibrant and full of life. This picture does not portray a scenic, conventional beauty of nature but instead this picture is to remind us of the law of individual differences that exists among trees. At the same time how their vigour to live life is similar to ours and how we should not take away their life and let them live, and perhaps in their old age we will see faces of trees like in this one.

As a photographer, what caught my eye was how bewitchingly beautiful the tree was and in my journey from the Himalayas to the jungles of south India, this is one tree that made me realize, trees not only have life but they have an identity too, which often goes unnoticed by an unfeeling being, the so called and proclaimed mammal of higher intelligence, the humans. Humans die, but nature is perpetual, alas,we can no longer say so for we are killing our environment every passing moment and this tree’s howl is one such testimony.

Futurity

She sits there,

her arms wrapped tightly over her knees,

her body at complete ease,

her skin glows a beauteous hue,

the sun amplifying it further,

she feels pulchritudinous.

Then she wonders;

the skin that glows will someday wrinkle,

the face that she sees in the mirror, will disfigure,

in front of her eyes,

the alcohol and the cigarettes, slowing consuming her body,

and her brain, deteriorating, dysfunctioning, and then

what will remain?

The soul that one has never seen,

The body which will go back to the earth,

The mind that dies with the body,

And yet the cycle continues,

the unknown cycle,

and this future is not her alone,

It is for all of us.

Ode to the Mountains

You stand majestically,

clad in green,

barren at some,

at times adorned with white,

purity is your essence.

you never stoop,

never stumble,,

you are born to stand majestically, till eternity.

Seasons come and seasons go,

autumn paints yellow all over,

and winter comes,

snow and you,

earth and heaven,

white and mud red,

the white sinks in you,

makes your red richer,

and when spring sets,

you are greener than never before.

But still you stand,

never budging,

never complaining,

your patience is a virtue-

humans will never learn,

your elegance- no woman can ever compare,

you are THE MOUNTAIN,

the land raised high above,

so high that you divide the earth and the sky,

and yet so low,

that without you,

there is no Home

DUSTBIN

No one hails you,

no one's written poetry about you,

no one loves you,

for you are a trashbag- a dustbin.

But i admire you,

you take in everything,

good or bad,

delicious or rotten,

broken or not,

you take in everything.

But I admire you,

there are lessons you teach,

the humble lesson of acceptance.

You accept what it really is,

you never complain,

you never cry,

you never get angry for what people throw at you,

and after all that endurance,

they still call you a DUSTBIN.

You arn't simply a bin,

you are a collector,

a healer,

you are a teacher,

you are everything but a DUSTBIN.

Death Penalty

Death penalty is a subject much talked about and debated around the world. This topic had never died but the waves hit the shores of discussion again, especially after the sentence and execution Saddam Hussain. The topic is open to peoples views but taking a stand "to" or "for" does not suffice the humanitarian world, for the views become extremely idealistic. Me thinks, a little of both the stand can create a 'middlepath' on the same subject.

"The birth of life," itself is a mystery; believers of fate and karma call it divine gift and worshipers of science - the multiplication of cells due to the environment led to the evolution of organisms and later the humans.

Death is an end; we do not know whether it is just an end to this life or the beginning of another, whatever be it, a section of the masses believe that " no one has the right to take someones" life. If you do not have the power to create life then you do not have the power to destroy it either- be it the worst of criminals. In every heart beats emotions. They could be good or bad; it is very relative to the environment, in most cases the external factors makes you the person you are. A criminal is never born a criminal;he is born a baby, a child who has no thoughts on in his head, no sense in his brain and no gun in his hand. All these are presents given by the very world to the "criminal." My point is- if a criminal is born a human, the he/she can definitely be reformed, be humanized. They too can join the mainstream.

Perhaps the above argument looks good on paper but fear still lives in the hearts of people, fear of the criminal who must have heartlessly killed uncountable number of humans. Today there are "professional" murderers. Once caught, who would want these creatures back in their world, so the only way for them is to the gallows. Maybe these gallows are their ways to the next world-if any.

I cannot see a human getting hurt; if I was amongst the judges, I wouldn't pass a death sentence- whatever be the reason. Perhaps a middleway can be achieved. Life imprisonment of these penalty holders- maybe they should not be allowed to interact with the mainstream but leave them as tributaries. Let them atleast live till they want or till they can in their four walled prison. Some vocation could help them earn their bread and butter, inside such prisons and give them a chance of redemption. Death penalty could be an option of the person sentenced and not the black cloaked judge who has only read the big books of law- laws made by humans which are so inhumane sometimes.

Life is a gift- call it God's or science's but it is a gift. everyone has the right in this world- the world is big enough for all of us and even the criminals can fit here, or maybe there, in their four walled prison.

MOON RISE AND SUN SETS

The moon is up,

the sun in bed,

both, half their work done,

and soon, in a while they will trade places,

and here I am, unable to sleep.

And many a days I have spent,

witnessing this day and night,

so monotonous, the transition goes unnoticed now.

And later, will I ever yearn for many more moon rises

and sun sets,

will I want more "monotony''- when the lid is about to cover,

MY COFFIN

Fish

I am a fish in the ocean,

submerged deep in the ocean of desire,

I try to swim,

I struggle,

my fins are fine,

my body in total shine,

why can't I swim?

It holds me,

so tight

it hurts,

time is passing

the clock is ticking

Its dragging me into the abyss,

But how do I free myself?

Beauty

With every passing moment,

beauty detoriates,

beauty ages,

it can peak,

or pause,

or even stop being beauty,

but praise of beauty,

shall always remain,

embedded in hearts,

in minds,

in lovers,

in friends,

in families,

in strangers,

in nature,

in poetry,

beauty never remains beauty,

for beauty is 'that moment'

and even the moment has to pass,

and so beauty perishes,

leaving tarnishes in hearts, soul and mind,

Goodbye beauty.....

can such a thing ever happen?

I am stranger at Home

They say they love us,
but they lie.
They say they love us,
but they only need us.

They have taken my childhood away,
but I can only weep.
They have taken my roots away,
but I am just a branch,
and what good is the branch without the root?

My tears have now dried,
My fate has now diminished,
My heart still hopes
for a heart never stopped hoping.

There will come a day,
when the sun will shine,
and I it will smile.
There will come a day,
when I will be no longer a stranger
in my Own Home.

Sleep

Come take me,
take me to your land.

I am ready-
neatly tucked in bed,
ready for the flight,
ready to embrace you.

I love being with you,
Lying assured in your arms,
devoid of worldly matters,
of pain and hunger.
You caressing me gently,
telling me that "this" worlds beautiful.

The world of dreams;
the world where I can make and
break
but everything is fake
and what is "fake"?
and what is "real"?


I love you both equally;
"day" and "night".
If i see the sun during the day
mother moon awaits to escort me
to my dreams....
and so I shall sleep now.....
Its 2.58 in the morn..got a nine o clock lec......oh shit...saturdayz.....
argggggg

Truth

Like beauty lies in
the eyes of the beholder,
Truth lies in the heart
of the speaker.
What truth means to me,
May not mean to you,
What it holds for me,
May not hold for you,
But truth to me is like
Beauty - it changes every
moment.
What seemed truthful
Yesterday
Is surrounded with fakeness today.
But for that moment yesterday
“ I was truthful”
Truth is nothing but
PERCEPTION

Hop to Holland

Preface
This travelogue is a recollection of the journey untaken by a sixteen year old girl. The views are that of a girl born in a country regarded as one of the poorest if marked according to the per capita income, views of a girl who was nurtured in a country who has its roots in the depth of the Himalayas and whose inhabitants believe that Tantric Buddhism is the way to happiness. These views include the girl’s emotions during the journey and should not offend anyone who does not agree with it.
I was one of the "chosen four" selected by my school to represent Bhutan in the United Nations International Students Conference of Amsterdam (UNISCA) in The Netherlands. Seeing Europe at ‘"16" would be anyone’s dream but there is more fun when you get paid to go half way across the globe and as also get attendance.
So along with three other school mates, with approximately 1000$ in my pocket, my passport and my almost empty travel bag, I set off………………………….
to Amsterdam…………………….

Hop to Holland


2:45……..The alarm rang and too excited that I was, before it beeped for the second time I turned it off. My mother came rushing five minutes later to check if I was getting ready. My clothes were neatly pressed the previous evening but I still had some last minute packing to do, my comb was missing and oh! I had to check my passport and my tickets. Finally by three thirty I was ready to move to the airport. The drive to Paro airport is almost one and half hours from Thimphu - the capital of Bhutan and that gave me plenty of time to take a nap (even with such excitement of traveling with friends for fifteen days to Amsterdam could not stop my eye lids from closing).
After much hassle and impatience I got through customs and checked in.
Finally, following much anticipation the flight took off to Bangkok where we were to wait for twelve hours in transit and then board Chinese airlines to Schiphol airport in Amsterdam.
Four oriental kids on a loose, traveling alone to Europe aroused the curiosity of custom officials in Bangkok airport and we had a "special security check" for the four of us. After the WTC attacks, traveling was no longer a luxury. Our documents were xeroxed, our passport doubly examined as it was hand written which made it more primitive and lastly our money was also counted. With such disgraceful treatment, we thus boarded the plane. As luck would have it the flight got delayed for two hours and it took us more than fourteen hours to get to Amsterdam.

Ahhhhhhhhh!!!Whew! That was indeed a long journey and that too not an easy one.
The university had thankfully sent a Dutch student to receive us and the two Bhutanese boys couldn’t believe their luck when they saw a Dutch brunette with a placard "Bhutan."
"Hi, I am Madeline. Well come to Amsterdam," said the brunette. Madeline could be called "a normal Dutch girl"; a girl who was six feet in height, thin, slender and gorgeous. Having always being grief struck by my stunted growth the Dutch girls looked so tall and sophisticated that it was like an entire supermodel magazine coming to life.
The airport buzzed with people busy in their own worlds, some people departing and some arriving and amidst them some crying over their missed flights. But I had to follow Madeline along with the others. She took us through a series of escalators and finally we reached a place where we could exchange our dollars to Euros. Near the exchange machine were a series of machines and from one of them we bought lots of tram tickets as we were told that it would serve as a useful means of traveling around the city but we eventually lost all the tram tickets, so much for wasting our precious Euros.. All this sounded very foreign to me for the only time I had taken a train was with my family! We then took a train to the main city. It was more than an hour ride from the airport. The train ride answered all my dreams of a fantasy foreign land. We passed by beautiful sceneries, castles, buildings of very European architecture and of course Europe has a sense of romance in its air and I was breathing it!
Dry November air, Dutch blue skies, tulips of every colour blooming in the fields and the train passing like a snake in the colourful maze and I peeping out of the window, savoring, relishing every sight I saw and without batting an eye lid I watched the beautiful whisky miniatures of Dutch Houses that I had back home come to life.
The train stopped and we got out at a station whose name I could not pronounce. Dutch was a strange language; sounded more like people who had swallowed bananas trying to talk but ended up making noises that one would probably make while vomiting but every language sounds strange to a stranger doesn’t it? Madeline escorted us to a restaurant and said she would be back after confirming our reservation. The Dutch restaurant looked dimly lit and early birds were sipping their coffee. The Dutch lady who came to take our orders looked more like a saloon mannequin with her hair streaked in every possible, imaginable colour than a waitress. My three companions ventured to drink tea and I being a non tea drinker decided to nibble the cookies that came free with the tea. The lady appeared with three huge steaming glasses of water and a small box. She thunderously kept the glasses and the box on the table and went off. Later a small girl came with three small cookies and I happily relished them. As for my companions their tea happened to be a good surprise; blueberry, blackberry, apple, cinnamon were some of the flavours in that box in tiny tea bags. These tea bag plus the hot steaming glass of water was the Dutch idea of tea (milk tea is known as Indian tea).
After the much expensive tea we set off with Madeline to the hostel which would be home to us for the next nine days. We walked from the restaurant and marveled at the castle located right in the middle of the city. The roads were not tarred, they were bricks laid out in a certain pattern such that it covered the earth and yet looked beautiful.
"Oh! Wow, look trams," said someone in the group. These trams were indeed nice looking unlike the trams I had seen in Calcutta. We then reached Shelter City, a Christian hostel from where we were left on our own and were told to report to the university the next day to attend the conference briefing.

Quick shower in the centrally heated common bathroom was soothing and I wore some warm woolen stockings and a thick jacket to shield myself from the cold. I hail from the mountains and can boast of withstanding quite an amount of cold but European chill had an ineffable flavour altogether. We walked quite a distance in some random direction and this area looked quite different from the area we had previously passed; it looked more crowded, noisier and shortly the posters splashed on the walls revealed to us that our Christian hostel was located in the famous "red light area of the city". To sixteen year olds from quite an orthodox place seeing a woman in 'only 'her untied night gown, busy dusting her clothes sent us fleeing back to the hostel with tears in our eyes. Maybe this is what people term as" CULTURE SHOCK." After much contemplation I decided to forgo all my prejudices and think with an open mind. I was luckier than the rest- to see the drug capital where marijuana and other drugs are legal and prostitution is licensed. It was definitely not an everyday scene.Down the lane of the hostel was an erotic massage bar. Souvenir shops had smoking pots, packaged joints, post cards of every kind; there was one of Bill Clinton in his birth suit ( He he).

University of Van Amsterdam awards credits to students who sit for this conference and successfully complete it. Students from all over Europe enroll for the conference. The university is regarded as worlds 69th best university and its departments are sprawled all over Amsterdam.We were lucky to have the University as our hosts since we had access to the computer lab and also the "cafeteria". To reach the university from the hostel we had to walk through the red light and after a few days we actually had fun watching the girls ushering the customers, reading the walls at the streets and eventually landing to eat one of the huge pizzas.

Amsterdam is an unusual city. It has its good and its bad side, one may argue which city doesn’t? But in Amsterdam one can find a certain segmentation and the word "bad" that I have used is very relative.. One part of the city is all canals and boats, bridges and castles, fur coats and shopping malls, elegant and beautiful. While on the other hand you have the ever popular " good boys go to heaven, bad boys go to Amsterdam," come true in the wildness of the drugs and sex end of the city.If time had permitted I would have loved to visit Anne Frank House and Vincent Van Goh museum. Also I regret having missed the opportunity to see the sex museum but I fortunately scrapped enough time to visit a sex shop.

The conference was a great success. I made Dutch friends, learnt that you greet Dutch people by pecking on both the cheeks and swore never to drink coffee again (horribly bitter).Amsterdam showed to me how different cultures can be and how different cultures perceive drugs and sex (considered taboo in most cultures)and "freedom- living life" is a value I brought along with me from this country.
While in the Dutch Capital,
I saw people
Some high on life,
Some high on weed,
Some high on brownies,
Only that they were made of Hash.
And others sobbing
Fighting for asylum,
Crying for love,
Praying for mercy,
Begging for food,
And such people I saw
In the Dutch capitol.
Ladies with furs of
Blue and red,
Brown and white
And dogs of the same
Walked the dainty roads
The hole less roads of
"Holland."
In some corner
Of the famous red light,
In a coffee shop where the sign reads
"please smoke your joints here" sits a man
Puffing black rings
from his meticulously rolled joint
looking somewhere into the horizon
understanding that this freeland
AMSTERDAM
Is a land both for you and me
If you need it
It’s yours if you don’t
You can still take it.

Random Thoughts

12.17 A.M ....An auspicious time to start blogging I suppose...
I remember Simar talking about her blog and back then, it didn't really make much sense to me. I hate typing, even mailing for that matter but now that I pay for the internet from my pocket money I might as well make use of the unlimited usage( A selfish motive I know, but this is one of the few instances where I've been selfish). I remember one of my lecturer talking in class about how blogging is now the next BIG thing and I seriously have no idea as what to post! I have begun writing recently, well not that recently too...I used to write but never thought that I could write. Initially I used to write my answer scripts, my assignments or the numerous "dead" peoples theories that my hand would ache copying but yes I did write.Now it is different.I now write my experiences, my wildest journey's and my trippy journey's too...I write to ease myself and most importantly "to know myself". My writings are my reflections, my pain and experiences that I wish to share and at times the fun things that I've done.
It has been quit a transition for me to jump from B.E Comp Engg to B.A Com Eng. The former being engineering and the later Communicative English( Note that the difference is only of two letters 'PG') but with a change of "PG" in my course my whole life has changed. I am now a different person than I was ( one might argue that no one remains the same) but for me my very thought processes have changed. From a 'technical' me I have become a 'thinker' though at times I have used 'catalysts' to make me think....My life is a little to complicated to describe and discuss and my brain has kind of ceased to function as of now plusI have an early psychology class to catch up tomorrow...so Ishall fill in more tomorrow...!! Nighty nite!!