Driver, Please Spare the Horses!

Kannada road sign - Bengaluru

Our trip to India was to last a little over three weeks. Our last two weekends had been fruitful, starting with our visit to Mahim Nature Park. The third weekend was ear-marked for further travelling, but this time it was away from the city, to Bangalore.

The weekend sojourn to Bengaluru, as it is now called, was set to be a very quick one, just three days. We’d booked tickets before hand on a budget airline, SpiceJet, which we had never travelled by before. And some of our photographic cohorts from previous weekend trips were also along for the ride.

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Writing Poetry Without Bloodletting

Nostalgia and grief seem to fuel the pensive poet’s pen,
Without them the bards would not know where to begin,
On their journeys through life and soul and deed,
All springing from the one eternal human need,
A yearning for meaning, the hope that it will come,
The fear that it has slipped past in years long done.

Thus they wander on their unending refrain,
To nostalgia, and back again.
They sing of many lovers lost,
Of children dead, of chilling frost,
Of personal angst so meek and gory,
A furtive glance, a touching story.

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Kanheri Caves & Borivali Snippets

After a week of bus rides, we were starting to miss the buzz of our Mahim Nature Park adventure. To make sure the following Sunday would be put to good use, we set our sights on a larger target, Sanjay Gandhi National Park.

Sanjay Gandhi National Park is a protected forest area in the Borivali suburb of Mumbai. Commonly referred to as Borivali National Park, it is the only national park in the world that lies inside the confines of a city. Considering Mumbai is one of the most populous and dense urban environments, that’s quite an astonishing thing.

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Taking Street Photos on the Bus Route

After my Sunday visit to the Mahim Nature Park, during my recent trip to Bombay, I spent a week doing a lot of hopping around through the city. My transport of choice is usually a public bus, and that week I was on buses a lot. Most of the time, I had my camera with me and took pictures.

Taking photos from a bus is a great way to get images of street life in a city. It has it’s advantages, you can concentrate on the photos rather than the traffic, and you’re bound to travel through many parts of town you might not usually visit. But, photography from a bus has many challenges too, not the least of which is the near-constant motion.

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Mahim Nature Park & Dharavi Delusions

Dragonfly on a fence - Mahim Nature Park

We arrived in Mumbai just before the weekend. After the requisite day of lazing, and a mandatory visit to my favourite part of the city, we had our first Sunday there. Since everyone was free, my cousin arranged that we spend the morning at the Mahim Nature Park. She, her husband, and their friends are all photography buffs, and had visited the place before, but I had never even heard of it. Another cousin had just bought a new camera that he wanted to take through its paces, and since Vishal and I are old camera-junkies, we all heartily agreed to the early sojurn on Sunday morning. We were to meet directly at the place, and we were told the nature park was right opposite the Dharavi bus depot.

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Travelling Home From Home

passports & luggage - Travelling Home

My Grandmother has a common comment to make when it comes to going out of town or travelling. She says it’s a gargantuan task to leave your home empty. While ever active, she’s always been a bit of a home-bird. She doesn’t like travelling to the point where she can’t come back home at the end of the day. In many ways, she’s right, of course. Leaving your home, for anything more than a few hours, always requires a good amount of planning and preparation.

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The Religion and Philosophy of Hinduism

Kumbh Mela - Religion and Philosophy of Hinduism

Questions of philosophy vs religion are as old as the human ability to question. Today people wonder about the balance of power and reconciliation between science & religion. It’s a valid issue to think about, but to get a better handle on the subject, it might help to look at the relationship between religion and science’s great-grandfather, philosophy.

My friend Paul always puts interesting questions to me. After tackling truth, this time we were having a conversation about how I reconcile religion and philosophy from an Indian or Hindu perspective. Some interesting points came up, which I have not seen expressed often, so I thought I should share my thoughts here. Indians take much of our own way of thinking for granted, but the fact is, the relationship between religion and philosophy in India has always been quite unique when compared to the West.

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