Perceptions of Threat

My blogger and FB friend Bhavesh Chhatbar, has posted some amazing captures of winding roads amidst the Green Kokan landscape scene in the Westren Ghats. He specialises in cropping closeups of his photos and presenting them as Premium Photo  Paintings.

Jaitapur, in Konkan has been in the news for a nuclear power plant being planned there, and tough opposition to it from the locals.  

When I looked closely at the closeup on the left , I actually saw something there......

So many
native upright folks
greening the land,
amidst
a richness of
mountains, rivers, and the ocean.

Sometimes,
unable to stop
trespassers wandering in
trying to
exchange it all
for radiating spheres
of energy
at Jaitapur.

Junglee Gardens

My friend Sangeeta Khanna of Delhi, who is a  green thumbed plant researcher, nutrition expert, traditional food scholar,  trekker and photographer,  posted this photograph , of an early morning sun focusing on folks in her garden.   Then she wonders if she should be calling it a jungle, given the free and wild way in which things are  growing....

Ah.

There are artistically landscaped, color co-ordinated gardens, where no one really knows the names of the plants and an orchid is superior to a homegrown cherry tomato , rose, spinach or karela.

And then there are gardens, where the trees are free, the various fruits and vegetables grow together, fighting for places in the sun, some rebel, some are mature, and some behave like teenagers, obsessed about their looks.  A good mother knows all her children .

She walked amidst them , and clicked the Sun trying to trespass....

My friend can probably tell you the life histories and characteristics of most of those growing in her ....err..garden ?

  

It takes all kinds.

Some stand,
tall, green and upright,
concerned
in middle age
about
brown vertebral spines
managing all the foliage.

Some
in balance with their land
cheerfully face up
to each morning
humouring the Dew kids,
big leaves
lording over the little ones,
some stems weighed down
by the fruits
of their lives.

Some middle class types,
eek out an existence
in the shadow of
the large,
while
some defiant E types,
think they are
on an Internet cable
connected to the world
on a high.

But the ones
to really take the cake
are these
fair and beautiful
flowery damsels
artistically posing
just so
trying to catch the
tanning Sun
through a patch in the Green....

Fall has arrived,
and Ma Earth has declared
it's all about
Brown and Lovely......

The Stony Melting Heart.........

My young blogfriend Pri who has a wonderful blog called Nostalgic Moments, recently wrote a wonderful story about a fight between a stone statue and a wax statue.

 Do read her wonderful and poignant  post "In wax and stone lies a story known..."

Reading meanings into the story commensurate with one's age was an interesting exercise for me. 

And then read the take below, of someone, who as they say, has seen a lot more summers  transform into autumn and winter, only to blossom in spring again....

Inside
every stone statue
that stands
unrelenting,
getting eroded
by
wordy deeds
and
katabolic acts,
is a soft nucleus
flooded lachrymally.

It just takes
some,
a long long time
to reach it.

All around,
reincarnations in wax
sculpt visions,
manic swinging between
tearful melts
and
new lives.

It takes
a shuddering shaking
and quaking
in the depths
of the earth,
for both to realize
that
they are ,
at the end of the day
a little bit of each other,
and beholden
to the same roots...