Another Rider Mania, another ride...

Last time around Rider Mania was in Shillong. While I had any amount of leaves (read that as "not employed anywhere") and the urge to take a road trip was stronger than ever, I couldn't make it.

Why?

Let's not get into that :-)

This time around, luck was a lot favourable (so to say) and I registered much in advance and thereafter also managed to get leave etc, etc.

So, come the 16th of January, I was on the road again (without any preparations whatsoever, on a borrowed, spanking new, Classic Chrome 500) and surprisingly enough had a pack of Bullets riding along too.

The agenda was simple. Get intimate with the road again, rediscover it for the pure thrill of motorcycling, connect with the basics of biking again. Naturally then, I chose my painful motorcycling boots (if not for which I would have lost a toe or more when I had fallen and broken my collar bone en-route Kolkatta for another Rider Mania) over my birding shoes (and lenses and cameras).

The agenda was also to rough it out (I had carried along my tent -- I did not need to pitch it because a fellow rider -- who also snores -- invited me to join him in his tent) and have fun in "life is a beach" terms.

Must say I managed to do all that and more.

And though I do regret on not being able to photograph a Marsh Harrier, any number of Common Kestrels and countless Black Shouldered Kites and White-breasted Kingfishers; I don't regret not having to lug the heavy backpack with me, for all of approximately 800 kms each way.

More importantly, I do regret not being able to do justice to the landscapes on offer with my puny camera phone, but then at one level motorcycling is all about framing and freezing those vistas in your being -- with no camera involved!

Yes, it was  good ride. I had company both ways; tucked into some amazing food all over the ride, connected with a lot of biker buddies and made quite a few new friends too.

But the icing on the cake was the fact that I started my birthday with a 200 kms odd trip (from the place where we had called it a night, at a seedy lodge somewhere after Pidiguralle on the absolutely hypnotic SH-2) to reach home for have the privilege of touching  my parents' feet.

That this ride was through inchoate early morning fog, under a drowsily weak winter sun added to the magical quality of the whole experience. Having the Classic Chrome 500 to stride and the challenge of maintaining a fast clip (while weaving in through the occasional truck traffic) gifted it a very special edge.

So you could say I gifted myself a grand present for my birthday. Because, as someone known to me said -- If you don't celebrate your own birthday, who will?

Most importantly, now I have the contextual depth to compare two different birthday rides. On the ride to Rider Mania, Kolkatta, I was riding all through my birthday and intent on getting the ride over and "partying". That's when (though I was not speeding) I fell and broke my collar bone. As such I spent the night of my birthday in a decrepit Kolkatta hospital, wracked with pain and surrounded by ghoulish looking, post middle-age, matronly ayah type nurses firing Bengali phrases at me.

This time, I was more sensible and had 4 hours of sleep behind me and the mental focus -- "I will not fall, come whatever." As it turned out, I neither partied (came to work right from the ride in fact and got a nice talking to, as well) nor wore any new clothes, nor cut a cake (that way, someone has to celebrate our birthdays, no?) and spent most of the evening in a sleep-deprived vigil waiting for some biker friends to come and shack up at my place. But heck, I did manage to enjoy a "Beer and Biryani" before the night was over. And, I slept under my own roof, without any painkillers in me :-)

I am not comparing, but its nice to survive all of life's vicissitudes, if only to celebrate small joys like a birthday ride.

Om Namaha Shivaya (oh yes, I prayed a lot on the ride!)             

In praise of the little man :-)

The little man celebrated his birthday on the 20th of this month. Sadly though, I wasn't there to see him play host to his "best friends" from the apartment building where he lives and from his class at school. Nor was I there to feel his special "smack", oh-so-wet kisses.  

Because I was on the road, getting back home from a motorcyclists event at Mahabalipuram.

I will be catching up with the little man and making up for missing his birthday. And if I know him, he wouldn't sulk or throw a tantrum about the fact that I wasn't there. Still, missing his birthday does rankle me a lot!

****

What exactly is the little man to me?

Well, he is a lot of things most children are -- lovable, petulant, demanding and so on...

And also, in a very peculiar way, an yardstick of how bad my ears are :-)

Some 4 years ago, on a train trip with my family to Tirumala, while we were in the upper berths and indulging in horseplay in the rattling and clackety clack din...the little man tried his level best -- for something like two / three minutes to tell me that he was sleepy and wanted to sleep. Then, being the smart fellow he is, he just mimed it.

Around that time and much before the train journey, most of my motorcycling and wandering in the open spaces around my place were also driven by the need to satisfy his walkabout nature.

It wouldn't be much of a revelation then -- if I own up to the fact that I discovered the buffalo wallow purely due to the little man's interest in going to "waters", since he liked throwing pebbles into the deeps.

(It was on one such trip that I saw a lot of birds at the wallow -- black winged stilts to be exact -- and got around to getting more "reach" to photograph them; so the credit for my being a birdman goes to him too!)

It wouldn't also be much of a revelation then that I miss spending time with him and chafe at the bindings of an idiotic adult world that ensures that little men (and women) are so burdened by school and outside-of-school tuition that they have no time to play, monkey around and generally be just children.

(Also, its not that he wasn't coming to my place enough. Rather he would be mostly disinterested in anything as real as a walk or a motorcycle ride. Then again, at the very mention of the quarry or the buffalo wallow, my mother would become murderous as she did not want her grandson to be exposed to "bad air" and "germs", etc. Lastly, there were always various other virtual attractions -- the desktop and the laptop(s) and his tablet and my cellphone and of course the TV...)

But then, if you wait enough, everything in life turns full circle, does it not?

So, one fine afternoon around a week ago (the day before Sankranti, in fact), when as usual with my hearing aids not doing much, I invited the little man for birding, he surprised me by agreeing. And then, when my mother turned protested, the little man quelled her objections adroitly (I did not hear what was being said, I just noted that he probably said one or two sentences in all).

And, thus history was made!

But that's not all. The little man also took recourse to a notebook and a pen -- to write down instructions for me, more or less to say that :

1.) He will be carrying along the notebook and the pen, just in case I cannot hear when he says something to me.

2.) I should carry some money with me, because if we stay out too long and he gets hungry then we may need to buy something for him.

As it turned out, he bought his favorite biscuits and some bubble gum (one for him and one for me -- according to him) and we made it to the wallow and I put up the tripod (with him offering to help carry the tripod on the way) and set up the lens too.

But then, his snacks got over, he got bored (and progressively tired) of standing, and we did not do any photography as such.

Oh well, there would be another time again, I am sure.   

              

Dushman na kare

दुश्मन ना करे दोस्त ने वो काम किया हैं
दुश्मन ना करे दोस्त ने वो काम किया हैं
उम्रभर का गम हमें इनाम दिया हैं
उम्रभर का गम हमें इनाम दिया हैं

तूफां में हम को छोड़ के साहिल पे आ गये
तूफां में हम को छोड़ के साहिल पे आ गये
साहिल पे आ गये
नाखुदा का, नाखुदा का...हम ने जिन्हे नाम दिया हैं
उम्रभर का गम हमें इनाम दिया हैं
दुश्मन ना करे ओ ओ...

पहले तो होश छिन लिये जुल्म-ओ-सितम से
पहले तो होश छिन लिये जुल्म-ओ-सितम से
जुल्म-ओ-सितम से
दीवानगी का......दीवानगी का फिर हमें इल्ज़ाम दिया हैं
उम्रभर का गम हमें इनाम दिया हैं
दुश्मन ना करे ओ ओ...

अपने ही गिराते हैं नशेमन पे बिजलियाँ
अपने ही गिराते हैं नशेमन पे बिजलियाँ
नशेमन पे बिजलियाँ
गैरो ने आ के...
गैरो ने आ के फिर भी उसे थाम लिया हैं
उम्रभर का गम हमें इनाम दिया हैं

दुश्मन ना करे दोस्त ने वो काम किया हैं
उम्रभर का गम हमें इनाम दिया हैं

From Akhir Kyon, 


P.S.

What a fabulously beautiful song this is, no?

And Smita Patil was absolutely ethereal in it! Lovely trip down memory lane in piecing this song together, hopefully perfectly. Do write in, if I have missed something :-)

Why am I blogging this here now? Ha ha let's not get into that, shall we? 

  

An encounter with a Citrine Wagtail

The White-browed Wagtail is an old, old friend. And, a resident at the buffalo wallow (okay, call it a pond if that suits you more, or a lake if you please) barely 200 metres from where I stay, where I do a lot of my birding.

Naturally then, I have any number of absolute stunners of this constantly tail-wagging bird; and it weighs in with a big (or long) poem in Stray Birds too.

But this post is not about the White-browed Wagtail -- rather its about a Citrine Wagtail that I encountered today morning on my traipse around the buffalo wallow. As encounters with birds go, this was long and extended (and since I had the extended reach of a Nikon 14 E II TC aiding me) and also led to quite a few keepers.

Incidentally, this bird is not a resident at the buffalo wallow, but a migrant who -- if I am right (along with the White-faced Wagtail) makes its appearance in end September / early October.

That I got to meet it so late is testimonial to the fact that I have been busy elsewhere, and also to the fact that the buffalo wallow's perimeter (the Wagtail is essentially a bird that is always on a walkabout at the edges of water bodies, a wader so to say) is nowadays heavily overgrown with weeds and grasses.

But meet it I did, and that too when it was bright and light, early in the morning. If White-browed Wagtails are tough to photograph (they will saunter in a zig-zag right at waters edge, through all the the dregs of civilization piled up there -- the plastic bottles, the plastic packets, the quarter and half bottles of cheap alcohol, the coconuts and so on, all the while wagging their tails furiously) but not exactly shy, so waiting up for them works. The Citrine Wagtail however is a different kettle of fish and doesn't take kindly if you come close and also doesn't saunter as nonchalantly as the White-browed Wagtails.

Suffice it to say that I have never managed to take "exceptionally good" photos of this bird, so seeing one of them feet deep in a trickle of water (technically the run-off from a still full buffalo wallow) made me feel that I have struck gold.

Of the 50 or so photos that I could take a lot were truly full-frame; but then not surprisingly a lot of them are useless too -- with such a small bird, DOF is a huge thing...and in most of the photos, the entire bird is not in focus, in quite some of them the eye and bill are certainly not!

But then, I know I will meet this fella again :-)

And I do have a couple of exceptional photographs from this encounter. Especially one which shows the bird facing the camera and looking askance, its tail in the background and out of focus and its yellow breast dappled / lambent / awash with the light reflected by the water from the runoff.

I don't have the right word to describe it -- light bouncing / reflecting from rippling water, itself looking like a ripple; but then its a good problem to have, its a good problem to have...and maybe the word will come to me too, as the bird has -- unbidden.

             

Stray Birds @ Thalam -- an update

The exhibition is still open.

That is to say, it has been extended till this Thursday, the 21st of November.

So if you are in Bangalore (or passing through) do go and say hello to the Stray Birds! 

Must have something to do with the fact that it is seeing a lot of footfalls.

Or that all the birds look serene and peaceful on the walls of Thalam, as if they were on familiar perches, and as such, the Thalam guys are not too inclined to take off the exhibits.

Anyway, I wouldn't know, I am here in Hyderabad and missing out on all the action.

~~

The Bangalore Mirror did a story on the Stray Birds.

Read it here 

The actual story (in the physical -- as opposed to online -- newspaper) has a lot many more birds.

Hopefully, I will get my hands onto a copy of the newspaper.