Chhavi Noticed This!

So the BMC has decided it will now prune trees to prevent stray branches from falling. You know what that means, right? They’re just going to start chopping everything down in sight. My neighboring building society head told me that they’d chopped down the tree between us because “mosquitoes are breeding there”. He claims to be a horticulturist. Who never went to school, evidently. Because in his next breath he also told us it didn’t matter because “Only Tulsi” gives out oxygen, other trees are not important. I nearly slit my own wrists. Maybe these little clay gods will protect this peepul from being ‘pruned’ BMC horticulture style …

I wanted to put up something Christmas-y and I guess I’ve been in a quirkier, lazier mood than usual so this is all I got! Merry Christmas all, from Chhavi Noticed This! and a bloom from my very own balcony “garden”.
It’s the only one we’ve had, although the bougainvillea is drooping with blossoms. Where I lived in Mass. had wonderful soil for roses – there were houses boasting 60-year old bushes that were pretty much knotty, gnarled trees with massive, fragrant flowers. I’ve never been crazy about roses, but these were heady. And then I had a friend who once stopped on the bike path and made this elaborate show of deviating, stopping, and sniffing. I made a point of stopping and smelling the roses every day after that.

Behind Ta Prom in Angkor Thom, as my fellow travelers meditated on the incredible roots of the trees that have taken over the ancient temple, this fellow came along and perched on me.
I waited for a long time for him to get moving so I could capture how dazzling his iridescent his tiny blue/black wings were – but he flew too fast and in quick bursts which made all the motion pictures totally blurry.
He flew off and came back to perch on my finger three times in total – and I have no idea what made my finger so attractive. But there he was. And I wasn’t complaining about being so favored!

And that’s the moon over Bombay’s skyline. But, the moon, however, wasn’t orange – it was pink. Seriously. Twitterstanis who attended @adese’s birthday will vouch for it. Taken with my mobile phone, it’s actually amazing any colors came through at night, though!

My mother said after she’d visited the Louvre, she felt this sense of satiation and then faced a big question mark: a lifelong dream had been realized. What on earth came next? That’s how I felt.

Thanks to: Kwantu game reserve, The Fantastic 5 contest at Web18, Blish for the online support,& South African Tourism for making it happen.

In March, I visited Rani Baug, which houses both Mumbai’s zoo and the Victoria & Albert Museum, now the Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Byculla. We had such perfect timing, we chanced upon the albino peacock just as he unfurled his beautiful tail and tried to get the attention of the very coy peahen (visible on a perch on the left.) It was gorgeous! Very soap opera-esque. Yeah! Someone told me it’s all happening at the zoo We saw sleeping rhinos, a python, gazelle, neelgay, sambar, beautiful birds, including one of paradise – all with bad or no signage. The bird of paradise, an unusual red and green specimen was identified as a “mynah” – a terrible travesty.
The only decent sign we saw, however, was … audacious in its sheer stupidity. Click on the peacock picture to see the only sign of explanation

I didn’t know until very recently that Mumbai is one of the very few places in the world that hosts flamingos within city limits. (Nairobi and Miami are two others.) So of course I wanted to go see. And with a video journalist friend and an expert ornithologist friend, I went off to do a piece on them (hey, why not share with the world?) The flamingo photos I took are not worth publishing, they were too far away, but, on one of the quays, against the backdrop of an oil refinery and a thermal power plant blurred by grey wisps of smog and a flock of flamingos rocking gently like rose petals on oil, were these rotting, abandoned boats. Sewri was nothing like I expected. But these boats just grabbed me. Quite poetic a metaphor, aren’t they?(If you’d like, you can listen to the story and see Nitin’s photos)

Is this bliss or is this bliss? I’m not trying to romanticize the life of this beast of labor or anthropomorphize this dude here but I caught sight of him recently at Warden Road and he was so striking, I had to stop and video him. I swear to you, he looked like he had hit hay nirvana. He was smacking his lips loudly and his eyes rolled back into his head. I think there was no doubt whatsoever that he was beaming to himself in sheer happiness. So I stopped to watch, and soon a small crowd of people had also stopped to smile at the bull and each other. Well, all except the bull’s maalik. Guess he hadn’t gotten to his own fodder, yet.

Heaven knows I have a backlog of photos to blog but fresh from a hectic eco/immersion-tourism trip to Orissa, I have a total Oriya hangover that begs to jump the queue. This is a frieze from the Sun Temple in Konark – where our tour guide shouted at us (just in terms of his volume, we figured he was unused to groups of only two!) I loved this dragonesque lion bullying the elephant. My trusty 6500 refused to work much of the time so all my cool photos of flaming Palash & simul, the baby goat I nearly ‘kid’napped, the baby elephant we played with at the Simplipal reserve, the Khairi river, sal leaf forests, the random-ass cups of *salted* tea I was continually served (grr) are all on the Samsung so cannot be posted here. We packed a lot into four days and I think I need a vacation from this vacation.

In the streets of Mumbai, not only do Hindus and Muslims shiver in the same cold, but the cats and dogs seem to have come to some understanding as well. See, it’s all just dirty politics that serve to divide us. This was taken one cool evening near Bombay University as we traipsed around Kala Ghoda, drank ganna juice, gazed at Flora (you know … of Flora Fountain fame), marvelled at how green and velvety the grass looked under the fountain, and then stumbled upon this rag tag group sleeping near the homeless.