I wanted to see if the flavors I saw flying in my kitchen had wings. I wanted to see if my hands moved fast enough to massacre a red onion in under thirty seconds. I wanted to see if I could count on the buoyancy of the country eggs I poached. I wanted to see if I could scale the golden fish. If I could do justice to her death. I wanted to see if I could make the chicken fall off its bones. I wanted to see if the boiled spinach adorned a darker green. I wanted to see if anyone else could stuff more onions in paranthas than I could.
I wanted to see if any other spice could overpower asafoetida’s pungent-ness. I wanted to see if life could be lived without coriander. I wanted to understand the fuss about the snowy-white garlic. That always looked to me like the dome-like crown on the head of queen Victoria. I wanted to see if Tiramisu talked. Maybe it could breathe life into another being. As when I licked its spoonful, I was floating freely and kicking in my mother’s uterus again.
I read a lot more. I scroll blogs for hours. I highlight words while I read. I note them down. I try to go through them again.
I write a lot more. I ask myself why shall I not write on a Sunday. The world goes on. So I go on describing it.
I broke up with redundant words. I perfect the Whatsapp messages and the emails I send. My scrutinizing eyes don’t even spare the responses of my friends.
When I wake up, I think about writing instead of thinking about going to the toilet. I am burdened by guilt the day I don’t write. The day I write well, I feel liberated.
In my vivid narrative style (that readers love, ahem), I have told my most incredible adventures, including a nine-month solo trip to South America. In the candid book, the scoldings I got from home for not settling down and the fears and obstacles I faced, along with my career experiments, are laid bare. Witty and introspective, the memoir will make you laugh and inspire you to travel, rediscover home, and leap over the boundaries.
Sikkim Express: "Simple, free-flowing, but immensely evocative."
The Telegraph Online: "An introspective as well as an adventurous read."
As we approached the Ranganathittu National Park, we could see big birds flying above us in groups. That part of the Mysore city felt like a forest. Soon we would see crocodiles basking on rocks and islets full of young chicks chattering incessantly for food.
Ranganathittu Bird Sanctuary is a natural reserve in the Mandya district of Karnataka. The reserve is three kilometers from the historic town of Srirangapatna (another important place in Karnataka) and sixteen kilometers (10 mi) north of Mysore. The drive to Ranganathittu bird sanctuary from Bangalore took us about four hours.
Ranganathittu islets were formed when an embankment across the Kaveri river was built between 1645 and 1648 by the then king of Mysore. These islets, originally numbering twenty five, soon started attracting birds. Once upon a time, ornithologistSalim Ali observed migrant birds nesting in huge numbers on the islands. Upon his suggestion, the King of Mysore declared the islets a protected area in 1940. Now the sanctuary is formed by six of these islets on the Kaveri river.
As soon as we arrived at Ranganathittu, we purchased a ticket and went inside. As we went inside the sanctuary, we could see the Kaveri islands below us, and above us in the sky flew painted storks, ibis, pelicans, and herons. At least those were the birds I could identify. When we took the special boat ride that takes in seven people and goes around the sanctuary for forty minutes the boatman told us that the Ranganathittu reserve hosts at least one hundred seventy bird species. Some of the common birds found are painted storks, Asian openbill storks, woolly-necked stork, pelicans, river terns, egrets, cormorants, herons, and varieties of kingfishers.
The best time to visit Ranganathittu Bird Sanctuary is from December to February, and we were well within the time frame. During these months migrant birds come to Ranganathittu from as far as Siberia, South America, and the Himalayas, and they all nest in the bird sanctuary. You can also spot crocodiles, otters, mongooses, and flying foxes there. Just keep your eyes open and binoculars in focus.
I penned down my experience in Ranganathittu National Park in a poem. After all, what is better than nature and poetry?
Writing down that poem here. Hope you enjoy it 🙂
Painted storks in Ranganathittu
As we entered the sanctuary, painted storks glided above us in the clouded sky,
and with our heads tilted towards the heavens,
we walked by the side of the muddy Kaveri,
to see flocks and flocks of white and grey birds just perched onto the canopies of the Arjuna and the Acacia on the islets.
The crisp air buzzed with their songs and shrieks,
though I couldn’t identify even one of those notes.
We gazed at the distant foliage to recognize the winged-ones,
but our eyes instead discovered three crocodiles who rested on the rocks with their powerful jaws wide open,
as if they were waiting for a fish to dive into their mouth.
Their stillness made us wonder if they were real or fake,
and then we saw one of them gracefully gliding into the coolness of the water,
After struggling for a year, I broke up with the man I had wished to spend the rest of my life with. Then I flew to the other end of the world. In that foreign land, I picked up a million tiny parts of mine and weaved them again. I breathed life into that lifeless me. After a year, I returned to the old city and happened to run into him.
My Cambodia Travel Blog on the Atrocities Unleashed on the Country
I was climbing the stairs of a high school in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. No, I did not intend to repeat high school to recognize the petals and sepals of a flower better. The school wasn’t ordinary. The faces of the men and women that had been tortured and killed in its classrooms stared at us from behind the glass frames hung on the bloodstained walls. The rusted iron bars, withering waterboards, and used bloody clothes kept in those classrooms narrated a gruesome story of the ruthless Cambodian massacre, that happened not so long ago. The metal shackles with which people were tied to the waterboards and to the iron bars were still chained to them; I assume those metal chains couldn’t be used for anything else now.
Unwillingly, I vividly imagined the bodies possessing those faces and donning those gory clothes tied to the iron rods with the cold shackles. A guard came throughout the day to beat them and torture them with electric shocks as the helpless stifled on the floor. Or to cut them with knives and suffocate them with plastic bags. Blood oozed out of the wounds of the tortured but medicine was out of the question. Four small spoonfuls of rice porridge and watery soup of leaves were given to them twice a day.
My skin crawled. I shivered in the scorching month of June.
One of My Favorite Places to Visit near Bangalore: Panchapalli Dam and Bettamugilalam Village
One needs to control his or her mind to do anything in this world. Even the most enlightened of us all, Plato, Seneca, Marcus, Aristotle, Buddha, Socrates, valued this virtue. I do not possess this quality, yet, and hence couldn’t sleep the Saturday night before the Sunday drive. At 4 am, when I disabled the alarm and dragged myself out of bed, I felt as if a hundred pins pierced my eyes.
Determined to hit the road, we packed our country-egg-omelet and Amul-butter-pasted sandwiches, that I had already prepared the night before, in tiffin boxes and then in a backpack, along with bananas, water bottles, and Unibic protein bars. We wanted to hike the world. Soon, we sped on the road in search of a green and sunlight-lit golden Sunday in some distant hills or next to a lake or a dam, may be accompanied by an elephant or two.
The right learning could make you or break you – and the one who understands that stands above all.
Josh Waitzkin – a child prodigy, an international chess master, and a Tai Chi Push Hands world champion wrote a book called The Art of Learning. In this book, he penned down his inner and outer journey to success while listing the various techniques he applied to master chess and martial arts.
I picked up his book – not to learn from a chess master or a martial arts champion – but to learn from someone who has cracked the art of learning.
Once upon a time, a blue frog lived in a blue pond.
He liked eating flies. Whenever he saw a fly, he would stick out his tongue. The fly would get stuck to frog’s tongue. Then the frog would quickly withdraw his tongue inside and gulp the fly. He then bathed happily in the ink-blue water of the pond.
One day, a honey bee was flying with two house flies near the pond. While the bee settled on a red hibiscus growing near the pond, the flies flew down to the shore of the pond to sit near the cool water. The frog sucked-in both the flies one by one. The honey bee, who was watching the hunting game of the frog from the hibiscus grove, flew to the frog and bit him on his neck.
I’m not here to quote Robert Frost (even though I took the road less traveled) and suggest you to leave everything and travel. Here we want to understand why so many people wander around the world in search of something bigger than themselves.
Why do so many people change their careers and lifestyles to travel? Sometimes even indefinitely?
Do they travel to see new places and eat different food? Or to fill their passports with stamps? Or to be able to say at their deathbed that they have seen the world?
Could be. But it is more than that.
Let me take you through what travel has taught me.
I pre-landed in Bangkok at 5 AM. In the on-arrival visa line, a friendly attendant helped me skip the line and processed my visa faster. The airport was far out of the city and having decided that I would take public transport, I climbed into an about-to-crumble bus to go into the city.
In the three-hour-long bus ride, as long as the flight from Bengaluru to Bangkok, a lady passenger helped to hold my bag and told me that I was beautiful as I managed to not-faint in the crowded aisle. The bus crawled a kilometer in almost an hour. Due to my skepticism of being able to explain the situation to the angry and rude lady ticket collector and the bus driver, I didn’t leave the bus to hop into a taxi. She kept buying dumplings for him from the street while my stomach growled.
The bus ride wasn’t enough torture that I had to climb four levels of steep, dingy stairs with my suitcase to reach my just-enough, single, air-conditioned room.
Tired, hungry, and lonely, I went down for food and ate a mediocre Pad Thai. Having grabbed a few cold water bottles from the fridge downstairs, I climbed back up again. Sudden rudeness and a hint of racism coupled with sleep deprivation and loneliness made me sleep for almost five hours.
In my vivid narrative style (that readers love, ahem), I have told my most incredible adventures, including a nine-month solo trip to South America. In the candid book, the scoldings I got from home for not settling down and the fears and obstacles I faced, along with my career experiments, are laid bare. Witty and introspective, the memoir will make you laugh and inspire you to travel, rediscover home, and leap over the boundaries.
Sikkim Express: "Simple, free-flowing, but immensely evocative."
The Telegraph Online: "An introspective as well as an adventurous read."
The presentation should be ready at 2. The code should get deployed. The author’s biography should come under every article. Let’s put in a hack. Grammarly shows that this pronoun doesn’t make any sense in the sentence. I don’t understand why but let’s get rid of it. Spaghetti over boiled again. But at least we have dinner.
As Josh Waitzkin, the chess and Tai Chi Push hands world champion, said in his book The Art of Learning, “We focus so much on the outcome that the intrinsic details of the learning process are lost on us.”
In the past eight years of my working life, I observed how you do the task at hand is not the only measure of productivity and satisfaction. Your living style, priorities, patience, and certain keystone habits such as discipline, healthy social behavior, hard work decide how good you perform, how well you live your life, and how stable your relationships are.
For more than eight years, I've read and written night and day to make On My Canvas—my sustenance and life's focal point—a place of inspiration, trial, adventure, and happiness. Everything here and my weekly newsletter, Looking Inwards, is free. No AI. No ads. No paywalls. No sponsors. No paycheck.
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