Cattle

Forgive english, me rediscovering rustic roots.

I always find bovines/ungulates/cattle very funny. In India, cows are given one holiday every year. That day, cows and other domesticated animals don't work - they are instead painted. Both cow look same, but they are two.





Some cows in India very photogenic - they pose patiently when they hears shutters.



Some cows very kinky - they give BJs to strangers.



Some bulls even more kinky - they try to hump cow when everyone is watching



Then when the good men protect modesty of the cow in question, the bull take man on wild goose chase - with man trying desperately to hold on






Me have hearty laugh

COMING SOON: Deer, Monkey and more macro

A million sunsets

So we were on a trek, and by virtue of how early we started off, it was still pretty dark when we reached the base. We stopped at a waterfall we chanced on the road, and decided to rest a while till light came. The sun was a good hour away, so one of us went to sleep, some went to explore the area, and some brought out stuff to eat. I put on some music about interstellar travel, societies in space and panspermia, and had a good hard look at the predawn stars. Its like a flat sheet of paper has been spray painted carelessly with white dots. Of course, the more you look, the more you can see, and there is no limit to how many stars twinkle into existence as you notice them. Some of them are pretty familiar, and stand out clearly.



What was interesting was when the sun started to rise. The sky began to change its color long before the sun actually broke the horizon, so the reverse effect of the stars twinkling into existence happened - they twinkled out - but very slowly. If you concentrated enough, it was still possible to see the fainter stars. Just before dawn, if you looked up, you could see three maybe, four stars. But if you continued to look up, a whole host of them were still visible. Finally the sun rose, and all of em disappeared for the day.

Heading out to Borivili National Park tomorrow for a break from all the tech and a much needed dose of endorphines - might take some more macros and a few panos for sure - see below.

high contrast

An hour at a railway station

An hour at a railway station might sound like an obscene amount of time... especially at five in the morning when you wouldn't really expect anyone to be around. The only people sleeping were the beggars, and they were huddled together right where they sold the tickets. The long line for the tickets had to snake around them, and everyone were thankful that the beggars were not awake - or they would have added their bit to the commotion. It was noisy - the regular announcements for the trains on the seven odd platforms, what sounded like a child crying but actually was a woman in a saree but without a blouse next to a small bag slapping her own head every now and then, the ruffle of fresh newspapers as the supplements were placed in the proper places and the pamphlets inserted, the traffic outside, and a stray dog whose bark was worse than his bite - these were ignored by the people that mattered - and the people that mattered were standing in line. Those unfortunate people who jumped the queue to get hold of the coupon booklets were yelled at, and abused by the people standing in the line. Kurla station has trains plying in different lines, and the trains running to far away stations like Kasara or Panvel are few and far between. There were many people who would miss their trains if they actually stood in line, and many got away by requesting those in the line to buy tickets for them - if they managed to do it discreetly, they saved themselves the exposure to colorful language. One man desperate to catch a particular train tried to jump a line at one counter - the guy sitting there sent him away, he went straight to the other line, claiming to have been sent from the first. Till the point of time he was trying to jump the first line, people from line 1 were yelling at him, when he went to the other line, everyone in line 1 became dead silent, immune to his accusations, because now it was the problem of those in line 2. Where did I fit in? Standing impatiently in the longer and slower moving line, which was the first one, and hoping that I would get a ticket in time to catch my train. I had come in early so that this would be easy. There was one man who probably had done this a few times before. He came up to me discreetly, joined in the line right behind me, and removed a wad of crisp hundred rupee notes from his pocket. I was wondering which bank he had robbed this early in the morning, he was travelling to Thane, and when the man behind me protested, he said he was in the line and had to run to the toilet. Maybe someday, it was a perfect strategy for me to use. The line in front of me dwindled slowly, it was finally my turn, and I purchased my ticket, and triumphantly walked out of the station for a smoke.
It wasn't five minutes before I got a call. A fellow traveller would take a little more time... he asked me if it was possible for me to buy a ticket for him.

Those water absorbing globules

Donno who made them, probably some guy in china, but they are everywhere. They are tiny multicolored pellets that you can find at railway stations. Some jelly like material that absorbs water. The cheap ones you get for something like five bucks, some shops offer high quality versions for a hundred bucks and upwards. No practical use, except for use with potted plants without having to use mud. I just clicked a few snaps of them - they are very brittle to handle, mind. The high quality ones can be thrown about a bit, and have a better coloring. The ones that look dark in the following photos are actually transparent.

The geography textbook

The Maharashtra State Geography textbook used to be this huge blue thing full of maps, figures and diagrams of the land. The things it said about basalt, and the Deccan plateau and igneous rocks were learnt by rote by those scholars who wanted to get any marks. The rest of us put the textbook to good use in other ways.
There was this guy who discovered his puberty in the middle of the seventh standard. There was some belief amongst us that you only hit puberty when you started to masturbate. People who discovered this pastime could not stop – a certain teacher was scandalized, and did not know how to react, when she discovered the geography textbook spread out over a student’s lap with his hand underneath it. We troubled her in so many ways that she left the school and started teaching nursery kids – a step down from secondary.
Geography used to be my favorite subject. I always studied geography, and little else. It was so easy to prop it up on your lap, and hide a smaller book inside, I remember hours spent between the pages of Five children and It by Nesbit, and Bellair’s The trolley to yesterday – while the books themselves were between the pages of the geography textbook.
There was a bunch of interesting games we used to play with the textbook spread out between us during recess. With a map of some obscure country or continent, we would spot an interesting location and see who else could find the same place. The only thing we knew from the textbook properly were the countries and their capitals, which was necessary in our friend circle – hell we knew the capitals of Burkina Faso and Iceland.
The geography subject gave us a lot of grief – that was the only subject apart from the drawing exams, where we had to take a stencil of India, sketch pens or color pencils, a scale, and one of those stencils with loads of holes in them of different sizes. All this was so that we could map out the course of rivers and coastlines and shit like that. I remember getting two marks or something like that in one such exam – and am definitely proud of it.
Somehow, despite the largeness of the textbook, and all the knowledge that it contained – it told nothing really of the actually geography of the country. Maybe it was just the education system, or maybe it was that we were forced to learn it – whatever be the case, the actual geography out there, in the mountain ranges, and the rivers that flow through them have much more to them than we were learnt. You have to see the ranges, and the layer upon layer of basalt, before you can appreciate the formations of the world’s oldest mountain ranges – right at Mumbai’s backyard. So many aeons ago, active volcanoes poured out the rocks that settled in deposits, and then were eroded away to give us the local ranges. When you see lines on a map look down on you, or wind through the countryside far below you, that is when you understand how large and complex the world is, and how small the textbooks make them out to be. It’s as if we can understand, and learn about the nature of the Earth from a few scientific lines of text – when science is just one way of observing it. This can deteriorate into another geography lesson – there is a simple point to be made – the whole thing is much more interesting than they have us believe, and there should have been practicals.

Bunch of artwork

Found these on a folder somewhere - remember making them for use as wallpapers - you can never really find wallpapers perfect for your desktop anywhere on the net, you HAVE to make your own.