A Naturalist's Column

Even when the air was still, the lake kept washing over its edges and receding in a strange rhythm. It was as if it had a beating heart in its depths. I liked to think that it did. I started out that morning, to walk around the Hadosiddapura lake, past the Eucalyptus plantation and to find some un-walked earth to wander on. Instead I sat by the shore till afternoon. That November it had rained down unusually hard when I was there in Bangalore. A good number of lakes were running full to the brim, spilling over onto the adjacent roadways. The car journeys through this city now seemed to get progressively eternal.   I was staying at The Bhoomi College for a few days, and on some mornings, I walked behind the campus and spent most of my time by the Hadosiddapura lake. This lake, which is as of now safely tucked away in the suburbs, too had breached its banks and had more water this year than I had ever seen in it. My body is nearly cold-blooded. It is accustomed to getting warme...

I remember reading somewhere that not a square kilometer exists in the world now where human trace isn't present. But as this was taking place, life too adapted to live in the habitats of our making. It has learnt to permeate it in so many ways, even into our bleak urban-scapes. Richard Powers said that "if you allow for kinship then the question of 'you' becomes permeable". In this fragmented age, how do we reimagine 'ourselves' in relationship with the soil, sky, leaves and birds? What connect and purpose could life around us offer in these times - spiritually? Could they be agents of our own inner transformation? Perhaps some of this could start with being profoundly observant in our daily lives.  Rachel Carson spoke of wonder as a 'radical state of mind'. Maybe wonder and watchfulness are powerful tools of community change. How do lives sharing our immediate spaces and surroundings braid our own? How do they invade or interweave our contexts? ...

Fungi transformed in our imaginations after the Wood wide web was discovered and described by the forest ecologist Suzanne Simard. And later powerfully evoked by writers like Peter Wohlleben and Robert Macfarlane. We now know that they connect forests, live in the ocean's depths and thrive in nuclear waste where nothing else can live. Their structures and lives confound our understanding. Their presence on the planet is almost all pervasive, that the dominion of any other life on here turns illusory as we study fungi more deeply. This poem is written from astonishment, terror, enchantment and a range of other feelings fungi can conjure. Fungi Let me throw you a riddle. Us, I, all of me. Bedrock, sky, all in between. Big, bigger than any dinosaur. Deep, deep as ocean floor. Life and life's reverse, death and death's converse, comprehension's curse, webwork, network, sub-soil universe. Underland's ancient internet, Underground's riddle-vers...

Bark can appear barren. But when you go closer, things start moving, its pieces start shifting. So much life lives hidden in its interstices, or garbed with its looks. This is a poem celebrating these rugged vertical landscapes. Bark Bark, you call me, I am a biome by myself, a stretch of sheer curvature, a tree's unique signature, the very meaning of texture. Abode of a diverse creature community, lichen-tatooed, moss-draped, fringed by fern, singed by fungi. I am life whether I stand or lie, pressed on Earth or bridged to sky, home to bark-gecko, bark-mantis, bark-beetle, bark-others, who wear my looks and garb my features, I'm a basking spot for snakes and lizards, grooming post for elephants and leopards, nesting place of wasp, shield-bug and spider, snack bar of barbet, nuthatch and woodpecker, ladder and staircase for vine and creeper, morning hideout for many a midnight creature, a squirrel playground and katydid podium, a civet haunt ...

Palaash Blossom and Rosy Starlings If not every day, then during every transiting month, the human being who pleasures in taking long walks and communing with the landscape, has something or the other to anticipate excitedly. March is almost upon us and the Palaash trees everywhere are full of buds, making their branches sag. Very soon, when one looks up one morning, they would have suddenly bloomed altogether, overnight. And the tree would then bear not a sole leaf. Not a tinge of dark green would be seen on its crown, for it would have replaced every single one of them with its tongue like kesari-orange flowers curling towards the sky. From a distance, with some imagination on my part, the tree could well be a titan’s arm reaching up with his palm spread wide, his crooked fingers dripping with magma, having broken through the crust. The roads and walkways below are carpeted. The canopies of the smaller trees around are topped. Its flowers bob all along the shores of a pond...