Whispering Shadow

You are big but your might is relative. You are important today and will be replaced tomorrow. You are stable as much as you are fallible. You have your head held high yet you are trapped. You have different perspectives with every varying degree but you always come a full circle. You make a good picture, but it not as much because of you but the elements that you are viewed among. Your beauty lies not in what you reveal but what you hide. You have your highs and you have your lows. You are powerful but your power is only derived. You can bring joy or you can gift fear. Your purpose is defined by your maker; the only problem is you may not find out till your time has passed.

The balloons float in mid-air. Like thoughts awakened, they create a stir. My mind is bubbling with ideas each screaming to be heard, indicating a sense of identity, like size and colour indicate for each balloon. But at the end, identity is secondary. All that is of consequence is visibility. Unless you are noticed, you will not be observed and given a chance to prove yourself. It is the story of the world you and I live in seen in the struggle of each balloon to rise above than the rest. However, the world we live in also gives us a vast canvas, clear and unending, the canvas which is provided by the blue sky in the photograph. We feel liberated. We have a fair chance. It is our own to take. Though an ideal world would have no boundaries, in the real world, there are strings attached. It is not about simply doing our best, but doing our best within the constraints. Only the one who can succeed in seeing a complete picture is a true champion. PS 1: I submitted this for a competition (...

Under Construction , after four attempts on four different themes! Today is just not the day to write. My mind is void of any creativity, nor there is a flow of ideas. It is not that I am forcing myself to write. I just wanted to! But nothing lived up to my satisfaction. To stop myself from going to bed with the sense of dejection, I clicked sweet lime instead. It was supposed to be round but thanks to my dexterity when it comes to knives, it turned out to look like a leaf. But isn't it a pretty leaf? The colours exceeded my expectations and life doesn't seem as dull as it seemed earlier in the day.

I haven't visited the Shadows in a while because I was visiting some place else. A tiny sleepy hill station on the outskirts of Mumbai (don't know if 180Km qualifies as outskirts) was our destination for a well deserved post exam holiday. It is called Bhandardara. We went there to have fun and so we did to the fullest - climbing the tallest peak of Maharashtra, trekking among the clouds, catching frogs, going shoe-hunting when it is pitch dark, playing the most hilarious game of Bluff, getting caught in fog so thick that it could hide an elephant, picnicking near waterfalls and much more.Nonetheless, I am not going to make this post a journal. I am going to describe three moments which made me feel at peace with myself like never before. The first one came when we were sitting at a step on our trek up the Kalsubhai summit. We were half way up having crossed rickety ladders and slippery trails. At this point, I decided to take a break. I sat on a rock in admiration of the view. ...