Ponto de Vista

Literally. In the sun.

Do you recognize the place? I’ll give you a hint: It’s not in Maharashtra 🙂

and by the title of this post I mean me, not this guys. This is not the best action shot, but take it from me, they were having a helluva lot of fun. The cynic in me wonders what infections they picked up, but their unfettered enthusiasm made me think, if I swallowed sea water and dirt regularly, maybe my immunity would improve and I could also run around uninhibited. Erm, but maybe not.

and then the sky turned orange and the last light reached glowing fingers into my room, tapped me on the shoulder, made me leave my desk and take this photo.

How gorgeous is my city?
That’s a rhetorical question since the answer is staring you right in the face.
Taken from a cab while crossing the little bay of Haji Ali’s Dargah on a cool January evening. We were crawling and I got a few different shots of the ever changing, swirling clouds as they moved from candy floss to orange cream hues…

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 😉