There are times when we just see something or someone around us and our imaginations go wild. It maybe ordinary and natural or it may be something artificial. It may have been a mundane article or something which arouses our sixth deadly sin.
Something of the former was what I experience when I stayed overnight at a friend’s place to watch the late night soccer match. Yea Germany had won and I got up pretty late. My friend knowing my passion for bed-tea had got me a mug. Sipping the delicious beverage my sight wondered out of the window. And before me was dense foliage of a Gulmohar tree.
The night earlier was quite wet and Bangalore had witnessed one of its heavier showers of the season. The earlier evening the tree was in full glow of the crimson blooms and today morning nothing but the bowed dark greens.
The beauty of nature
Does not lie only in the beautiful and bountiful
But matters so the thorns and dark clouds
As with flowers and sky so blue.
The ground below was blood red. Those handfuls who have never observed a Gulmohar flower should know that this particular flower usually grows in India during the summers. But the flowers don’t have a fragrance at all. Though the color riot they display in a sight in itself.
As I stood observing each branch and each leaf I tried to view it in one sight. And I was stunned at the effect.
On his knees with his heard lowered
Not broken but certainly bowed
Bloodied ground lay below as a Persian spread
Beaten but not lost nor afraid.
This topic may be so out of the blue for a blog. But I am sure every one of you must have such imaginations. As children we have often tried to imagine ourselves as hero and ridden a fallen branch like a horse with a twig in our hand as sword. Or we might have lay on our backs and gazed into the blue sky trying to relate the fluffy clouds to some known shapes.
Laying on my back and gazing into the blues
I wondered the shapes and hues
How the tides change or winds blow
How fast oh… does time flow
And in the age where we see more of concrete jungles, the kids are glued to the artificial world of video games, the trees and the greens are like a fallen general, bowed but not broken.... yet.
7 comments:
nice imagination!
reminds me of the film, jaane tu ya jaane na, they imagine stuff lukin at different objects, isnt it?
Good one CB. I loved the way you likened the tree to a kneeling man and the fallen flowers to his blood. Amazing!
I have had countless such imaginative sessions, if I can call them so :) - although I cannot recall any one at this moment. I will definitely comment when I do :)
Beautifully Written!! :)
Very Artistic narration... Point well made with an intersting analogy.
WOW!!! thanks for fueling my dormant rather non-existent imagination. Rich imagery, very similar to Magic realism.:)
Great imagination! I also have something to say. My family has an ancestral house at Ucassaim. And since the time I was little boy, I noticed a peculiar sprout growing in my garden, in a place where there were many other beautiful and exotic plants around. It was rainy season and we had got some workers to pluck the grass to make the garden look clean. I stopped them from uprooting this sprout, since i felt it was like an ugly duckling among the brood.
Months went by and it grew like the magic bean stalk with a handful of short round leaves forming a canopy, like an umbrella. The unusually tall stem looked as if a boy had suddenly got ostrich legs after puberty. My family kept on guessing what kind of tree it might be but in the end all were wrong. The speculation was to such an extent that it was agreed that this tree will break the foundation of our old house in a few years.
Its been almost 10 years and we have now started renovating our house. To my utter surprise, this summer I saw a bright red canopy adorning the new house , as if it is happy to be the star in the garden. It was the very Gulmohar you have described. It is amazing to see how something that looks like a dirty shrub can attain such exuberance.
Pramesh,you must be really proud of this post coz it looks like you have inspired your room mate (someone who never ever reads, forget about writing), to actually put up an entire paragraph long comment here. This has to be your best written post so far ;-). Good job and keep it up!
@Akshay,
Woww .. that stands testimony to nature's unpredictability. And metaphorically, to life itself. Something (say a piece if software, or an investment, or a relationship) that seems to be trivial at beginning could turn out to be all-encompassing before you know it!
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