A short video on a traditional bookbinder in Cairo

The Sun beats down;
The dead leaves stir;
Crows caw.
A babble of voices
A total chaos
Cacophony?

The Sky darkens
Clouds threaten.
Thunder roars,
rolls.
People hurry
Not all.
And then it rains.
It pours
Bucketsful.
An hour. Two.
Wet people, wet earth,
wet buffaloes, wet leaves,
wet roads, wet wet
It pours on.

The heat seeps in.
Throat dries up
And so does the rain.
No longer
Can I hold
the illusion.

Hunger, sleep,
Pure boredom
Listening to the same old songs
The same old words.

I get up –
It’s time to go

Brick-bakeries
Baking in the sun
Watched
from moving metal kilns
Moving?
Perhaps. But getting nowhere.
Sudden stops in the wild.

The train runs late.

He ignores
She ignores
It ignores
They ignore
I?
I am ignored. 

Many thousands
Of millions of light years away
Stands the Desert
Where the Sands of Time
Are blown about in dunes,
Small ones, big ones
Mountainous ones.
Soft, curves, stripes….
In Unthinkable patterns.
The Winds of Change keep on
The designs are altered,
mindlessly, aimlessly,
Brainlessly!

Once in a while,
A Man comes along,
A Real One.
Who has built real
Castles out of imagined air.
And He builds,
Out of the pliant sand,
Out of the wasted barrenness
Out of the Sea of Death.
Defying the Winds.
The ‘Divine’ Winds.
Devised by the Sand’s Minions.
He builds on
Undeterred by the Wind
Unfettered by the Sand. read more

We were on safari in the Serengeti. Our driver and guide was the unflappable Isaac. Nothing fazed him, and he was quite knowledgeable about the animals we came across. This was our first time in Africa, and we were reacting with the appropriate amount of awe to everything we encountered. Even the zebras and wildebeest held our attention!

When we encountered elephants, we were fascinated – after all, these were the bigger cousins of our Indian ones, and we were spellbound by their large-eared magnificence. Naturally, when we came across a herd in the distance, Isaac stopped and we popped out of the open top of the safari jeep – we were cool like that – and I was shooting away with my camera. read more