Saturday, June 25, 2011

Monsoon in India, 2011



Home...
Our arrival a couple of weeks ago coincided with the monsoon. For privileged people like us,  in terms of a safe  and dry haven, watching the monsoon, getting drenched by choice and viewing the monsoon through the lens of nostalgia and old window bars, cozy on a bedroll, with books by the side and hot food... it is a different reality.


Flowering shrubs  against the blue tarpaulin of the multi-storied construction going on in the neighbourhood. 

Driving through the city which had a laidback feel- a landscape with rock formations, lakes and water bodies  and old trees lining the highway: think of the Old Bombay -Pune Highway.Hyderabad has cut a swathe across its beautiful, fairly undisturbed landscape of pre-historic rock formations over the past decade. Nay, it has decimated the landscape and dressed itself in concrete and glitz, in a mad rush towards being a metropolis. So the drive from the airport through the 'ring-road' evoked mixed feelings.This was a comfortable 'scar' across the old villages, with fields already earmarked for residential plots, ever hungry land sharks catering to the demand for 'investment' from the population. Old water bodies struggling to survive against the encroachments...

Travelling back home from Chennai this week, the flight over the landscape revealed part of that old landscape.

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