Skip to main content

A Room with a View


This is a picture taken from one of the rear windows of my residence.  The recent showers in Delhi have given a fillip to the weeds, shrubs and trees so much so that the place which normally looks like a semi-desert has begun to look like a quasi-jungle.  And I love it just for that.  Isn't it a blessing to live in such proximity to nature?

We are also blessed with a fair share of animals and birds. The campus can boast of a wide variety of birds which keep singing, cooing and whistling. Peacocks and their hens used to be regular visitors. 
In the last
couple of years, however, monkeys have all but displaced most of the animals.  They go around stealing pigeons' eggs and even capturing a 'sitting' pigeon.

They can sit majestically like kings on the dishes of our TV connections.  They may sometimes bite into the cables and throw us off our simple 'channel' delights.  They seem to have driven out the peacocks and their hens altogether.  After all, they are our predecessors... it must be in their blood to drive away all goodness and beauty!



Comments

  1. That peacock is quite a sight ! Beautiful captures all

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks a lot. I feel sad this peacock has stopped visiting us now.

      Delete
  2. Replies
    1. Yeah, magic, a paradise, indeed. One would wish the monkeys and their descendants weren't there...!

      Delete
  3. Matheikal,

    I will let others enjoy the beauty of the peacock in their own ways, mostly visual I suspect. But, I enjoy it from a different perspective - thinking how the plume got so large. As we understand now, it was a competition among peacocks, aided and abetted by natural selection, that got the plume to be so big, even to the extent of risking its survivability. If this is not proof enough for evolution via natural selection, so be it. This is the kind of beauty I see in such photographs, glasses all evolution-tinted!

    RE

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Raghuram. I understand much from this comment.

      By the way, I took the photo from my bathroom as the peacock chose to sit on the wall outside downstairs. I'm ready to face any challenge otherwise as far as the genuineness of the photo is concerned.

      Delete
  4. Love the monkey ... Almost like he's driving a car or something ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  5. Good to see you here, matheikal....!
    Your place is exotic...love the way that monkey is sitting on the terrace. And of course, the peacock...beautiful :)
    Am following you...

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

William and the autumn of life

William and I were together only for one year, but our friendship has grown stronger year after year. The duration of that friendship is going to hit half a century. In the meanwhile both he and I changed many places. William was in Kerala when I was in Shillong. He was in Ireland when I was in Delhi. Now I am in Kerala where William is planning to migrate back. We were both novices of a religious congregation for one year at Kotagiri in Tamil Nadu. He was older than me by a few years and far more mature too. But we shared a cordial rapport which kept us in touch though we went in unexpected directions later. William’s conversations had the same pattern back then and now too. I’d call it Socratic. He questions a lot of things that you say with the intention of getting to the depth of the matter. The last conversation I had with him was when I decided to stop teaching. I mention this as an example of my conversations with William. “You are a good teacher. Why do you want to stop

X the variable

X is the most versatile and hence a very precious entity in mathematics. Whenever there is an unknown quantity whose value has to be discovered, the mathematician begins with: Let the unknown quantity be x . This A2Z series presented a few personalities who played certain prominent roles in my life. They are not the only ones who touched my life, however. There are so many others, especially relatives, who left indelible marks on my psyche in many ways. I chose not to bring relatives into this series. Dealing with relatives is one of the most difficult jobs for me. I have failed in that task time and again. Miserably sometimes. When I think of relatives, O V Vijayan’s parable leaps to my mind. Father and little son are on a walk. “Be careful lest you fall,” father warns the boy. “What will happen if I fall?” The boy asks. The father’s answer is: “Relatives will laugh.” One of the harsh truths I have noticed as a teacher is that it is nearly impossible to teach your relatives – nephews

Victor the angel

When Victor visited us in Delhi Victor and I were undergraduate classmates at St Albert’s College, Kochi. I was a student for priesthood then and Victor was just another of the many ordinary lay students. We were majoring in mathematics with physics and statistics as our optionals. Today Victor is a theologian with a doctorate in biblical studies and is a member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission in the Vatican. And I have given up religion for all practical purposes. Victor and I travelled in opposing directions after our graduation. But we have remained friends notwithstanding our religious differences. Victor had very friendly relationships with some of the teachers in college and it became very helpful for me towards the end of my three-year study there when I had quit the pursuit of priesthood. The final exams approached and I needed a convenient accommodation near college. An inexpensive and quiet place was what I wanted during the period of the university exams. “What a