This week on Sentient Snippets: awakening languor, silence-inducing poetry, joy-evoking play, voices in the dark, purposeless ruins, and windows to new worlds.
These beauties decorated in stripes never go out of style even when they are just relaxing, their posture never compromising on composure, and their gaze never torpid. They only make wake our senses up when they suddenly appear on a path like this. And that’s how any bit of languor left in us will be washed away: in sheer enchantment, adoration, awe. And that’s how a sighting such as this never ceases to feel new and alluring.
Tiger, Bandipur, by Phillip Ross
Experience it first-hand on our ‘Southern Splendour’ Photo Tour.
This is leopard poetry: each spot working like a line adding up to a whole poem. Poetry such as this in the wild is nonconforming, formed only as naturally as it births itself, like these spots on a creature such as this as a result of evolution. While it is so clear perched on a tree, it can be so elusive in a matter of minutes and vanish into the depths of jungle. And you watch this, too, quietly, as the wild cat becomes the forest itself, in its disappearing.
Leopard, Kabini, by Jayanth Sharma
Experience it on our ‘The Leopard’s Lair’ Photo Tour.
Go high on a playful tiger. Make it two, actually, to indulge yourself in the joys that only the wildlings offer to your vision. Let the scene hang like artwork on the gallery wall of your mind where a sweet seclusion wraps you warmly every time you revisit, every time you seek it. Let the piercing joy of the moment become a tender throb in retrospection, radiant with a dull ache that only beauty can birth.
Tigers, Bandhavgarh, by Santosh Saligram
Experience it first-hand on our Bandhavgarh Tiger Photo Tour.
In the wildlife treasure chest that the Western Ghats is, there is a tree frog that can break its fall by extending the webbing between its toes while making gliding leaps down from treetops. In its firm grip, even clingy love becomes endearing to watch. And when this glossy green creature vanishes out of your sight, watch it metamorphosing into the night, or the darkness and quiet of it.
Malabar gliding frog, Amboli, by Sachin Rai
Experience it on our ‘Monsoon Magic’ Photo Tour.
The boat lies unmoored. It doesn’t sail either. Another mute metaphor for ruin at Hampi, in all its quietude, like it’s lying there fretting about never being able to fathom the depth of the river. This isn’t about resting when the river is flowing full with such mad rush that she could swallow anything that touched her. This is about an end without end. What is it like to be marred and existing when the purpose is taken away?
Abandoned boat, Hampi, by Rajiv Shyamsundar
Experience it first-hand on our ‘Ruin Reminiscence’ Photo Tour.
A mind without curiosity is like a house with no windows. And what’s a better way to understand curiosity than watching a child observing the world with a mind that’s but a clean sheet? Somewhere in the high altitudes of Ladakh stands this speck of a window, like a threshold, like a portal that separates an intimate human space… beaming as blue as the faraway mountains.
Boy at a window, Ladakh, by Neeta Shankar
Experience it on our ‘High on the Himalayas’ Photo Tour.