an itinerant observer

Prologue: Grounded in Houston – A City of My Many Lives The delay begins in Houston—a city etched into my identity. It’s where my kids were born, where I spent fifteen formative years, and where every return feels like both homecoming and farewell. Today, it’s a five-hour layover that stretches into an eternity. “Why this flight? Why me?” I mutter. The minutes bleed into hours. Airports have a peculiar way of amplifying existential questions, as if the pause in transit reflects a broader pause in life. When I finally reboard, it feels less like travel and more like drifting—an uneasy sense of being uprooted and untethered. In-Flight Double Feature: Cinema at 30,000 Feet Somewhere above the clouds, I scroll through the in-flight entertainment and land on Mother, Couch —a bizarre, dystopian family drama. A mother anchors herself to a couch in a furniture store, refusing to budge. Her children orbit around her, paralyzed by her immobility, tangled in invisible threads of expecta...

Day 1 of expedition: On which all, except me, start the ascent to Rakaposhi base camp. Photo of Rakaposhi taken from the apple orchard of the Minapin guest house When I woke up the day our expedition was to start, I felt a bit odd. I couldn’t quite pin point the oddity. I ignored the intangible (not quite bordering on distress at that stage), changed into my tracks and went out for a run, as is my norm. I wanted to get my joints freed up enough so the ascent wouldn’t come as too much of a shock. Surprisingly, I couldn’t run much as I lacked energy, so I returned to the guest house where preparation was afoot, somewhat counter-intuitively, for a hearty breakfast for the eager mountaineers. A simple low fat, high starch/protein meal might be the better approach at the beginning of an ascent, but not being a professional trekker who was I to say that aloud. Seeing the parathas , omelets, scrambled eggs and toast did nothing for my appetite. Au contraire, it made...

“Enaya has told another child in class that the world will end on December 21, 2012. This is unacceptable behavior…”,  were the 1 st lines of the email from the class teacher. Enaya aka Noori, the 6-year-old 1 st grader had happened to mention the Mayan prophecy to her young class fellow. She had done so without realizing the repercussions of mentioning doomsday scenarios in a public school setting. Maybe saying such things in a private school might not have generated a hyper-anxious email from the class teacher. Ayesha and I promptly responded to the email. I think Ayesha did so a bit apologetically. I, on the other hand, gave a complete account of the Mayan prophecy that I had taken quite a fascination to. I explained to the teacher that per that prediction made many hundreds of years ago, the world was going to end in a few weeks. I went on to inform the teacher that what Noori had mentioned was well known to most, if not all in Houston. The publicity of the world en...

A previous essay ‘I feel, I write,therefore I am’ ended with the sentiment, ‘I feel, I read, therefore I am’ . Prior to drafting the new essay I had to decide on a book. The title of the new essay ‘ in and out of randomness’, although not all that random, was based on the book ‘ The Black Swan’ by N. N. Taleb. The book has nothing to do with the same name movie of Natalie Portman fame. A black swan event can be positive or negative, good or bad – it is deemed highly improbable, yet it causes massive consequences. The book is a fascinating, history-heavy account of how unpredictable today’s world is and how utterly random events are. Taleb writes more from a broad world historical perspective, but I wonder if a similar argument could be applied to one’s own life events…those that one considers to be monumental or life altering? In retrospect, we tend to tell ourselves a story and things or events seem to have occurred linearly and the outcome for that event was predictable based o...