navtejphotography

O nce a flourished household, today's Punjab holds loneliness and grief in its village alleys. Gone are the days when small kids used to run pointless here and there in these lanes, often hitting an elderly person on their way. Now, we do not see the young chaps going to the fields very early morning to address water into their cultivations. A faded beam of light guides your way in these barren walkways. It seems like a curse in which everyone just vanished in thin air. No sound of children studying in the street schools, no smell of cow dung, no enquiring eyes following you from a distance, absolutely nothing at all. T he Punjab today is almost vacated by its inhabitants as these birds found other lands to exist and flourish. Blame the development or the corruption or the Government, now no one wishes to stay in this once a princely state of India. Two decades have gone by seeing people board planes to foreign countries, leaving their flocks and fields as it is. A silent a

The Falling Kalpavriksha Kalpavriksha, the tree that fulfill desires, seems to be full of energy and resilient against the odd nature and winds in the old books. It still feels like magic when narrated in the old mythologies about its vast branches spreading out into the sky. The solid bark and its grip would look like a palm resting peacefully in the womb of the earth. Sages sitting under it and meditating for many days, the nesting of birds on the small tender inner branches, away from the evil eyes of a predator, such would have been the aura of a Kalpavriksha. I was always fascinated by the stories that were written by the great thinkers and visually creative people in the times when gods used to flock the earth. These transcripts, written in Devanagari and Sanskrit, transfused a sense of richness and prosperity in our hearts whenever I tried to infer it by translating it in Hindi for my better understanding. Still I wasn't able to completely imbibe it in my strid