Walking My Mind In A Winter Morning

-

 

I got up a bit earlier today. Not yet sure if Muradabadi biryani could help to be an early bird or not. For reasons I don't know, something inside me kept saying, “Jabir, get up n go out...” Abha is the most beautiful on Friday morning if you can meet her when she rubs her eyes to the sun. Silent, tranquil,   visible, and almost no traffic to bother about.



        It was dark even at 6:30 am. That is quite usual during winter. The temperature was 9 C. Darkness coupled with chill would serve as a good excuse for not venturing out. But my mind justified that it was usual during winter and we would stay warm up while on the move on foot.

I let my weekend unfold on its own. Quite spontaneously with no plans...and a walk along ring road done solo. Off script. Walking has always been a meditative affair for me. If my lungs or calf muscles got something, that was only a bonus.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Earth in Her Hands

-
Image
  The Earth in Her Hands is a book by Jennifer Jewell that covers 75 extraordinary women in the world of plants . It tells us stories of womenfolk who put their life into plants, or the plants chose them to live their life with. Like most exciting things happening in my life, I stumbled upon this title recently while researching a related project online. It was love at first sight, and I got addicted to it while listening to the book on Audible, waiting outside our university dental clinic for my wife to have an appointment. Thanks, Dr. Abdul Qadar, for a three-hour long session on an emergency basis before he leaves for his home for the annual vacation. Each woman has a unique plant journey to relate to, which will take us for a ride through the ever-exciting botanical world. They are cherry-picked from various fields like botany, garden nursery, floral design, garden, photography landscape architecture, farming, seed banks, herbalism, and food justice. The common thread all these
Read more

A Breakfast with Elements at the Heights of Habla

-
Image
        There was a time when I lived in a sleepy, cold town all alone, having the luxury of a lovely friend, a small car, and a camera. We roamed around the places, exploring things no mortals we knew ever dared to. Once, he came up with a plan to watch the sunrise and had breakfast sitting on the top of a huge boulder, crowning the edge of a mountainous height and cutting steep slope that people feared to peep down. The mountain peak known as Habla is one of the peaks on the Aseer Mountain range, which is part of the Sarawat Mountains, running parallel to the Red Sea’s eastern coastline, extending the Hijaz Mountain range to the Southern borders of Saudi Arabia.                                               Part of the plan was to start way earlier so that we could watch the sunrise, and December was never kind to the people of this part of the world. Being so precarious and knowing much more about what was happening around me, I said no without sounding blunt. Still, I had to follow
Read more

Mandi: From Pen to Plate in 11 Frames

-
Image
Mandi (مندي) is a special steak and rice dish, a staple at special occasions such as Eid, parties, and wedding feasts among Arabs. Originating in Hadhramouth, Yemen, it soon made inroads into the entire Arabian peninsula, Sub-Saharan Africa, and recently the Southeast Asian countries too, mostly on account of its oil-free and exotic style of cooking. In short, the fat from suspended meat drips onto the rice being cooked underneath. The meat gets exquisitely tender, which is probably why the name "mandi" (from nada ندى meaning 'dew' or 'snowflakes') was chosen. Mutton (preferably lamb), chicken, and camel are the usual meats prepared this way.  Let us start with a three-month-old lamb raised nibbling on tender blades of subtropical desert grass and shrubs, often roaming free on vast stretches of the mountainous landscape. At the peak of summer, these lambs even dig up the land and eat the roots of plants underneath. A pit is dug about four feet d
Read more