Brown Motion

I was browsing online one evening when I happened on a recording of maestro Jagjit Singh in concert at the Sydney Opera house where he regaled the crowds with his (true to his name) indomitable voice and sang a famous ghazal called  - Wo Kagaz ki Kashti (One paper boat). This ghazal that Jagjit belts out showcases why he is indeed a master singer where he reminisces and gets nostalgic of a past that he misses dearly.  He longs for a simpler time where kids play in the rain water with paper boats.  He remembers how wisdom was not some complex idea but metaphorically an old lady on the corner with her million wrinkles that always had a long story to tell about many a thing and time flew by when listening to her tales. That made me think back some 40 years when my paternal grandmother who visited our place in Bombay with a Quasimodo like back and entertained me and my sibling through many an otherwise boring evening with tales of kings and kingdoms of a past that seemed as amazing as

I have been in many a crowd.  If you take the idioms to heart that would make me a perpetual occupant of one - crowd that is.  Since two is company and three is a crowd. But I am referring to the serious mass accumulations on the planet.  I have been amidst a variety of those.  They are different in their mood and temperament as I have come to notice. They are also temporary or constant.  The crowd phenom is one where I am one amidst many of my species but not necessarily of my cultural background (I'm not sure what that may be but whatever) in the literal sense. Say for example traipsing through a national park in some country.  Many nationalities and varieties of humans are crowding to see the major natural landscape and gape in awe in their own special way.  These are ephemeral events as these individuals disperse at the onset of dusk or where they have a flight to catch etc.  They have arrived from many parts of the globe to witness something magical and uplifting.  I

Visited Sonoma County today.  The rolling hills east of the Pacific are perfect breeding ground for good grapes.  The morning mist coming off the Pacific hangs out late cooling the grapes until the sun burns off the fog and the loose clay soil adds flavoring to the fruit. Chemistry of each acre creates a varietal within a type of grape giving the oenophiles something to crow about. I checked out a few wineries in the region looking for my kind of beverage, that with high residual sugar.  Found two. One winery located  at the end of a winding road bordered by large old growth eucalyptus served an amazing 'late harvest sweet wine'. Founded by a Hungarian migrant in mid 19th century it had the best tasting wine in today's tasting.  A nobleman born in Pest migrated in early 19th century seeking to see what the land of the free promised him and ended up in Sonoma where we played with some vine growing importing plants from his native land.  Tokaj is a region that crea

Back in the 70s when I grew up in erstwhile Bombay, now Mumbai, there was a burb where the planes flew from and it was called Santa Cruz.  It was almost synonymous to locals as Bombay's airport.  There was probably sketchy international service back then and all of domestic traffic operated on the two runways. Fast forward to California and I found a town on the Pacific coast also by the same name.  This one named by a Spanish explorer and labeled to mean the Holy Cross (Santa Cruz).  Well actually I had found it many moons ago and have visited often but this past Thanksgiving it was another day of R&R that found the familia doing familiar things and celebrating nature around us.  Thanking the good earth for the beauty it has to offer, our way of Thanksgiving.  The only bird(s) we enjoyed were the brown pelicans on the coast. So going back to what was special this time around was a visit to two regional parks operated under the State Parks jurisdiction.  Unlike the NPS whi