Prasanna Raghavan

No doubt, my favorite season of the year is spring.  That is the period in which the nature pauses graciously on its fashion ramp in the most eye-catching make-over. I fondly remember the Kerala spring, though we hadn't used that word in our common vocabulary, because we weren't that conscious about transitional seasons; we talked only about rainy season and summer. Instead the arrival of spring, we associated with the arrival of Onam, which is a harvest festival. It came as a relief from a three-month's horrendous, South-Western Monsoon. For the three months it poured non-stop, breaking the sky into a constant war zone.The dark cumulus clouds ran amok over our head like maddened elephants, clashing violently forming thunderclouds shrieking with thunders and lightening. It appeared the Monsoon relished a sort of cruel pleasure when it reeked insurmountable havoc in the lives of people, especially the poor and the deprived.  Those who received its worst firing rage were the

Tree on winter meditation  What am I thinking about now? I'm thinking about a tree, I see daily, outside my window. It belongs to the Betula Pendula species, commonly known by the name Silver Birch It's reminding me of the beauty of a temporal transformation. When I was in Kerala, the facts of seasonal changes weren't something that affected my sense of reality much, because there I never got a chance to experience them in such sharp contrasts. But in South Africa we have all four seasons,from 1 June to 31 August it's winter. So right now it's winter here. After that from 1 September to 30 November it's spring and the summer starts on 1st December and ends by the end of February. Here, I am watching the tree's transformation, as it happens daily.  I have captured two momentous points in its transformation through two photographs. Already by the beginning of the winter it started losing leaves and would stay in that state until the beginning of September, whe

The car screeched into the parking lot at a high speed and stopped haphazardly. Not straightening its position for fellow drivers' convenience, she stepped out of it and walked in the direction of the building close by. The building wasn't causing any interest in her. Not because of its dull quaint appearance, but because it was a police station. She had been lucky so far. Never had to step inside a police station, that brutal world, only  seen the outside of one or two standing far away.  That brought us to the point that her fears were not drawn out of any firsthand experiences. But the tell-tale stories were all over. Just read the newspapers and the Facebook posts. Men not officially charged with any offences were beaten up within its four walls, and women reporting offences were raped even using bayonets and guns. Her feet thumped hurriedly on the dirty path to the building and at its end, she climbed up a flight of  cement steps to reach a narrow open space. Two flower po