This blogger is not much into scientific names of birds. Mostly browse through but some names strikes. Saxicola caprata is one like that. It’s a name for a tiny bird common through out the subcontinent, some confines to hills but avoid thick forest (the above was taken at Sholyar Dam hills). Their note is like two stones knocked together, common to Chats from which they derive. It has a pleasing short song. They are generally found perched on vantage point that has view over bare ground in the vicinity thus prefers land with low shrub and near water bodies, it takes its food (entirely insects) thus. They prefer well concealed nest on the ground. The above pic is that of young one complete black plumage except under tail since it doesn’t get white band on the wing till about two years, and it is sub-specie that has abdomen black unlike the white bellied that is common in the plains. The female have grayish brown plumage.
This few stanzas from Borges’s poem I came across, it is one the best I have read
To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
into a music, a sound, and a symbol.
To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadness--such is poetry,
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.
Sometimes at evening there's a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.
They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca
Art is that Ithaca
a green eternity, not wonders.
Art is endless like a river flowing,
inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
and yet another, like the river flowing.
Borges (1899-1986)was an Argentinean poet, short story writer and essayist (complete name being Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo, phew!!). When 1955 he was made head of the National Library he had become fully blind due to a hereditary disease. He writes…
Nobody should think that I, by tear or reproach, make light
Of the mastery of God who,
With excellent irony,
Gave me at once both books and night.
Borges is someone I came across in the dusty shelf of Central Secretariat library (in Delhi), it was just about the time when after many stints of 9-5 jobs in god knows what all places in what all occupations that I took firm decision on no more full time jobs (I had just quit a job at publishing), and found myself with lot of time and lot to read. This library was also an escape from horrible heat of summer not to mention sometimes I would sneak into ministries nearby and have excellent food at discount rate, I did enjoy Rajma-chawal plate at the road side stall nearby. Things have changed so drastically because of jihadi macaques that anyone who try this now could be in serious trouble. One of my favorite short story is “Borges and I” it is a kind of an autobiography you would rarely witness in fiction. It is also an insight into the writer…"…it would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature jus
tifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things. Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger, I shall remain in Borges, not in myself ……..thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.
I do not know which of us has written this page.”
Another of his fine story is “Everything and Nothing”. It starts quite brilliantly “There was no one in him; behind his face (which even bad painting of those times resembles no other) and his words, which were copious, fantastic and stormy, there was only a bit of coldness, a dream dreamt by no one. At first he thought that all people were like him, but the astonishment of a friend to whom he had begun to speak of his emptiness showed him his error and made him feel always that an individual should not differ in outward appearance. Once he thought that in books he would find cure for his ill and thus he learned…instinctively he had already become proficient in the habit of simulating that he was someone, so that others would not discover his condition as no one…”.
It goes on like this “His histrionic tasks brought him a singular satisfaction, perhaps the first he had ever known; but once the last verse has been acclaimed and the last dead man withdrawn from stage, the hated flavor of unreality returned to him. He ceased to be Ferrex or Tamerlane and became no one again. Thus hounded he took to imagining other heroes and other tragic fables. And so, while his flesh fulfilled his destiny as flesh in taverns and brothels of
The story ends this way that reminded me Bhagvad Gita “History adds that before or after dying he found himself in the presence of god and told him ‘I who have been so many men in vain want to be one and myself’. The voice of the Lord answered from whirlwind: ‘Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dreams are you, who like myself are many and no one.’”
Now that is a good story!. 
