The bhataktiatma : Travelogue of a wandering soul

“with house nowhere, I belong everywhere” I was eating through the pages of “The shooting star” by Shivya Nath, experiences of modern day digital nomad and her travel throughout the globe when pilot made announcement of landing on Chandigarh airport.   Flight from Pune to Chandigarh was through cloud and turbulences and I could see the reason why, when we landed in Chandigarh, murky river and water filled fields were sight which I was not used to seeing in north Indian city at this time of the year, we knew our trek is not going to be rain free. “Depression has been formed in Indian ocean causing untimely heavy rains” Vikram supplied the information, rainfall pattern had been weird this year otherwise this late into the September we should only be getting clear sky and warm afternoon up in the hills. We were in Chandigarh and on the way to Shimla for our Buran ghati trek with Indiahikes, trek rated as one of the most beautiful meadows trek, but with weather like this we did

Easter holiday was approaching and i didn't want to miss this opportunity of staying away from hot summer city life for a while , hush hush trip to uttarakhand was planned and i was ready to accompany Sudhir Sawant ( Sudhir Sir as we call him) for one of his birding trips. Sudhir Sir is professional wildlife photographer / documentary maker and owner of Jungle Trails,pune. We have been doing lot of small trips with him around pune , this was first opportunity for me to do a dedicated bird photography tour. As birding was the only intention , I had to upgrade my photography kit, my trusted 55-300mm would not be of much use here hence i decided to rent out Nikkor 200-500 from Primes and Zooms , I now at least had proper wildlife photographers shoes to walk with. This was the first time i was doing a dedicated bird photography attempt , I have love photographing animals with whatever limited gear i have but that has never been a primary focus until now so as expected i committed