Because I'm <s>grumpy</s> happy

As I return kicking and screaming gratefully to the disgusting dustpan verdant oasis that is Delhi, I am struck yet again by how batshit crazy eccentric its murderously aggressive amusingly moody citizens can be. When I open the advertorials newspapers in the noxious fumes crisp winter morning, to the sound of the strangled croaking of the last few surviving sparrows birdsong, I am depressed beyond description heartened and invigorated by the great backward slides forward strides our country is making in claiming that everything originated in India progressive education, encouraging people to hate each other communal harmony, and bringing black money stored in shady overseas accounts I don't even know what you're talking about.

I hope you can tell that I'm trying hard to be positive. You can't possibly appreciate how impressive that is, seeing as how it involves stabbing my real self to death, hacking it to pieces, mailing them to different places, and then watching them inexorably re-converge to form the glass-half-empty depressive whiner that is my indestructible true self.

But I'm trying, because I went off to the mountains for a two-day recharge, and I always come back from there with goofy, unfocused eyes and tweety birds circling my head. The nine hours' drive either way, six of which consist of boring highway and such choking pits thriving crucibles of life as Hapur and Rudrapur, are more than worth it. Speaking of which, it occurred to me that small town India - not Tier Two India, but unclassified, small town India - might be the very definition of hell a great challenge to live in without ripping out your own liver giving in to a certain ennui. Swachch Bharat is nowhere to be seen, and dug up earth plainly shows geological strata comprised entirely of blue plastic bags. But back to the mountains.

By end-November the freeze hasn't yet set in, but you still want a fleece during the day and a fire in the evening. I chose this time to go up because the cold, clear weather unveils the Himalayas, which are so ridiculously good-looking that if they were lonely they could never find a date, because all the other mountain ranges in the world would be too intimidated and tongue-tied to even say hello, let alone get serious, move in, and have a bunch of little foothills.

From where I was you could see them in a shining white string from the massive scalloped bulk of Trishul and the presiding goddess of Kumaon, Nanda Devi, to the five sharp canines of the Panchachuli range and the Api-Nampa peaks in Nepal. The whole thing looks like the EKG of a god with ventricular fibrillation. At sunset there's a fifteen-minute period of magic when the whole snowy parade turns flaming pink - not baby pink, but the unapologetic piggy pink of cartoons - and you can contemplate a rack of strawberry ice cream cones before they fade gently into night. The night sky, by the way, is not a blackboard with stars prettily sequinned on it, but a 3D experience in which you can see the galaxy, see depth and varying distance, and feel the need to send down up silent thanks for having been a part of this mind-bending art installation.

But eventually I had to tear myself away from all this beauty and come back to the soul-throttling exciting city, which has perks of its own. I can't think of any right now, but that's probably because the tweety birds are obstructing my view.

Anyway, I think I am almost dead from could really get used to this being positive thing, and in that spirit, expect normal programming to resume next week would like to wish you a wonderful weekend.

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Mitali Saran is a Delhi-based writer mitali.saran@gmail.com