Tilt that busy head a little towards the sky. Watch a playful cloud wafting along. Notice their stillness; observe their transience. And drift along with them. No two clouds are alike. Like most beautiful things in nature, clouds too present themselves in an infinite variety of shapes, sizes, textures and moods. For a discerning cloud-seeker, there are thick clouds and thin; white clouds and grey; motionless as well as racing enthusiasts; singing clouds and thundering ones; beckoning clouds and threatening demons...
Clouds assume an ethereal unworldly quality when darkness descends. Evenings are, perhaps, the best time to catch them, especially on a less overcast day. When the sun, in an act of desperation, draws aside the engulfing haze and decorates the elegant cloud with a silver lining… there is magic on the horizon!
Clouds have inspired many artists, poets, scholars and scientists from times immemorial. Kalidasa made his romantic hero, the yaksha, plead with intense love and longing: ‘Learn first, O cloud, the road that thou must go/Then hear my message ere thou speed away…’ (Meghadoota)
For Percy Bysshe Shelly, the cloud was ‘the daughter of Earth and Water, And the nursling of the Sky’. Mark Twain could even see a divine presence: “The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious. And why shouldn’t it be? — it is the same the angels breathe.’ But perhaps the last word should go to Rabindranath Tagore who famously and eloquently said: ‘Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add colour to my sunset sky.’
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