Clouded Thoughts, Silver Lining…..🌤️🌧️⛈️

While travelling, I usually pass the time absorbed in books. But on a recent early morning flight from Mumbai, groggy and drowsy, I set them aside and let my gaze drift through the aircraft window. To my surprise, I had never found the fluffy, scattered billows of clouds—shifting endlessly in form—so deeply engaging and fascinating.

While clicking those cloud pictures, I knew I was acting like an excited child , a first-time flyer, but there was something truly ineffable, inexplicable about the beauty of that cotton-candy sky.

From above, the clouds gleamed brilliantly, bathed in sunlight, with rays dancing across their surface. Yet from the ground, the same sky appears dark, overcast, and gloomy. Perspective, I realised, changes everything. The magical expanse stretched like the kṣīra sāgara—the mythic ocean of milk, abode of Lord Vishnu—milky meadows of light that invited me to imagine Lakshmi at His side and the great serpent on which He reclines.

As the plane whooshed past, the cumulus clouds turned into shape-shifters—a crocodile here, a deer there, a galloping horse somewhere ,a duck, a bear a gamut if imaginations running amok…..The sky transformed into a gallery of living forms, a cornucopia of beauty and wonder. No silver lining, only billows of gleaming silver-white, leaving me truly on cloud nine. Suddenly, a towering cumulonimbus loomed like a mighty ship on an endless voyage, and my imagination, like the sky itself, knew no limits. Truly clouds are the most beautiful poetry written on the endless backdrop of vast skies , awe inspiring paintings on the endless canvas of lapis blue bright sky..

And then a thought struck me: Are we not, too, woven from water, air, and earth, destined to merge back into them? Our forms may shift and dissolve, but the essence—the ātman, the Brahman—remains unchanged like that vast sky..

The ephemeral clouds seemed like reminders of life’s fleeting forms, divine abodes of angels painted on a vast canvas of sky, awaiting our imagination. What we choose to see—monsters with horns, celestial dancers, or trotting horses—is entirely ours.

Yet, against these musings, reality intrudes. The very clouds that enchant from above have, in recent years, become bearers of destruction. Frequent cloudbursts have turned these moisture-laden billows into wretched villains, unleashing monsoon mayhem across the Himalayas. Entire towns, villages, and valleys lie inundated, lives and livelihoods washed away. But reflection reveals that clouds are not the culprits. The blame lies in our own actions—mindless concretisation of fragile hills, relentless deforestation, and unregulated construction that strip the mountains of their natural resilience. Global warming has already burdened the air with excess moisture, and when the sky’s tank bursts, the water has nowhere to go but downward in catastrophic flash floods.

The truth is clear -it is not the clouds but our own meddling with nature, compounded by erratic monsoon patterns and extreme rainfall events, that wreak such havoc. Yet, we must not let despair overwhelm us. Every cloud, after all, has a silver lining. Perhaps the day is not far when wisdom prevails, when humankind learns once again to respect the rhythms of nature. Then the sight of clouds will not fill us with fear, but with the joy of being on cloud nine, forever unfolding their swirling, mysterious wonders. In them, let us continue to find reflections of life’s simplest yet most profound moments..