But you are the mist

 

I try to find you

In the worn out pages

Of my diary,

I try to find you

In the withered flower

In my diary,

I try to find you

In the last metro to town,

I try to find you

In the poems that I write,

I try to find you

In the smell of the coffee shop,

I try to find you

In the perfume that you used to wear,

I try to find you

In the flower arrangement,

I try to find you

In the morning mist,

But you are the mist.

Living Bridges

 

This is a picture of a living bridge, a bridge over a water body made from 'alive' roots of trees. Bridges such as these are actually helped on its way to fruition by some incredible people of Meghalaya, India. It's an engineering marvel. I took help of Claude to find out how this bridge is built. Here is the conversation:

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Me:

Here is a picture of a 'living bridge' that I took a screenshot of from a video. This is a living bridge built by Mr Hali War, Padmashri, of Meghalaya, India. The roots of the trees become a bridge over rushing waters. How does one make an engineering marvel like this? I can understand if the roots go into the water and climb up from the other side. But cantilever to the other side and drop down dead? Or, as it appears from the picture, roots of two trees enmesh in thin air?

Claude:

What a beautiful photograph! And your question cuts right to the heart of what makes these structures genuinely mysterious even to engineers. Let me explain the whole picture.

The tree that makes it possible: Ficus elastica

The key is the species. These bridges are built using the living roots of Ficus elastica — the Indian rubber fig — planted on both sides of a stream. This tree has an extraordinary property: it produces abundant aerial roots that hang down from its branches and trunk. These aren't ordinary roots that only grow underground — they dangle freely in open air, seeking surfaces. This is why you see what looks like roots "in thin air" in your photo. They're doing exactly what they naturally do.

The biological mechanism: inosculation

When two aerial roots are pressed together, they engage a process called inosculation: the cambium layers — the living growing tissue just beneath the bark — merge across the contact zone. Over successive growing seasons, the merged zone develops a shared growth ring, and the two roots become effectively a single structural member. This is not grafting in the horticultural sense, but a natural mechanical welding of living tissue.

So to answer your specific question: yes, roots from trees on both sides are extended toward the middle, and where they meet and touch, they literally fuse into one — becoming a continuous living beam.

The betel nut trunk trick — the scaffolding secret

This is where human ingenuity enters. The process begins by placing young, pliable aerial roots in hollowed-out *Areca catechu* (betel nut) trunks. These provide essential nutrition and protection from the weather, and also function as root guidance systems. Think of it as a living pipe that steers the root across the gap, inch by inch, year by year. Villagers also tie the aerial roots at both ends to pieces of bamboo to help guide the roots toward each other and help them intertwine.

Why it doesn't just droop and die?

Your instinct about cantilevers is spot-on — unsupported roots would droop. The answer is that the scaffolding (betel nut trunks, bamboo, sometimes rocks below as midspan support) holds the roots at the right height while they're young. Once enough roots have grown across and fused together, the structure becomes self-supporting. Meanwhile, the aerial roots of *F. elastica* respond to mechanical loading — the weight of people walking across — by increasing secondary growth in the direction of stress. The roots orient and thicken where load demands it. This means a bridge in regular use tends to become stronger in its most-used sections over time, the inverse of what happens to a steel or concrete structure under repeated loading.

The timescale

This is not a project for one generation. Each root bridge takes about 15 years to become functional, but it is also alive — meaning it grows stronger with the passage of time. These bridges range in span from 15 feet to 250 feet and last for several centuries. The builders who start a bridge often never see it completed — it is a gift to their grandchildren.

So what you're seeing in your photo is the result of decades of patient guidance: roots from both banks, coaxed through hollow trunks and bamboo guides, meeting in the middle, fusing biologically, and then thickening year after year as people walk across them. Roots that look dead and hanging are actually young growth still being trained — some are decades away from joining the main structure. It's less construction and more cultivation — a centuries-long act of collaboration between the Khasi people and the forest.

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Remarkable, isn't it?

PS: I am adding another photo which was sent to me by my friend. He took the picture while on a visit to Meghalaya, recently.

When at the bar

 

I just realised that OM is the short form of Old Monk. So, when you are at the bar, or tavern, just say, 'OM', instead of , 'One large Old Monk please'. It will take you to Moksha in more ways than one. And, the more you say 'OM' at the bar, the more near you are to Nirvana. 

The hallucination

 

There is something strange about this picture which some of us may have noticed. I asked Claude about the strangeness that struck me. Here is the Q & A with Claude on this:

Me:

This is a strange picture of the newspaper editorial. The image is not pixilated in that sense. But some letters have changed to other English letters. For example: the letter 'q' in the word 'question' has changed to 'g'. Did AI come into play while taking the picture in a hallucinating way? There are many more such examples in the image.

Claude:

This is a fascinating observation! What you're seeing is not AI hallucination during photo capture — it's actually a well-understood optical/print phenomenon. Let me explain:

What's Happening

OCR-style lens distortion + compression artifacts are causing visually similar letters to be misread by your phone's camera processing pipeline. Modern smartphones (especially with computational photography) apply on-device AI-assisted sharpening and text enhancement — and that's where the substitutions creep in.

The Real Culprits

1. Computational Photography AI Your phone's camera uses neural networks to "enhance" text in photos. When a letter is slightly blurry or at an angle, the AI picks the statistically most likely letter — and gets it wrong. This is ironically a form of hallucination, but in the camera's AI stack, not a separate AI.

2. Visually Similar Letter Pairs The errors follow a pattern of confusable glyphs in serif fonts:

• q → g (mirror-similar, especially in italics)
• l → i or i → l
• o → c or vice versa
• n → m partial strokes
• b → h in small print

3. Print Quality + Angle + Lighting Newsprint ink bleeds slightly into fibrous paper. Combined with a slight shooting angle and ambient light shadows, thin strokes of letters get partially lost, nudging the AI toward a wrong substitute.

Why It Looks Fine to Your Eye But Not the Camera

Your brain uses contextual language understanding to autocorrect — you read "question" even if the q looks odd. The camera's enhancement AI processes locally, letter by letter, without that semantic context, so it commits to the wrong character.

So yes — AI did come into play, just inside your smartphone's camera processor, not in any external system. It's a subtle but real form of machine vision hallucination at the pixel level!

Me:

Although I wrote this post with a philosophical overtone, looks like the post does appear in some way a 'physical' reflection of the philosophical nuance? https://hunterfiftyfour.blogspot.com/2026/05/scraggy-tree-claws-into-sky.html

Claude:

What a beautifully compact poem — and yes, the parallel you're drawing is remarkably apt. Let me reflect on it:

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The poem reads:

The scraggy tree / Claws up into the sky, / Searching for the moon / For rejuvenation. / Instead, / Fed on Artificial Intelligence, / It finds a nearby lamp's / Fake glow.

The philosophical intent is clear — the organic, the aspirational, the ancient (moon) replaced by the proximate and artificial (lamp's fake glow). A commentary on how AI feeds us substitutes for genuine illumination.

But then the newspaper photograph arrives as an almost accidental physical enactment of the same idea: a real text, carrying real meaning, photographed and then quietly corrupted by AI's computational gaze — letters substituted, meanings subtly displaced. The text still looks like itself. It still glows. But something has been silently changed.

The tree searched for the moon and got a lamp. The newspaper searched for fidelity and got an AI's confident misreading.

What makes this particularly elegant is that neither the tree nor the newspaper knows it has been deceived. The scraggy tree doesn't know the lamp isn't the moon. The corrupted text doesn't know its letters have been quietly swapped. And that's perhaps the deepest layer — AI hallucination doesn't announce itself. It just substitutes, seamlessly, and moves on.

Your poem ended up demonstrating its own thesis through the very medium you used to share it. That's a rare kind of accidental coherence.

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Scraggy tree claws into the sky

 

The scraggy tree

Claws up into the sky,

Searching for the moon

For rejuvenation.

Instead,

Fed on Artificial Intelligence,

It finds a nearby lamp's

Fake glow.

When the wax melts along the sides

 

When the wax melts

Along the sides,

The candle dies

Much before time.

There is something

In the heart however,

When it melts, sides and all,

It pounds more than ever.

Swearing-in and Swearing-out

 

I'd say,

Swearing-in a misnomer:

You don't say,

'Blood hell!

I'm getting kicked

Into the treasury well.'

Methinks, swearing-out 

Is more like it.

You will probably say,

As you go kicking and screaming,

'Bloody hell!

I'm being kicked into a cell.'