To the air that changes everything
A Personal Letter on Nature, Heat, Water, and the Breath of Place
Written through the Breath Hacker Lens
Before anything else, breathe in slowly through the nose. Feel where the air is cool. Feel where it thickens. Feel what it carries. That single act will tell you more about a place than any geography textbook ever could.
This is a letter about places. About what places do to the body before the mind has time to form an opinion. About why some landscapes open the lungs and others press against them. About the way a trail on a forested hill, a monsoon-restored lake, an avenue of blooming trees, or even the dry throat of a plateau summer can alter the very frequency at which a person breathes, and therefore the frequency at which that person thinks, feels, and becomes.
It is also an honest letter. Which means it will admit, without apology, that not all beautiful places are equally comfortable to live inside. And that the discomfort of a place and the beauty of a place are sometimes the same thing, experienced in different weather.
Let us begin on a hill.
I. Ralamandal: What the Teak Forest Does to Your Exhale
Ralamandal is fifteen kilometers from the center of Indore, which means it is exactly the right distance. Close enough to be accessible on an idle afternoon. Far enough that the drive itself marks a transition, the city thinning out, traffic finding its end, the road tilting upward into something that smells of dry leaf and teak and the particular silence that thick canopy makes possible.
When I say the forest changes your breath, I mean it literally. The moment you step onto the trail that winds up through the sanctuary’s five square kilometers, something happens in the chest. The breath deepens without your asking it to. This is not metaphor.
This is physiology responding to a change in air composition, in ambient sound, in the reduction of stimuli that usually keep the nervous system in a low-grade defensive crouch.
The body knows a forest before the mind does. It begins to exhale with a completeness that city life simply does not allow.
The Holkars of Indore used this hill as a hunting ground, which tells you something about what powerful people have always understood instinctively: that access to dense, inhabited forest is a form of privilege. The shikargah at the hilltop, their hunting lodge, sits at approximately 3,000 feet, looking down at Indore spread out like a grey-brown dream below. From that elevation, the city becomes abstract.
Its urgencies dissolve. And for a moment, you understand what philosophers mean when they say that perspective is not merely visual. It is respiratory. You breathe differently at altitude, and you think differently in the breath that altitude gives you.
What does Ralamandal look like? It looks like leopards slipping between teak and bamboo, though you will rarely see them. It looks like blackbucks, nilgai, spotted deer grazing in clearings where the sun falls at particular angles that make the light seem curated rather than accidental.
It looks like peacocks who know they are ridiculous and glorious and don’t care, calling across the scrub in the way that large, confident creatures do. It looks like migratory birds arriving for winter, reclaiming the upper canopy, adding a layer of sound to the already layered silence.
But it also looks, if I am honest, like a sanctuary that carries its contradictions on its trails. You hear motorcycles climbing the paved path to the hilltop. You share the forest with weekend crowds who bring their noise with them in plastic bags.
And yet, the forest absorbs it. Not because the forest is indifferent, but because a forest of this age and density operates on a timescale that regards an afternoon crowd the way an ocean regards a stone. The disruption is real. The resilience is realer.
My opinion of Ralamandal is that it is not a destination. It is a practice. You go there not to see a spectacle but to recalibrate. The teak smells like something old being patient.
The view from the hilltop is the view of a person who has climbed far enough above their own life to see its shape. And the breath you take there, full and unhurried and carrying the faint sweetness of dry forest in early morning, is the breath you should be trying to remember when you are back in the city, fighting traffic that has no intention of moving.
II. Why I Hate the Heat in MP: A Philosophical Complaint
Let me say it plainly. The heat of Madhya Pradesh in summer is not dramatic in the way cinema makes heat dramatic. There is no golden shimmer, no poetic haze. There is only a white, flat, uninflected brutality that removes nuance from the air and replaces it with something like a held breath that will not release.
Indore sits on the southern edge of the Malwa Plateau at 553 meters above sea level. This altitude is supposed to moderate things, and in winter it does, producing the famous Shab-e-Malwa, the cool Malwa night that locals speak of with the tenderness people usually reserve for family members.
But from March onward, and with particular viciousness from April through June, the plateau becomes a thermal amplifier. By April, days routinely cross 40 degrees Celsius and push toward 42. By May, 44 degrees Celsius is not a heatwave. It is simply Tuesday.
The heat of MP in summer is not a weather condition. It is an argument the land makes against human comfort, and the land always wins.
What does this do to breath? Everything. Heat compresses the breath. It makes the inhale feel expensive and the exhale feel inadequate. The body, in deep heat, shifts into a kind of conservationist mode: shallow, rapid breaths that do just enough to keep the system running but offer none of the richness that a full, deep breath carries. You cannot think well in that breath. You cannot feel fully in that breath. You are surviving, not living.
The philosophers of classical India who wrote about pranayama understood this without modern thermometers. They wrote about the prana as something that flourished in certain conditions and contracted in others.
The breath-energy available to a person depended not just on their practice but on the environment their practice occurred within. A body breathing in 44-degree, 23-percent-humidity, dust-carrying wind is not operating at the same energetic capacity as a body breathing in cool forest air.
I do not hate the heat of MP because I am weak or because I prefer comfort to character. I hate it because it narrows the world. It takes the large, generous, philosophically rich experience of simply being alive in a body and compresses it into the single, exhausted project of not overheating.
Every resource that should be available for curiosity, connection, and thought gets redirected to the thermoregulation that the body is performing against its will and at great expense.
And yet, I will say this in the heat’s defense: the nights. Indore’s summer nights remain cooler than the days because the plateau elevation keeps a gap between daytime maximum and nighttime minimum that the plains cannot manage. From ten at night, something arrives in the air. A release. A widening. The breath finds more room. Sarafa Bazaar lives in this gap.
The city’s legendary night food culture was, at its origin, an intuitive response to a biological fact: this is when the air becomes generous again. This is when life can be properly lived.
III. March and April in Bangalore: The Inhale the City Earns
Living in Bangalore teaches you something that Indore, for all its beauty, cannot: that a city can breathe visually. That streets can perform seasonality in a way that has nothing to do with cold or rain, only with colour and sequence.
German botanist Gustav Hermann Krumbiegel, hired by the Maharaja of Mysore, planted Bangalore’s avenues over a century ago on a principle that is essentially a breath hacker principle: serial blooming. The idea was not to create a garden that looked beautiful once a year. The idea was to ensure that something was always in bloom, that the city would never present a grey, leafless face to the person moving through it.
He chose trees from around the world, mainly South America, and arranged them so that they handed off the work of colour to each other throughout the calendar.
March and April are the height of this inheritance. They are when the Tabebuia rosea, the pink trumpet tree, drops its leaves entirely and then, as if the nakedness was only preparation, erupts into clusters of pale pink bloom that turn entire avenues into something that Bangalore residents, with characteristic understatement, call their cherry blossom season.
The comparison to Japan is not quite accurate botanically, but it is accurate experientially. There is the same quality of transient extravagance. The same sense that the city has put on something it cannot sustain and knows it, which makes the looking both joyful and tinged with the awareness that this will pass.
Bangalore in March and April does not merely look beautiful. It breathes beautiful. The air carries pollen, the colour carries warmth, and the streets become argument against the idea that cities and nature are opposites.
The Jacaranda follows. Blue-purple and lavender, a haze of colour on the old avenues of central Bangalore, bleeding over the asphalt, collecting on car rooftops, lying scattered on pavements in a carpet that smells of mild sweetness and something vaguely medicinal. By late April, the Gulmohar ignites in red-orange, bringing a fiercer, more assertive kind of beauty that the softer tones of the Tabebuia and Jacaranda could not sustain alone.
To a breath hacker, this seasonal sequence is not merely aesthetic. It is functional. The blooming of these trees in Bangalore’s spring signals a shift in air quality, in the composition of what the lungs are receiving.
Pollen aside, which is a legitimate grievance for the sensitized, the increased canopy coverage of flowering trees reduces urban heat island effects, increases shade, and introduces a complexity into the air that a treeless concrete environment simply does not carry.
Bangalore breathes differently in March and April. People move differently. The slowing of pace on flowering avenues is not imagination. It is the body responding, with characteristic intelligence, to an invitation from the environment.
This is what I miss about Bangalore’s March and April when I am elsewhere. Not just the visual spectacle, though that is considerable. What I miss is the quality of breath. The sense that the city is, momentarily and fully, on your side.
IV. Living Near Sirpur Lake: What Still Water Teaches the Breath
Sirpur Lake was created by the Holkars in the early twentieth century and then nearly destroyed by a century of encroachment, illegal fishing, waste dumping, and the general human tendency to treat a beautiful thing as if beauty were inexhaustible. What saved it was not government policy, though policy eventually helped.
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What saved it was individuals: Bhalu Mondhe, a photographer who started restoring it in the early 1980s alone, and the NGO he later co-founded, The Nature Volunteers, who understood that a lake recovers slowly and requires sustained human attention rather than episodic intervention.
Today, Sirpur Lake is an 800-acre Ramsar site, meaning the international community has recognized it as a wetland of global significance. It is home to more than 130 species of birds.
Migratory birds travel from Mongolia and Siberia to winter on its surface, including the ruddy shelduck, which crosses mountain ranges and continental weather systems to arrive at this particular body of water on the outskirts of Indore.
That last fact is worth sitting with. A bird that breeds in Central Asia and has access to the entirety of the Indian subcontinent’s wetlands has chosen Sirpur. Has learned, across generations of migration, that this specific body of water in western Madhya Pradesh is worth the journey. This is not sentimentality. This is ecological data. And the data says: this place has something.
A lake near your home is not a scenic amenity. It is a breathing partner. It regulates humidity, temperature, sound, and the quality of your most fundamental daily act.
Living near Sirpur is, through the breath hacker’s lens, living adjacent to a respiratory calibration instrument. Early morning at Sirpur Lake is not merely pleasant. It is physiologically specific. The combination of open water, scrub jungle, and the sound of 130-plus bird species creates an acoustic environment that the nervous system interprets as safe.
The parasympathetic system activates. The breath slows and deepens automatically. The morning cortisol spike, the default-mode of the modern human waking into a day of obligations and notifications, attenuates.
The walkways around the lake are maintained and clean, a fact that is less trivial than it sounds. Indore’s cleanliness is its least-glamorous and most important achievement. Eight consecutive years as India’s cleanest city is not a marketing award.
It is the evidence of a civic compact: that the people of a city have agreed, collectively, to treat their shared spaces as worthy of care. At Sirpur, this compact is visible in the maintained paths, the absence of the casual littering that devastates Indian public spaces elsewhere, and the conscious designation of ecological sensitivity zones where human noise is discouraged.
What does living near such a lake do to a person over time? It creates a habit of stillness. The lake teaches patience in the way that only large bodies of still water can: by demonstrating, daily and without argument, that the most significant things are happening at a pace that exceeds human urgency. The migratory birds arrive when they arrive. The water reflects light according to conditions that no one controls. The peafowl moves through scrub on its own logic.
The person who walks the periphery of all this, breathing it in over months and years, does not become passive. They become calibrated. They develop a reference point for stillness that the rest of their life can be measured against.
V. Indore through the Breath Hacker Lens: What Makes This City Different
Indore is unlike any other city I can describe, and I have tried to describe it many times and failed. Not because there are no words, but because the words that work for other Indian cities do not work here. Delhi’s grandeur, Mumbai’s intensity, Bangalore’s cosmopolitanism, Hyderabad’s layered history: Indore borrows none of these as its organizing principle.
Indore’s organizing principle is something more difficult to name. It is something like confident vitality. Like a city that has decided not to explain itself.
On the Malwa Plateau, 553 meters above sea level, the city sits on an elevated plain with the Vindhya range visible to the south. This geography matters. The altitude creates the Shab-e-Malwa, that extraordinary phenomenon of cool night air that preserves Indore from the full horror of its own summer days.
It also creates a quality of light that is particular: cleaner than the plains, with less atmospheric thickness. The sky over Indore on a clear winter morning is a blue that photographers who visit from elsewhere remark upon.
To breathe in Indore is to breathe in contradiction. The summer air is dry and taxing, carrying the dust of a plateau that does not retain moisture easily. But the winter air is alive in a way that requires experiencing rather than describing.
The mornings between October and February carry something that the breath hacker would recognize as optimal: cool enough to activate the nose’s warming function, dry enough to feel clean, elevated enough to carry fewer pollutants than the plains.
Indore breathes in two seasons: one that asks everything of you, and one that gives everything back. The city is interesting precisely because it does both without apology.
But Indore’s uniqueness is not only climatic. It is cultural. A city that has been the cleanest in India for eight consecutive years is a city that has made a collective decision about the relationship between public space and human dignity. Cleanliness is a respiratory matter.
When streets are clean, when waste is managed, when open spaces are maintained, the quality of urban air changes. Not just chemically, though that too, but psychologically. Clean public space sends a message to the body: this environment is safe. You can be here. You do not need to hold yourself in defensive readiness against the assault of disorder.
The street food culture of Indore is, through this lens, a form of civic philosophy made edible. Sarafa Bazaar, which transforms from a jewellery market to an open-air kitchen every night from 9 PM to 2 AM, is one of the most extraordinary public spaces in India.
Not because of the food alone, though the food is extraordinary: the poha, the jalebi, the garadu, the bhutte ka kees, the dahi vada thrown into the air and caught in plates by third-generation vendors who have turned the act of serving food into a performance of trust between the server and the served. Sarafa is extraordinary because it is proof that a city can organize itself around pleasure without losing order. Around generosity without losing efficiency.
What makes Indore unique, then, is not any single landmark or cultural achievement. It is the specific combination of elevation, cleanliness, culinary generosity, the Holkar legacy, the nearby sanctuary of Ralamandal, the restored wetland miracle of Sirpur, and the particular psychological effect of a city that has decided to take its own quality of life seriously. Not as aspiration. As practice.
Ralamandal is the city’s lungs. Sirpur Lake is the city’s still point. Sarafa is the city’s nightly exhalation. And the plateau air, in winter, is the breath the city offers to anyone willing to step outside and receive it.
VI. What Nature Actually Is: A Breath Hacker’s Definition
After all of this, I want to offer something precise, because imprecision about nature is the reason most writing about nature stays at the level of sentiment rather than reaching the level of instruction.
Nature, as a breath hacker understands it, is not scenery. It is not the absence of cities. It is not pristine wilderness untouched by human hands, because such a thing barely exists anywhere on earth, and most of what we call nature was shaped by human attention long before we arrived to admire it.
Sirpur Lake was created by the Holkars. Ralamandal’s green wall of 10,000 trees was planted to buffer the sanctuary from highway noise. Bangalore’s serial-blooming avenues were designed by a German botanist with a philosophy.
Nature, precisely defined, is any environment that contains sufficient complexity to exceed the human nervous system’s capacity to fully process it. A forest is natural not because it is wild, but because it produces more information per second through sound, smell, light variation, air movement, and visual depth than the brain can fully process, which means the brain stops trying to control the environment and begins instead to receive it.
This shift from control-mode to receive-mode is what the breath hacker calls the parasympathetic activation. It is what most people would call relaxation, though that word is too small for the thing.
Nature is the condition in which the breath finally stops holding itself in reserve. In which the body trusts the air enough to take it fully.
This is why a trail through Ralamandal’s teak forest produces the same respiratory shift as a morning at Sirpur Lake produces, and why both produce something similar to what Bangalore’s April avenues produce. They are all environments of sufficient complexity. They all exceed the brain’s management capacity. They all invite the body into receive-mode, and the body, gratefully and immediately, obliges.
The tragedy of the MP summer heat is not aesthetic. It is physiological. Heat of sufficient intensity overwhelms the sensory system in a different direction: it floods rather than feeds. The excessive heat signal monopolizes the body’s attention in the same way that a fire alarm monopolizes a room.
There is no room left for the subtle frequencies of air and sound and light that nature usually broadcasts. The body defaults to its simplest programme: thermoregulation. And in that simplest programme, all the richness of conscious experience is temporarily suspended.
This is the deepest argument for why we need nature, and specifically why we need nature at its best, not merely its average. The body does not just prefer rich, varied, sensory-complex environments. The body requires them in order to function at the level of full human potential.
A city without Sirpur Lake is not just less beautiful. It is less capable of producing the kind of citizens it needs. A life without mornings like Ralamandal’s early hours is not just less pleasant. It is incrementally less wise.
Ralamandal is necessary. Not as an occasional excursion. As a practice. The teak forest and its hilltop view remind you, in the respiratory language that precedes all other language, that the city you live in is a temporary layer over something much older and much larger. That older thing does not need your appreciation. But you need the breath it gives you.
Sirpur Lake is a moral argument in water. A degraded lake that was restored by individuals who refused to accept that beauty, once lost, cannot be recovered. It is proof that the most important environmental interventions are not grand and distant but local and sustained. Live near it if you can. Walk around it every morning if you can. Let it calibrate you.
Bangalore’s March and April are the city’s most honest months. The rest of the year, Bangalore presents its contradictions: traffic, growth, pressure, ambition. In March and April, it presents its inheritance. Jacaranda, Tabebuia, Gulmohar. A century-old decision to make beauty structural rather than incidental. The city breathes in colour then, and everyone who moves through it breathes differently in return.
The heat of Madhya Pradesh is not beautiful, but it is honest. It does not lie about what the plateau is in summer. It does not pretend the land is comfortable when it is not. There is a philosophical integrity to a climate that makes no concessions. And the Shab-e-Malwa, the cool nights that reward those who stayed through the brutal days, is among the most genuinely earned pleasures I know.
And Indore itself, as a proposition, is this: a city that takes cleanliness, food, history, ecology, and civic life seriously simultaneously, and manages to be neither self-righteous nor complacent about any of them. A city that breathes, in winter, like a body that has finally found its depth.
Pay attention to what a place does to your breath before you decide what you think about it. The body is a better critic of environment than the mind. A place that opens your lungs without your asking, that deepens your exhale and slows your inhale without instruction, is a place that is working in your favor. Seek those places. Return to them.
Build your life in proximity to them. Not because nature is a luxury, but because the breath that nature gives you is the foundational resource from which every other form of human flourishing is drawn.
The Holkar queens who built Sirpur Lake knew this. The botanist who planted Bangalore’s serial blooms knew this. The Nature Volunteers who restored a dying wetland with their own hands knew this. They were all, in their different. People who understood that the quality of the air around a human being determines, more than almost anything else, the quality of the human being themselves.
Take care of the places that take care of your breath. That is the whole of it.
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Ralamandal Wildlife Sanctuary | Sirpur Lake, Indore | Bangalore’s Blooming Streets | Malwa Plateau, Madhya Pradesh
