Mobility and Roots

Everyday we drove  from our Hospet address, via Hampi Road into the countryside. Hospet town is always a joy to escape from, since it has an ugly bustling market crammed with  leaf, flower, fruit , provisions and numerous other things, but no  really memorable place that invites a visit.  Nor do occupied pavements, testimonial to our poor urban planning skills, provide space for any kind of leisured saunter.
      This time we were back  on Hampi Road to view the main cluster  of  temple buildings, which are best described by that old cliche, poetry in stone.  After a circumambulatory stroll we reached the Virupaksha Temple, which  is still in use. It has its own elephant, a vivacious fellow in robust black who takes bananas from the hands of visitors and  pats them on the head exercising great discretion.  The temple is grand and peopled, intricately carved and pillared, with a central pavilion housing a handsome god and a ceiling  painted with intricate murals. We waited in line to enter the sanctum sanctorum  with its renovated  flooring of shiny gray granite tiles.
Eventually,  we walked out towards the right side of the temple to the river's edge, past the promenade to the wall with steps that led right down to the water. We  watched this inspiring sight, blue water with  many pavilions and cave like structures and large crags in the middle of the water, and people in regular boats and basket boats,  and beside shady trees on the embankment and  little  wayside eateries serving snacks and tea and coconut water.
The steps from where one can watch the river communicate a sense of serenity. This is routine everyday activity, the rhythms of  visitors thronging to the temple and  then to the scenic river's edge for a glimpse into a bucolic world. Having had our fill, we head back to the temple, retrieve  our footwear and head out of the main entrance  to the market that flanks both sides of the road. There are sellers of fruit and brass and prayer accessories and odds and ends, possibly recently displaced from a series of  demolished structures all along the road.
We stop at a colourful stall selling bric a brac, mostly cushions and spreads and bags and buy a few colourful embroidered and mirror embellished bags that recall the work of kutch craftswomen.  The ebullient woman who sells them tells us she is a Lambadi,  from one of India's extant gypsy tribes.  The only lambadis I have met before have been all of us dressed in special costumes and beads rehearsing for a school dance. How little we know of this woman's life  and  even less of the Dhanajars whom we see as we drive past stretches of agricultural land in parts of northern Karnataka.  Srinivas tells us when we ask him that the Dhanajars  are keepers of goat and sheep and that when the harvest is done, they help in clearing the land by bringing their flock to  feed on the fodder left in the fields. They can be found in small groups in fields where the harvest has been gathered. I saw some of them scouring out vessels beside a water source while yet another small group sat beside  a cooking cauldron  with pots and pans and blue tarpaulin tied on the backs of horses.

When one stops to think of it, this is a wonderful symbiosis of recycling and use, and one that sets the food chain in motion  as it were perpetually.  Of course, questions remain. Where do the Dhanajars go when the harvest is over?  Do they store collected hay for the cold season?  They possibly sleep under  tarpaulins and keep their flock in barred enclosures.  Fortunately Karnataka is not subject to the kind of biting cold that reigns supreme in the Northern plains. Our car slows down many times for the flock of sheep and goat to pass. One time we see mules carrying little  cloth panniers on their back and from them recently-born  baby goats peer out, making  for a delightful picture. It is the most unusual mobile nursery I have seen and with  a bunch of incredibly bright eyed (goat) kids.This is probably the safest way to move the babies in the group.

I wonder if there is  a market in India for goats' milk and cheese. Our  nation's first father consumed goat's milk. Apparently the milk is more easily digestible and  the goat itself is a compact and easier to raise animal. Now that terrible truths about dairy cholesterol are being uncovered, will the quest for health foods direct the dhanajars towards a less nomadic life? Will they be able to use this as an  effective bargaining point with  resident farmers? Would that mean a better deal for them or a better life? It is wonderful to sleep under the stars and  move to  where the harvested fields lead you but to do this forever and a day seems a trifle daunting.What does this mean for the succeeding generations  that tend to the flock?  Do they get access to schooling  and to other ways of living? Maybe all this is mere  wishful thinking, induced by the view from a car window.
We return to Hospet and I sight yet again  a young lad sitting on the pavement with some sort of gourd in front of him. This time I get out of the car to explore. The beautiful gourd like object is in fact a large root. Cut to about half its length , the outside  looks rather like a brown leather drum  with  taut white skin on top. The name of this root is Poo Shakaragandi or kandamolai. It has the texture and flavour of raw banana stem,  extendable to the taste of  raw shakkargandi or sweet potato The  young man cuts out thin slices for me that look rather  like bits of gauda cheese. He offers to sprinkle sugar over the pieces which I decline.


This is yet another of the seasonal offerings that nature so generously sends our way, fast losing its  foothold in our dusty towns and cities.

Hirebenkal and History

   We visited Hirebenkal one fine morning. Hirebenkal is about thirty odd kilometres from Hospet, and is spectacular, since it suddenly springs into view almost unexpectedly. India's Valley of the Dead, so called, because of the enormous quantities of  megaliths that are spread through an entire stretch. At some point the dead were ritually buried under these huge capstones, dolmens, and hut like structures with portholes. No evidence now remains of any  human bones, nothing except these large stones all over the place,  washed clean by centuries of wind and rain. The entire hillside looks like an abandoned village.
 The men and maybe women who set up this burial site, possibly commemorative or ceremonial,  lived on another stretch of the mountains, but even less trace remains of their daily lives.  Rural  and pastoral lives, framed by thatched roofs, cannot be expected to survive a period of over two thousand years.
So these monuments to the dead are all we have, to understand these ancient people by, and we drink in the   rich, green gorgeous landscape, plentiful with  water, where they once lived. The ASI has identified the place and put up some signs and posts, but it is still rather difficult to access. Notices  warn people not to disturb the stones because no treasure lies buried underneath. Not that anyone is reading these instructions or taking them to heart. The entire stretch  is in need of   urgent attention.  It needs to be made visitor accessible and visitor friendly, and there is desperate need both for information from human sources as well as public conveniences. The ASI officials are probably busy doing good work elsewhere but surely they could consider recruiting  young people living in the area to guide people around the megaliths.   We were lucky to have people working with the ASI who could take us there, but this is not really the norm.

This picture is typical of the landscape we walked through to access this  secluded and little mentioned area.

What continues to puzzle me is that I grew up reading about Stonehenge in the English Countryside and the men and women who might have built it as a site of worship, and the  barrows in the adjoining vallleys where they were buried. How is it that years of history lessons never alerted me to the presence of such a marvellous site, in my own country? I received my schooling long years after the ASI had identified this as a protected monument!
 What is it that stops our historians and our administrators from disseminating information about such astounding sites?   Hirebenkal is definitely an important marker of an ancient civilizational cradle, but it exists outside the imagination of  our countrymen and women. Anywhere else in the world, such a site would have been treated as a national treasure trove and local adminstration would have vied to increase the footfalls.   Schools all over the country that incorporate educational trips could definitely take their students to visit this megalithic site , thereby sensitizing them to our rich heritage.
The countryside around the megalithic site, well outside a hypothetical three kilometre radius has great potential as camping and trekking grounds. Greater visibility would add to the lives of the people who continue to live in the area. It would also substantiate our claims  to  cultural and geographical diversity as  a nation and make history come alive instead of being neglected in terribly produced black and white textbooks? And perhaps  young people would  dream of   trekking in Northern Karnataka and visiting  Hirebenkal someday because it is a worthwhile thing to do?
In today's newspaper,  Justice Katju speaks of  our poets, Ghalib, Sarat Chandra and  Subramania Bharathi and the need to be honour them with the Bharat Ratna, our highest civilian award, so that we  create  a long history of  real heroes to look up to, albeit posthumously.  He accurately pinpoints our national reading deficit and the abundant poetry and prose in our national languages which  have generated  very limited interest. What we as a nation  also suffer from is a deficit of both real and imagined spaces. This is a huge pity because we have abundant sources in the vast peopled expanses  of our country and in the landscape, both natural and man made. We must make much  much more of our geography, history and literature!

Coffee, Tea and Me

 Hospet was our launchpad for expeditions into different parts of Northern  Karnataka. We stayed at an upmarket hotel cum lodge, which had a choice of air-conditioned  and  parabola edged  rooms with french windows that allowed you  to look  outside. There wasn't much to see; one large multistoreyed building  with a large tree  and stretches of concrete terraces and water tanks but the room was airy and comfortable and had colour TV.
What we struggled with were  the beverages! Of course I use the plural we here when the truth of the matter is that my friend has surmounted the challenges that the absence of beverages  can set up. So while I complained that the morning tea looked like all the kitchen cloths had been boiled in it and  shuddered whenever I broke through the ugly brown encrustation to  encounter a thick viscous over-sugared brew,  she stoically sipped  black coffee without sugar, without even so much as a murmur.
My objections of course have a long pre-history. Despite growing up in New Delhi in a fresh-filter-coffee-preparing- family  and  subsequently marrying into yet another coffee filter entrenched family, I had unashamedly succumbed to the delicate flavours of Darjeeling leaf tea and was completely besotted by Runglee Rungliot, Razia Begum, Orange Pekoe and  for want of an alternative, Lipton's Green Label, which if fresh can make for a pretty decent brew.
Each morning at Hospet brought on the attendant trauma of terrible tea and I had not  brought along with me any tea in instant teabags since it is my unswerving belief  that bagged leaf teas never rise to any occasion.
 So there was nothing much to do except gulp down the ghastly liquid that postured as tea and comfort oneself  with the knowledge that the morning breakfast was more than suited to the requirements of   a royal delegation. We partook of  fresh iddlis and hot vadais and chutney and sambaar and pongal or special fried rice with a pineapple kesari to boot; all this around 7.30 am in the morning, before we embarked on our day's journey.
We got back on the beverage route when we drank thin highly sugared tea, atop a hill temple at Jatinga Rameshwaram   which, the officiating hosts told us to treat  as prasadam. Tea is psychologically required at moments like this, especially if you have ascended 708 not so easy  steps to view an Ashokan edict,  so we sipped the  brown, warm liquid that could  have easily doubled up as charnamrit.  We dealt with the problem of not having good tea in the evenings eventually by not drinking the beverage after disappointing experiments at roadside tea stalls.
By which time  a wonderful idea took possession of me. This was after all coffee country! You couldnt blame anyone for bad chai. The Western Ghats did not grow leaf tea and possibly the coffee bushes had subdued every bit of  the fragrance in all extant  teacrops. So, I decided to quit complaining about the tea and  ambitiously embarked upon drinking filter coffee, because there is something very compelling about the aroma of   roasting Arabica  and Robusta seeds, especially if you are at your wits end.  I ventured gingerly into coffee territory hoping to savour  filter coffee. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that you could not get filter coffee for love or money in most places.
Our hotel served instant coffee, so did the swankiest hotel in town. Local restaurants which swore by vegetarianism and filter coffee  provided  small tumbler davaras of thick chicory based brew that  had little to do with coffee grounds through which hot water had filtered.  At Lingsur, I ventured out at teatime to a nearby restaurant and ordered a coffee. What I got was ghastly frothy espresso, the kind that auditoriums in New Delhi have been serving since the 1970s, ( made with instant coffee powder) in the interval between two act plays.
 The young man at the counter told me that no filter coffee was available anywhere in Lingsur. When  I shared this insight with our guide Srinivas, who was subject to my daily  beverage anxieties, he averred that I could not hope to drink filter coffee anywhere in North Karnataka. This was a body blow! Now I knew who bought all the Bru coffee that was advertised on television channels! As an attempt to  reconcile myself to bad beverage days, I philosophically reminded myself of my grandmother who had her first cup of coffee at the age of thirty five because the only beverages she drank  until then were milk, buttermilk and   rice gruel or kanji.
 Expecting very little by way of beverage salvation, we travelled to Hirebenkal to view its spectacular megaliths.
At the end of a long day spent traipsing the  Hirebenkal valley, fortified with coconut water and bananas, we headed back along a circular route to our vehicle, marveling at the giant cacti bushes in bloom. One variety, often called the cowblinder cactus or the pear cactus was resplendent with yellow flowers and  pink lotus bud shaped fruit. One ASI official accompanying us, told us that the fruit were edible.  He broke off some fruit from  the cactus  with a stick and proceeded to beat all the thorns out of it, with his stick. I tried holding the fruit in  my bare hands and a shower of fine thorns  immediately attached themselves to my fingers. While I disengaged the almost invisible thorns, Khan sahib had divested the fruit of all its thorns and it was now ready for consumption. He lopped off the tip of the fruit and poured a crimson red liquid onto my outstretched palm. The liquid was sweet and had tart overtones, and  its rich colour was remniscent of the sweetened  syrup of the kokum fruit. Khan Sahib then squeezed out  an extremely delicious  deep crimson jelly  like substance with seeds that tasted rather like the passion fruit. The fruit of the cactus  was apparently a popularly consumed delicacy in the district.  The local name for this fruit was "Dabbagole Hannu" and  sweeter versions grew all over the place and  were a known  source of enriching  blood haemoglobin. We descended the hill accompanied by the lingering taste of the fruit.
As we moved past flat ground  our attention was drawn to a yellow flowering shrub that grew everywhere and  we are told  that its flowers were collected to make a drink  that was drunk in lieu of tea in the area. Khan sahibe didn't know its name and there was no means of finding out, so all I have is some pictures and much reduced tea and coffee cravings.

No Shoka with Ashoka

                                            Sunshiny sunflower fields 
                                                     
We visited parts of Northern Karnataka. Over the trip we replenished an old friendship with  long conversations. Our time together was punctuated with  field work,  periods of rest and quiet and the sharing of meals thrice daily.  My friend as Chef de Mission was revisiting Ashokan edicts and I was an attendant lord, if we eschew gender in this instance.Through these stone etched edicts, Ashoka  shared and  disseminated    personally experienced understanding and hard learnt truths  in the aftermath of the horrific Kalinga war.

The edicts were  at a considerable distance from one another. They are not particularly accessible to the modern tourist, used  to arriving at  destinations, accessing the site  and  heading to the cafeteria for re-hdyration. Srinivas and his Ambassador took us to most of the sites, but there was a lot of walking through field and rock to be done, occasionally bits of strenuous climbing through  both man made and naturally formed steps in the castellated hills that are part of the backdrop of Northern Karnataka.  The  hill contours  along the skyline are not smooth and undulating but are embellished with large rocks and crags , so much so, that these natural formations look rather like fortifications.
 The hills enclosed agricultural country and  the  abundant Tungabhadra and the Bhim  rivers ensured that  the land was rich in bananas and  lush green  paddy. We were at the beginning of the harvest season. Large mounds of rice were  spread out to dry by the wayside as were cobs of corn and  red chillies.  Walking for a few hours through the fields and rocks can build up quite an appetite.
For instant sustenance, we unpeeled pods of moong dal and tuvar in peak growth season and ate them with gusto. We saw the prosaic flatbean in flower  and  sunflower fields in full bloom We were  introduced to the joys of eating raw groundnuts, freshly  uprooted from the ground. We chewed upon juicy dark purple sugarcane stems beside the grove where Vaali, the Kishkinda monarch battled brother Sugreeva in ancient lore. One memorable moment in our food forays was when we encountered a double row of  magnificent tamarind trees..The bagful of green tamarind fruit  we gathered from the stately green trees lasted  over the next few days.Living in the city and dealing with produce that comes in plastic bags  off  supermarket shelves, it was a  unexpected reconnect with the source root and a continued visual treat.

corn cobs and red chillies drying in a field and  
areca nut  spread out to dry in the picture below.

Fruit Of The Palm

Yet another wonderful thing I want to remember is savouring mangosteen after many years on the  way to  Calicut Airport the day we were to return to Delhi.. Under large shady trees, there are any number of vendors doing  brisk business.  Other than the brine fruit carts and  and piles of clam shellls, small waysisde stalls selling sundry snacks dot the journey.  The most welcome is the coconut seller who sits beside a small built up territory of green coconut and deftly swings his scythe,  lops off the head of the coconut and hands out  an instant packaged thirst quencher with a  long plastic straw tucked in for convenient sipping. If a coconut  that falls to your lot also has flesh,  he deftly fashions a spoon from the side of the  green shell which he splits  into two, handing over  two half cups of  really delicious still unformed coconut.This is an old  familiar ritual readily recalled.
Mangosteen, however, was always brought home and eaten, so eating it on the street was a novel experience.
The mangosteen is also a fruit of another palm, and is a little smaller  than the green coconut, rounder in shape and deep purple brown in colour.  It is slit open, again with a scythe and reveals six or eight little sacs filled with a juicy white fruit, resembling perhaps the litchi. There is a thin white outer skin that needs to be peeled off, to get at the soft interior, which is seldom sweet, but approximates to  a more delicate variation of the water chestnut. The mangosteen is called nongu in Tamil Nadu and my nephew assures me that this palm is not cultivated anywhere in  Calicut. It is probably true for I have only seen abundant  coconut palms and betel nut palms.
 I struck up a conversation with the young lad who  efficiently cracked enough  nongu to feed all of us. He had boarded the  bus from Pollachi in nearby Tamil  Nadu to station himself off the highway to Calicut airport in order to sell his produce. Nongu is abundantly available in the summer months  all over South India.
To find it in  November is a bit of luck and I admired this enterprising  lad, who had  carted a sackful of nongus and leaves and a large container with nongu juice, having prepared a sugared drink with the fruit for those who wanted it.  When an order was placed, he picked up one set of palmyra leaves and quickly knotted the slatted ends to make a very pretty bowl. Into this green boat-like container, he slid in the scythed fruit and extended the bowl to the mangosteen muncher.  The  green bowl   not only held mangosteen fruitbut also proved to be an extremely handy receptacle for partaking of  mangosteen juice.

 I carried my leaf fashioned bowl back home to Delhi because it was so hardy and an important reminder that  the best designs were creative and grew out  of functional requirements.  This was a very holistic and eco friendly use of  natural resources, aesthetically presented. How I hope that the nongu will not be subject to the  tetrapack suffering that has befallen the coconut. 

Nuts About Fruit

I reached Calicut a day before  Eid and  stayed on a day after The Revathi Pattathanam festival at the nearby Thali temple where the descendant of the  Zamorins continues to  honour scholars and philosophers. Calicut or Kozhikode as it is now christened has hosted a multiplicity of cultures for exceedingly long centuries. It continues to be home to several communities and boasts of a multiplicity of religions and cuisines. When the plane touches down at Kozhikode airport , the landscape is predominantly green, with cottages discreetly tucked away beneath trees. It is only when you drive into the heart of the city and its commercial centre that you see the ascending buildings and the newly positioned malls, conspiring together in recently conquered space.

This time, there was no sadyam feast to partake of, so we sampled local fare in different parts of the city. One mall I visited served traditional Kerala cuisine, ranging from idiappam( rice noodles) to chilli katta (steamed, chopped and garnished tapioca served with  hot green chilli and tamarind chutney) and a range of pradhamans(kheers made of cereal, lentil and fruit). All these foods were  reasonably priced and unbelievably inexpensive by Delhi Mall standards, so we ate without wincing and flinching at prices after a very long time.

My favourite  moment in Calicut was the discovery of an amazing  fruit snack selling in different parts of the city. We first noticed the carts along the road adjoining Calicut beach. Large jars were arranged all along the cart. These were filled with cut and whole fruit that  were immersed in what looked like brine. At  first glance these recalled  decorative salad jars with chunks of fake carrots soaked in fluid that form part of most Italian Eatery decorations. These however  were meant to be eaten. Sliced pineapples, mangoes, carrots, beetroot, cucumber and whole guavas, large bers and gooseberries(amla) were  the  standard offerings on display. In a country where potable water remains an everyday luxury, anxieties regarding  the liquid immersed fruit immediately surfaced.

 We dispelled anxiety  with the aid of our new scientific learning. The jars sparkled and the brine water was not clouded over. The fruit immersed in it looked fresh and  inviting and a great number of people eating it seemed happy and healthy, even by our  exacting standards of finickitude.   The vendor used a pair of stainless steel tongs and fished out a piece of fruit which he handed over to the buyer, deftly opening and closing the lid in the course of the transaction.  We began our exploration with sliced cucumber and  whole ber. Each piece cost us the princely sum of one rupee and tasted delicious. The brine water also had vinegar and chopped green chilles which lent a piquant flavour to the cucumber and the ber. When we asked for  gooseberries, the vendor told us that they weren't ready yet.

 Over three days, we sampled the fare from several carts and discovered the delights of this delicious, inexpensive and fast-moving snack.. The nature of fruit is such that if left alone in brine and vinegar it begins to putrefy. Most vendors we spoke to said that they were sold out at the end of the day and that they renewed their fruit stocks every other day.Slices of pineapple, raw mango and whole guavas cost three rupees apiece, and  the pineapple slices won the palate vote, closely followed by the guava. Conversations with vendors at locations such as Bathord, Bangladeshi Colony, Mannanchira Maidan and  Pulimode  have led me to conclude that this fresh pickled  fruit'n'vegetable combo is the special preserve of  communities that consume meat and fish, who have evolved this cottage-industry technique of ensuring adequate  fruit and vegetable volumes in their daily diet.
Traditional food options no longer form part of the everyday food currency of the big city. Invaded by the global endemic of  uniformly prepackaged, processed and sanitized foods, such fare is a poignant reminder of patterns of eating and consumption that we have shrugged off nonchalantly.  Assuredly,  it will take  Walmart and Carrefour  a very very long time to  sustain or carry forward such practices and customs,  let alone replicate them. We seem to be doing pretty well without them!


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This is  from a street vendor's cart on the way to the Airport.

November Nostalgia

I visited Calicut  and spent three palm-fringed days on  my sister-in-law's porch, soaking up the sun, idly watching birds, insects and butterflies flit by in the mittham of the house. Of late the garden has been left to itself, but  Kerala is God's own country and ungendered God  likes green, so along the laterite brick walls and all around the courtyard green abounds. Little pilea( microphyllia) perennials  that I struggle to keep alive in New Delhi  grow confidently in every little crevice in the wall. The ornamental palm put in the ground is scripting its own narrative, while the peace lilies have gathered several followers around themselves.  Unnumbered little fish swim in the secluded kollam and on the  ancient  mango tree, tiger ants (actually they are called puli  locally, which could translate either  as "sour'"or "tiger". The ants  are brown in colour and nest in large trees, so tiger seemed rather appropriate...possibly these are weaver ants?) march in single file  to reach their nest, which incidentally is lots of leaves welded together . From a distance of ten feet the leaf cluster looks rather like a large green  mango, but  if you stand beneath it, you can see that it is made up of leaves and  ants swarm in and out of the ribbed leaf edges of their nest.
When not tracking ants, the eys is caught and held by the brilliant pagoda flower. I have seen this plant in manicured gardens in Goa. In  Calcut, it grows everywhere with abandon. Once a plant has reached a sufficient size and flowered, it stretches its roots and sends up feeder plants on either side. This is a farly efficient  propagation system and the plant grows easily , in fact anywhere there is a patch of soil, the pagoda sets up home.
 The flower of the pagoda is its crowning glory. It is a wonderful tomato red, and  grows in a formation of tiers. I think this plant  was the inspiration for the Kerala craftsman who made the tiered  deepa aradhana lamp which is used for arati by the priests in the temple.When this lamp is lit hundreds of little flames flicker and the golden orange glow replicates precisely what is embodied by the  pagoda plant in full bloom . Each flower has snaky light coloured filamants that look like individual tongues of fire.

 I wonder idly how Wordsworth would react to the pagoda flower.  The meanest flower that blew, led him on to thoughts that lay too deep for tears. The pagoda plant would have transported him to another realm and possibly more magnificent poetry. Yet, in the green plenty where it grows , with what nonchalance the pagoda has established itself. Just goes to show how tropical vegetation is a gift generously bestowed all the year round and something that is taken so much for granted.!

The pictures of  the pagoda plant with its extraordinary crown of flowers that I took  in Goa a couple of years ago.

Makin' Ajay and Manning Shankar

I was reversing my car up the slope in the  parking lot at South Campus when a friend who graduated with top honours from an elite women's college called on my cell phone and asked me to  explain the meaning of the word "dichotomous." Conditioned by years of  explicatory teaching and numbed by being the at-home- thesaurus, I stepped on the reverse gear and proceeded to explain wondering why she didn't consult the dictionary, because people asked on the off-chance tend to be woolly? Her chuckle made me realize that this was a trick question and  with a little prodding, the paisa eventually dropped.
In karmic evolution the  anxieties  one is visited by remain the sum total of one's misdeeds, both in this life and in previous ones. Of course, we also need to  propitiate our blood ancestors, but in secular life, we are called to account for each and every gaffe and social misdemeanor that our seniors in  academic institutions  effortlessly  execute.I shifted to first gear and drove the car back into the trough that I had been struggling to lift  myself out of. We had a long exchange, this friend and I, over Mani Shankar's repartee that was not merely out of place, but also completely off the point.
The truth be told, Mani Shankar has always been articulate enough, in all manner of forums, that India could not  afford the extravagance of the commonwealth games and  he was absolutely correct on that point, never mind the fact that nobody in his party cared very much about his views on the subject.Yet what is intriguing about this whole exchange  is  that the entire debate has hinged around whether Mani Shankar Aiyar's elite arrogance is misplaced and out of date. In fact Swapan Dasgupta continues the debate in this vein in his 30 September article where he launches forth on wit and understatement as the privileged space occupied by the inheritors of the Nehruvian tradition, wherein  he places both Mani Shankar Iyer and himself, a bit too quickly, methinks.
 Swapan Dasgupta,  authoritatively pokes fun at  "puerile"  undergraduate Stephanian clubs such as the  no longer extant Wodehouse Society. Maybe they should hand wrestle over the fine points of Narendra Modi's   hostility to the upper cadres of the Gujarat RSS under Dasgupta's  super-'vision'? This would go well with the cultural pundit  aura  Dasgupta has appropriated ever since his strident  declaration a few years ago (in the wake of the controversy over the film Fire,) that lesbianism  was a foreign import, brought to India's  hallowed shores by a whole lot of disreputable people, presumably elite anglicized women?
 Rather than reiterate that Mani Shankar  is maliciously witty and  speaks better English than most people, it is time to ask why Mani Shankar  never considered stepping down or resigning from official positions and continued to be "obstructionist." The schism between  his words and  subsequent action  could definitely be termed "dichotomous" in this instance. Could we communicate to  him  that there is a consensus on Maken's appropriate and advised use of  both words  and he should now labour to provide a detailed explanation?

I recall Mani Shankar's effusive oratory in Parliament, asking for Connaught Place and Connaught Circle to be renamed as Indira Chowk and Rajiv Chowk, immortalizing through architectural symbol  the cradling of the son in the arms of his mother. That chowk indicates a square shape while  the circle represents a different geometrical figure altogether, was merely inconsequential detail. His suggestion was implemented by those who should have known better  in order to ensure that everyone who knows their Hindi could cringe  whenever they saw these signboards in time and times to come.
Language effectively records the gulf between speech and action and  thrusts the underlying thought into our faces. It did so powerfully in Narendra Modi's recent fast purportedly for communal harmony. Yet this man, the proverbial cat at Haj,  refused to  wear a cap proffered by a visiting maulvi. That one gesture effectively dismantled the horrendous charade of  fellow feeling he tried to construct and left him completely exposed. Thankfully language retains the power to do that most  of the time, be it the case of superannuated Stephanians or regional satraps running amok.

August Occasion

Of  all the views that windows can provide, looking out into a leafy tree from a bedroom or a study window, is something to be grateful for. The dense foliage provides a curtain of green, shuts off the household on the opposite side of the street that you may have no desire to watch and provides a world of soothing green through which one glimpses the sky.

 A flamboyant Silk Cotton tree grew in front of our house a few years ago. Every March having shed all its leaves earlier, it stretched out against the blue sky and exhibited its large deep orange flowers to the world. Each flower had its own little green holder and the display against the bare branches  was like an enormous breathtaking  ikebana. It attracted its share of birds and people, but one stormy summer, unable to compete with concretisation, it loosened its roots, gave up its will to live and leaned against the street's overhead wires, ready to leave. 

Irate residents whose power supply was  short circuited  since the tree grew outside my house, rang our doorbell. Offering consolation as we mourned the loss of the tree, we contacted DESU and then diligently pleaded with the forest department to help us.  DESU responded  immediately and fixed the wires, but the tree teetered precariously. Many phone calls were followed up by  escorting FD officials to the site  for inspection. Eventually we received a sanction, authorizing us to cut down the tree. For a sum of money the tree was chopped down in a couple of hours and then carted away as well. The process took a week but at the end of it, the silk cotton was sorely missed by us and our neighbors, after the resumption of  the electric supply restored their equanimity.

Maybe it was  collective longing that allowed the seed of a mulberry to sprout and grow, but six months after,  a mulberry bush,  began growing a few yards away. The nursery rhyme that talks about people going around a mulberry bush, didn't encourage us to think of the young mulberry as having any tree potential. Yet in less than three years, it was a large tree, moving quickly from its slender bush like form to a stately height,  well over  thirteen feet with a canopy of leaves on the street.

  I know of no paeans written to the Mulberry Tree. Even the nursery rhyme  only suggests a nondescript bush in the landscape. The tree in lived experience, sets up a whole series of narratives.  In early December it switches off its photosynthetic processes, so by the end of the month the tree is covered with yellow leaves that are sometimes the only source of colour during sun strapped Decembers at Delhi.. 

The leaves drop quickly off  in January and the tree is bare for a few weeks before the stems  quiver with bursting nodes and  suddenly, magically almost overnight fresh  little  green leaves appear. While the leaves captivate with their new leaf green, the mulberry goes  into bloom and  soon thereafter  little green fruit make an appearance all over the tree. This mulberry has purple berries  and  hordes of visitors, feathered and  on foot, some  with school satchels, others with carts and cycles  stop by to partake of the abundant bounty. The ground outside is stained purple and so are the bird droppings all around the house.

Watching the rain pour itself out on the leaves is another activity that provides for hours of unending reflection. Today I was privy to  yet another of the mulberry's secrets. A little bird around four inches in length with a long tail had been around awhile, but suddenly there seemed to be more of them.  They darted about each morning, little enquiring long tailed bundles of yellowy green, and they seemed to take in all the details of the tree shaded potted sit out. 

 I was diverted by a movement in the tree and on close observation  from an upstairs window saw that it  came from  the  inside  of what resembled a bunched up leaf cluster. This  cunningly stitched nest that the greeny yellow birds had  put together, high up in the tree which is now well over twenty feet,  was quite difficult to spot. I have watched these birds before, soaking in the  sunlit air before  the onset of the evening. The mother and her four fledglings sat on one branch while the father perched guard over them on another overhead branch.  I did not know then that these were tailor birds or that they stitched mulberry leaves to build their nest.

  

Sparrows in Spring

I have a kitchen garden. Actually, "garden" is possibly a gross exaggeration  because  these are really eight pots at the corner of my kitchen, beside a sunny door where I grow, basil, aloe vera, thyme and  four pots of  hardy  twenty-year-old karipatta (karuvapillai) treelings that  are regularly harvested  for garnishing  foods, ranging from sambaar  and upma to vermicelli and sharp chutneys. As any passionate cook would aver, there is really no substitute for fresh herbs, and I try to keep my herbs organic, by feeding them  used tea leaves  and coffee grounds as manure.
When tall houses sprung up and blotted out  a fair share of  sunfall, a three foot high sandstone ledge began to house the kitchen garden pots. The karipattas stretched and flowered in  endless sunshine, but also drew the attention of large black ants, which attracted by the moist pots, built their nests under them and around the roots of the plants. This was not a very happy situation, since ant colonies tend to be persistent. However  instead of bringing out the gamaxine and malathion I tried using simple solutions like detergent water and turmeric powder to discourage the ants. The black ants were willing to relinquish the kitchen to me since they didn't particularly care for the  turmeric boundaries I had drawn, but  the karipattas  remained a favourite haunt, over the last couple of years.
 In fact, the ants  felt so much at home that they took to farming woolly white aphids  all over the karipattas. Eventually, white aphids, in some stage of evolution clung to all the stem nodes . While aphids  hosted on karipatta stems, the kitchen garden territory became a confrontational space between  the black ants and their aphids and me. Things got  really sticky at this point. Sticky in fact is the operative word as far as aphids are concerned. They secrete a sweet fluid which the black ants harvest off their bodies and distribute to the entire  ant colony. Meanwhile, the aphids feed off the plants where they are  housed and stunt their growth, eventually damaging the plant all together. It is extremely difficult to  get rid of aphids and doing it manually is cumbersome and unattractive. Divesting sticky cocoons from the interstices of stems, is a messy business and the goo  clings forever to the fingers and the leaves. Operation  Black Ant  grew in prominence and  I resigned myself to the gradual withering away of the karipattas.
 I had however reckoned without the spirited sparrows who lived in the nearby bougainvillea bush. They developed a taste for the aphids and made flying visits to the  karipatta source several times a day. Very soon,  the  aphid plantations were wiped out since what was intended as ambrosia for the ants was transformed into  choice meat for the sparrows. So one fine day, the karipattas were free of aphids and the black ants relinquished their hold on the karipatta territory by  abandoning the colony site that  had begun to  demonstrate signs of  active hostility.
The karipattas grew back to their full glory,and played their stellar role in culinary achievements but this year has brought in new contenders for the karipatta's favors.The sparrows nest in  various  niches occasioned by the backyard and in the spring they are busy building nests. They have taken to lining their nests with karipatta stems and leaves. So most tender stems are jabbed at by sparrow beaks and hacked from the plant. Some of them are picked up and transported to the nest. I would have thought that  the karipatta wasn't exactly  brilliant nest-building material, from the sparrow's point of view, but possibly in the absence of alternatives, the fragrant, quick drying karipatta has its uses. Perforce I wait for the sparrows' nests  to be completed  and the eggs to be laid before I can claim the karipattas as my own.
These days, I have a  regular morning engagement, that of  reclaiming all the fresh karipatta  leaves lying  in my backyard once  the  charge of the sparrow brigade is over.   I use these intercepted leaves to garnish  my cooking.  A small price to pay, as were it not for these feisty little birds, there would  be very little karipatta aroma in our lives.  I accept with grace  that  this hands-on training of  retrieving karipatta leaves,  has reconnected me to the values of conserving and sharing local  natural resources equitably.

Winter Wedding Wave at New Delhi.

Winter weddings at New Delhi are extraordinary. The weather is cold, the bride and groom are  usually happy to marry at an unearthly hour, everything is brightly lit up and copious amounts of liquids and solids float around, followed by quantities of  food and angheetis and electric heaters  efficiently keep the cold away. The most fascinating people at weddings are usually  the women, and Delhi's women are nonpareil. For, nowhere in the world, with temperatures inching closer and closer to the lower single digits would anyone brave the cold in the manner that Delhi's women do,. Wrapped in the most exquisite benaras, tanchoi  and kanjivaram or in the latest  newly restructured saree, with stilletoes and heels sinking into the soft lawns where wedding parties are held, Delhi's women dare the elemental cold with incredible aplomb. Gracefully they pull their heels out of the soft ground shoe by shoe and unfazed by the absence of any warm accessories, glide over the lawns with apparent ease, often accompanied by well layered males.  Not the  fault of the women, this practice.  The festive saree is actually  a very demanding animal. Confine  it with a cardigan, restrict it within a coat , or drape it with a shawl, (never mind if it is pashmina with a jamawar border) any of the aforementioned  attempts asphyxiates  the  aesthetics of the saree. Therefore it becomes de rigeur to wear a saree without  any other distractions. These days, even  the blouse just about manages to pass muster by making itself as inconspicuous as possible.

A whole host of weddings are held in the second half of  December at New Delhi. Purist friends down South  who believe that the month of  marghazi, is ideally spent in pursuit of the life spiritual, completely overlook the powerful impetus provided by the United States of America in altering cultural practice in India. Many young Indians who study and work abroad, fall in love and  get married in situ. For friends and  family in India, this new tie is reiterated with a celebration during the December break.  So late December weddings are now in vogue and have been on the rise over the past few years.
 Ania and Suvir  celebrated the marriage of their son Tariq with Piyali  and hosted two ceremonies for the newly weds. The first of these was a charming mehendi and choori  day-time ceremony on Neel's front lawns at JNU. The sun shone, flowers bloomed, glasses tinkled, the bride sparkled in orange, the groom beamed  and  conversations continued while we all partook of a delicious kashmiri repast where despite being curtailed by my vegetarianism, I came away feeling that baingan and lotus root should only be cooked as per  kashmiri specifications.
The dinner and drinks and dancing  that followed a couple of days later was  great fun and will be something Ania and I will remember for reasons more irregular than the nostalgia of watching young Tariq (whom i  met when he was not even eight) now  a strapping young man with a pretty wife, stepping into a life all of their own. It so happened that Ania and I wore identical sarees  on this occasion, right down to the golden peacock woven red border and this was  by sheer coincidence. So with much shared laughter, we captured this on  camera.
Just yesterday, Ania sent me a picture of the two of us at the mehendi ceremony with a header that exclaimed "I can't believe it but at the mehendi too we were dressed alike!"
I am putting both sets of pictures on the blog, because this is really quite an unlikely occurence.

Usually, whatever I end up wearing  uncannily  replicates the colours of the tapestry highlighting the wedding  pandal  and furniture. This time round, I seem to have tuned into the colour-vibrations of the mother of the groom, without quite knowing it! Maybe this could serve as an indicator of intuitive bonding between old friends...or even be the start of a new custom  wherein mothers of the groom or bride could colour coordinate  their clothes with their close friends?