Burmeen Pakoras

What do vegetarians do when they visit places where  people  draw a great deal  of their sustenance from the sea? This is not really much of a dilemma when there is an abundance of vegetables and fruit, even though sea food is referred to rather appropriately, as fruit from the sea. Goa allowed us to experiment with abundant  fresh pineapple, breadfruit and delicious perada , a hardened version of guava jelly cut into barfi like pieces.

At Port Blair, we discovered Burmeen pakodas. The name seemed intriguing  and as it was listed under vegetarian snacks, we ordered a plate at the Megapode Nest while we  nursed chilled beers and stared into the turquoise and teal  blue waters. Burmeen pakoras turned out to be julien cut vegetables such as carrot, potato and cauliflower, which were dipped in chickpea batter and deep fried with a smatering of fennel seed or saunf for that distinctive flavour. It  established a  connect with the geography and the history,  because Burma itself is not very far away from Port Blair, hence Burmeen pakoras,  must have evolved from  older and  linked food cultures that wafted along  the coasts.?

There is something about  salt  water and air that sets up a yearning for pakoras, so the following day after a long bout in the water, while we idled at North Bay island and waited for our boat to come back for us, we were struck by pakora-lust yet again. We wandered into a small  enclosure with several stalls selling odds and ends  and  stopped to order tea at a make shift  tea stall. It was late afternoon, so seeing a huge mound of still warm pakodas, we  ordered some. Jasmine, who wo-manned   the stall  plied us with a  newspaper cone full and plenty of  hot sweet tea to wash down the pakoras with.
Soaking up the warm tropical December sun, our bellies full of pakoras and tea, we chatted with her. She was from Kerala and  kept a stall at North Bay during the tourist season. Her husband worked  on North Bay itself, so she could add a little money  to the household by selling tea, biscuits, chips, and cool drinks.
The weather is very nice, Jasmine confided, but vegetables are very costly. Most of it seemed to come from the mainland, from Calcutta. Only  green and yellow tender coconuts, small  local mangoes and spice grew in abundance. On our third day as well we stopped for tea, this time near  Chiditop and partook of  giant green batter dipped  chillies and smaller vegetable pakoras.

We met a lot of people in Port Blair from Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Kerala whose  migrant parents had put down roots on the islands.  There were plenty of shops run by moms at walking distance from the Megapode where several salt and sweet snacks and groceries and provisions were being sold. The Megapode Nest  itself served a selection of meals that  spoke of links  between the north and the south of India, with the occasional gobhi manchurian disguised as fritters. Breakfast comprised  iddlis , chutney, sambaar and oothaapam, and bread, jam,  tiny bananas and eggs. Lentils brown or  yellow, chappatis, rice, and vegetables were around for lunch and dinner., along with a selection of mutton, chicken or fish. Dessert was custard,  gulab jamuns, rasgollas in condensed milk and delicious sevaian and rice kheers.

Also memorable were the kulfis that were sold by solo entrepreneurs at tourist spots all over the islands. These were delicious milk lollies, taken out from the deep recesses of a large earthenware jar. When you ordered one, a  stick was inserted into the tiny plastic container in which the lolly was frozen.  Effortlessly extricated from its mould and   handed over,it  filled the mouth with the  cool, sweet,  cardamom- flavoured secrets of milk and memories of an older time.

The most seamless assimilation of the old and the new, which one member of the scuba diving team  brought to my attention was the logo of (AFC)Andaman Fried Chicken, which occupies pride of place  in Port Blair. A grinning chicken dominates the logo in red and white atop imposing glass exteriors. The chicken, remarked the young man, was rather upbeat about its place in the food consumption chain, unlike its melancholy cousin from the KFC chain.

Delhi University: The Spectacle of the Carnival

It is second semester, fourth semester and sixth semester time at Delhi University. Currently, in the three year semesterized program three years are divided into six portions and these sections of time  are being used up by the first year, second year and third year students of the university. We have had six weeks of teaching, with the occasional holiday thrown in. Actually the national holidays have been rather disciplined announcing themselves around weekends and allowing us to teach.

Now the fun and games have begun. Teaching was thin  in the middle of last week, during the two day bandh, since many students were apprehensive about reaching Sri Venkateswara from distant destinations. Plus, the cultural festival season was on and students had begun the week by rehearsing for various co-curricular activities and staying away from class-rooms. Our vice-chancellor who is bringing about far-reaching changes in higher education which he thinks is some sort of Saturday Club engaged in productive welfare activities and entertainment,  decided to shut down teaching in the university  to propel the  three day North Campus Venture "Antardhvani" to take place.

Before the official shut down, co-ordinators and stall adorners  worked overtime to collect materials to take to the North Campus to display best practice in each college for which  cash awards were being dangled.
To begin with, I am all for cultural activities.  Our country boasts of an extraordinarily rich tradition of music, dance, art and theatre which has classical origins and has gone on to become very inventive. Singing, dancing, artwork, sports, theatre are very exciting activities and more eyeball grabbing than the comparatively less prosaic activity of teaching and learning in the classroom. Given the terrible rooms we teach in, and the absence of any facilities that could add to our teaching skills, the North Campus  certainly provides  happier hunting grounds.

 Yet, has the Vice chancellor brought culture to the heathen and Manna to the  thirsty as the promos suggest?  The students who excelled in all the co-curricular activities they brought to the antardhvani platform have done so because their natal families worked very hard to help them attain such skill and talent. The university had very little to do with their grooming.  Neither did the state. The state doesn't even want to take responsibility for education. Why would it foster  co-curricular activity? The ground reality is that most of these young people do not have rooms  or auditoriums in  colleges where they could practice their skills or share their interests. Despite this, year after year, in the then easily identifiable second term, every college in Delhi university hosted three day festivals  to showcase culture and there was a separate day earmarked for sports. Inter college and intra college exchanges flourished on these occasions.

 These  festivals continue in every college at Delhi University as do smaller two day festivals held by every single department in every college. Perhaps, our vice-chancellor has not found time to do the math, since simple addition would have  enabled him to compute without too much effort the number of teaching days lost per college. Had he been aware of this  low-tech solution, he might have hesitated to add more non-teaching days to the university's already bowdlerized academic calendar.

Delhi University's Annual Flower Show has also  been around for a very long time. In regular years, a half day holiday  enabled interested  teachers and students at the end of a working morning to  look at extraordinary flower displays and  horticultural excellence. Now our vice- chancellor aims to set our sights higher. He has introduced awards to colleges on the basis of excellent practice.  Exactly how will the college with  excellent practice be selected?  And exactly why should undergraduate colleges "compete" for this selection? Do we not have enough of this at the stage of secondary education where a few elite institutions battle it out ?

 Currently, qualified teachers  teach identical syllabi in every discipline  across all colleges in Delhi University. It is shameful then to set up a jostling for excellent practice awards in say, architecture, when St Stephens has had  close to a hundred years of sprawling acreage to build on, as opposed to Sri Venkateswara which struggles with a mere 16 acres, thirty odd years and stringent building bylaws? Not that the other categories are more actionable.  Instead of this divide and rule and carrot and stick policy adopted to wage fractious skirmishes between colleges, it would have been well worth everyone's time if the university had addressed the infrastructural needs of each college.  To get there, however, the very idea needs to be under consideration. My antar dhwani tells me that it is not the purpose of either education or culture  to exacerbate differences and that vice-chancellors as mentors should be  providing level playing fields for every undergraduate institution.

 Also, introducing  an institution which is nowhere in the vicinity through a stall is what academic fairs set up by foreign universities do, maybe because they feel that interpersonal contact is well worth it, even  in  days of satellite transmission. This reductive practice cannot work for Delhi University's undergraduate colleges, which can be visited by aspiring students from Delhi schools, on any working day. As a matter of fact we are reeling under student over subscription. We are not really in a position to solicit students, unlike the stall owners in international academic fairs.

 No wait! This is  a rather thankless response to all the largess the university is offering us, is it not? How remiss of me to be complaining about  inadequate classrooms and tutorial rooms and overcrowding and absence of infrastructure. How hard the vice chancellor is working at creating a classless society. First he introduced the idea of a meta university where students would spend their time commuting from one university to another.The next stroke of  brilliance was  to  transmit one knowledgeable lecture to every citadel of higher education via satellite.   We need to think out of the box and stop complaining about posts falling vacant in the university.The Knowledge Revolution is  in process. After all, the industrial revolution merely  ensured that one  machine could do the work of many men.  Our vice chancellor has ably demonstrated that one lecture by one mind  can substitute  or replace 500, maybe 5000 minds  at the same time. This will definitely take the work pressure off all of us and adequately bring down student teacher  ratios.

How thoughtless of me to forget that  from now on  daily work  will  only involve  hand-wrestling with a dozen colleagues over a solitary department  laptop,  equipped not with audiovisual aids to enhance teaching, but  with downloaded software  for punching in  soft-copy attendance for a class of eighty students or more. Should technology fail, backup exists  in the form of loose attendance sheets, so that project monthly upload may be upheld, since that is the singular duty  expected of college teachers.  After all, we are probably the only university in the world where five percent  of the marks in every paper in every discipline  are tabulated on  the basis of classroom attendance percentages.  So when we are done with double verification of attendance in one classroom, it will be time to go to the next.!

Those who  haven't received laptops must not despair. Exactly what are young and energetic Ad-Hocs around for?  There is no plan to regularize their jobs since satellite transmissions will be the order of the day.With no permanent jobs on the anvil, they might as well as earn their pay  by working as Attendance-Punching-Teaching-Assistants to Associate Professors. Why should such a facility only be available to university teachers in America, especially when we are the ones with  the numbers?  Of course, even this small task at hand will be taken away from the Ad-Hocs when five years from now the MA is whittled down to one year instead of two. Then all our mighty University Dons, who left their undergraduate institutions behind for even more higher learning, will probably be sent back  to their colleges, because MA teaching would have halved? Then  attendance punching  duties will be the sole responsibility of permanent faculty in colleges, while the prodigal dons ( who anyway don't take attendance) will provide inspirational teaching. By then maybe each one of us will have our very own attendance laptop? Meanwhile, here is to a brand new university whose only casualties will be teachers and learners.

Anchored Islands

Visited  Port Blair last week . Island hopped on middling boats and walked alongside stunning unspoilt beaches at Corbyn's Cove and  Mundapahad.  Viewed  stunning sunrises and spectacular sunsets, and a sea awash in turquoise and thick dense blue gray water that quickly turns blue black as soon as the sun disappears.

There is  a lot  to do at the islands: stroll, sit out at various edges, scuba dive, snorkel and sea walk, or enjoy a variety of water sports such as scooter, banana  and sofa rides.The scuba diving and the sea walking extend  into the heart of the ocean. A whole new world awaits the enthusiastic traveler and  it is an extraordinary experience, to glide over coral reefs and gaze at anemone clusters , watch myriad coloured fish in innumerable shapes and sizes swim past and  marvel at the amazing ecosystems sustained by the coral reefs.  The body becomes weightless and all one has is a discerning eye that is  entranced by this dazzling new world . One meets sea cucumbers and sea-urchins, anemones with velvety underskirts, giant clams that signal that they are not part of the inanimate sea by the zigzag edges separating their bivalve shells.

 Equipped with life jacket, wetsuit, goggles, mask and oxygen tank, it is easy to forget  air-breathing antecedents that  involve  a pair of legs slowly  plodding their way  on earth surfaces.

 Once the sea adventure is  over, it is time to  be awed again by the tangle of sun, earth, water and wind. People at Port Blair are helpful and warm. The views from the Ross and North Bay Islands are restful and incredible. 

 This idyllic group of islands are nautical miles away from our borders. There is an abundance of flora and fauna  and  Chatham saw mill remains even today, the largest wood mill in Asia with its  store of  tree logs.  The anthropological museum  provides information on the extant  tribes  among the several islands that form part of the Andaman Nicobar group.   In the colonial past, political prisoners were housed  first on Viper island  and subsequently incarcerated in  the cellular jail at Port Blair. The Cellular Jail hosts a sound and light show on its premises that recalls and reiterates our hard won independence. Countless Indians from all over the country gave up their lives or struggled in harsh everyday situations, years at a stretch  clamoring for  independence.  A trip to  these islands enables us to  renew and recharge  memories of  our nation's history.  Despite the checkered history  chartered out by violent men and by the imperious  forces of nature,  a  finely balanced co-existence punctuates each day at Port Blair.

Hard Times At Delhi University

As an Associate Professor at an undergraduate college at New Delhi, who has been around  for a fairly long time, I am constantly asked for advice about  what course to join at college.  Last year  when I was asked to offer an opinion, I told students that this was a bad year, since the university was in a spin of some sort, having introduced a semester system in the most haphazard manner.  The semester has split annual courses wide open and hurries students through syllabi in insufficient time and pushes teachers  neck deep into paperwork that is quantitatively exhausting and serves little other purpose.

The newest measure we have is the monthly online entering of student attendance as it no longer matters what we teach or how we teach because all we are required to do is to clock it down as data. Why should you complain, I hear the die-hard optimist ask, if you don’t cook up attendance registers at the end of the year? The monthly system of uploading  is  actually the least of our problems.  It epitomises the hallmark of the semester system. Arguably, anyone who cooks up a register at the end of the year can now  be well trained in doing this ten times a year, but surely there must be other obvious  benefits that semesterization  needs to provide?

In fact, in this  second year of semesterization, for every aspirant to the university who wants my advice I can only tell them that this is the worst possible time to join the university. The university administration has come around to our way of thinking and has accepted that the semester implementation was disastrous. Of course, this has not been said in so many words. People   wielding   power find it very difficult to own up to errors of judgement. The university is now going in for a four year course for undergraduates, offering many avenues for exit, turning the highway to serious academic learning and specialization into a fun -filled fair, with plenty of exit points. You can now drop out of the university system as and when you please , with a diploma to boot.   So what if there are those who  are marginal, dispossessed, poor,  otherwise able, female or on the fringes?  In any case, our system never had much need for such as them. We are now focusing on a masterclass, one that will globe trot for an education across universities .

Where exactly does it leave the poor unsuspecting undergraduates who joined the university last year and this year? We are not likely to find out and frankly we are not expected to care. When a behemoth of a university stirs itself up and rumbles and moves, there will be collateral damage.  And yes, our  Americans advisors on the semester system briefed  us on  issues of  collateral damage  a long while ago.  In enough time, in any case, collateral damage would have been  forgotten about. As for the rest who might have noticed, they would have fallen by the wayside, anyway.

Now that these little issues have been sorted, let me announce that  the vice chancellor is introducing  a four year undergraduate programme, that will get rid of the dismembered and rapidly disintegrating   three year semester programme. The  entire course is a secret guarded by the team of 61 that the vice-chancellor has summoned. Maybe someone should tell him that for something as banal as a cooking show, applications are invited and then a shortlist is prepared and applications are carefully screened   to ensure the quality of the performer on the show. This arbitrary selection of a motley group to make academic blueprints  that will affect fundamentally the futures of lakhs of students and change forever the academic  stature  and nature of our central university which, I would like to believe impacts lives nationally, seems to be an act of short-sightedness and  unprovoked delusionary  Neroism ( maybe, considering the vice-chancellor’s truck with numbers,  zeroism is  more appropriate ?).  All this is happening in a university that has procedurally constituted constitutional bodies to plan and implement academic changes in a holistic manner, democratically.

The far sighted vice-chancellor  has  short term measures in place to aid  and  decondition traumatised teachers . This is through a scheme called the META (Medically  Exempted Terminal Activity) University that is being planned. The actual location of this university is in virtual space. Students will shuttle between universities and choose study options and credit courses. This is the Vice chancellor’s version of Education without Boundaries. The vice chancellor is also planning to run a local express service for students as they shuffle on a daily basis from Jamia to Delhi University and when possible to JNU as well. The other advantage of the express service is that it will familiarize students with all corners of New Delhi on a daily basis. This was yet another opportunity that the vice-chancellor could not avail of in his student days.

 So students will travel ceaselessly for the   promise of an education sans boundaries and teachers.  We shall now have a shifting faculty and shifting demand as student affiliations in a state of flux will ensure that more teachers are not inducted. Departments will shrivel up and die. In effect there will be a reduction in the number of traumatised teachers all around. The free press from which we get our information has told us that the admissions to this course have been postponed to December. If only this state of continued deferral could be permanent!

 We  now have a new registrar on the campus, innovating with newer tricks that she obviously pulls out of her bureaucratic sleeves.  Not satisfied with the quadrupling of paperwork through demands of  attendance uploads, and the  increase in geometric proportions of  computational errors  each day,    she thinks up  innovative means of turning  teachers on adhoc jobs  into clerical staff and discommoding the clerical staff altogether . Attendance is  collected and collated  on loose sheets of paper, and these are  submitted  to the office for uploading.  Before depositing this data at the office  all attendance sheets and students assignments and tests are photocopied in anticipation of  future RTIs. Should institutions be inundated with RTIs then all the tomes of photocopying we are collecting term by term will reamfully come to our rescue! Somebody needs to tell the registrar that we are dealing with students who are eighteen years old or more. Monthly bulletins are required only for calibrating the first year in the life of a baby.

Meanwhile trees are being shred and invaluable time is being quantified. College grounds these days simmer and froth with discontent and badwill. This unfortunately only detracts from academic activity and is an unhealthy space.   When biometric attendance comes in for teachers, and we will be required to clock in our thumb impressions, we will finally be free to leave our minds, ideas and our thinking at home. For clearly then the  makers of this new system will have nothing more to lose, having been divested of working brains  at the time of their induction to university posts. The death knell of Delhi University  now sounds clearly through the attendant cacophony.

Awry Academia

I am  back to undergraduate teaching after a hiatus of two years. It is a break that enabled me to read and write and think, which is what I would like to think I have been trained to do. Workspaces, even when  constituted by  fellow academics are not necessarily happy spaces and at present , functioning as we are under a far from perfect semesterization that has been thrust upon us, I can only see the ragged edges of communication spike unevenly  out of control as we try to make sense of the new system that we have to fit ourselves in.

The semester system at DU has meant a splitting across the centre, and a bifurcation of course content . All hundred mark papers will now be worth  two hundred marks and students will study the course content over two semesters instead of a full length academic year. India's premier central university, located In its capital city could have  certainly done far better for itself and for its students. However, were you to ask any of the members in the team of the present vice-chancellor or the previous one, you would be given to understand  that this illogically bifurcated syllabus  is  because of the resistance  of the undergraduate teachers to change. That reasoned and sustained opposition to introduction of the semester was snuffed out through high handed and devious use of the  academic council  which in any case only provides token  representation to undergraduate teachers, ( 24 elected representatives speak for the college teachers in a house which has a voting strength of over 150) has escaped them altogether.

 Now as they introduce  a meta-university which is to  benefit 20 students and discommode a possible 20000 and will  create new frankensteins of teaching, learning and administration, it might be a good idea to describe a micro -detail in this not yet meta university and this is going to be the first month or thereabouts t in an undergraduate college.  Sri Venkateswara  College is located in the upper rungs of the notional ladder of collegiate education at Delhi University. The first morning when our vice-chancellor was visiting Bhagini Nivedita and  disapproving entirely of its modus operandi,  at  Sri Venkateswara College   orientations for  droves of students  who had joined various courses were underway. We have a space crunch that has to be seen to be believed  and promises to be an unsurmountable problem in the days to come.

Classroom spaces for the humanities and languages  has dwindled in geometric proportions in the last three years.  Teachers are supposed to have a teaching workload of around  18 periods.  As a result of  making the university  OBC inclusive, numbers in the classroom have more than doubled. The University administration  assures us that this  calls for an increase in teaching posts by about 40 percent. No permanent appointments have been made in our department in the last four years. Our previous strength of 11 teachers has gone up by 1.74. Our academic planning committee  reinvents the wheel, and talks of giving us posts for teachers on the basis of  sanctioned strengths.  Although, each year, we admit an enormous number of students into each department, our workload  is never calculted on the basis of actual student strength. No upper limit is maintained for the number of students  attending each lecture.

With semesterization, the  duration of time to teach a text and the  number of classes to teach it in has shrunk. We need to fix extra classes  that do not form part of our official time table in order to do any justice to the course content. Meanwhile  tutorials, that should form the backbone of teaching pedagogy in the humanities are mostly viewed as an after thought in our institution. A weekly  tutorial class for Honours students  in optimal groups of 6-8 is mandatory. I have an English (Honours) first year  class of over sixty five students.  If tutorials are meant to serve their purpose, I would need  at least eight tutorials  with my  I yr class.  What I have been allotted officially (as per sanctioned strength) is five which I am to fix myself with the students, preferably after 3.p.m.  There is an absence of  tutorial rooms in college.

Classes for students begin at  8.45 in the morning. Our corridors and staircases, built forty years ago to accommodate one third of the number of students who throng it  achieve high decibels of noise and near stampede conditions every day.  On different days  of the week, students in first, second and third year  have a random off-day. In practice no department  can plan  any collective academic activity for  all its three years at one time. This ensures  that students  lead truncated lives and are hampered from growing or learning in any holistic manner. Classrooms burst at the seams and  students swell in number and taking roll call becomes a long time consuming activity.

The  issue of fixing modalities on the basis of  sanctioned strength and  ignoring  actual  numbers is one of the most insidious ways in which we cheat students and impoverish both teaching and learning spaces.  Higher education , with the crunch in space and the crush of numbers  and unethical practice  is moving into critical mass.  Unless such  issues are addressed on a war footing,, the pleasure of  learning and teaching will be substituted by the cacophony of impersonal assembly lines producing near imperfect  units.

Bharat-abad?

We visited Daulatabad fort ( also called the  Deogiri Fort) located sixteen kilometres from Aurangabad.
 The fort is enroute to the Ellora caves and is an imposing structure with its thick walls and double moats and  stretches all the way to the top of the hill. Its cannons are intact and so are most of its boundary walls. A desultory attendant at the entrance checks our tickets (it costs us five rupees each ) and offers us a guide for 750 rupees. This seems inordinately steep so we turn down his offer and proceed to explore the fort on our own, drinking in the beauty of the fort and the surrounding views.

 This is a heritage building where the ASI has been at work since 1951 when it first  put up concrete steps for the benefit of visitors. The ASI imagines that all visitors  are  young and wiry and able to mount steep stairs without any kind of supporting rails. Before the entrance to the second round of fortifications is a very swank building and a new board that announces toilets. Moving in the direction of this structure which has convenience facilities for men, women and  the otherwise abled, one discovers that everything is under lock and key and firmly shuttered down. Possibly it awaits inauguration by some dignitary and in the meanwhile everybody will continue to press down on their bladders or ease themselves on the premises as is being done, wherever possible.
 The  Chini Minar is perched delicately in the middle of the fort  and main section of the fort which probably houses the  Chand Mahal is under renovation , so we lumber  past the renovation  and climb higher to the summit for better views of the fort.

  On our way back we explore the large courtyards to our right  where  a shiny board announces the Bharat Mata Temple.  This is rather intriguing because the gleaming goddess is quite young and was definitely not around at the time when the fort went into decline after the death of  Aurangzeb.  A sari clad woman's form  has been fixed onto a niche in the outer walls of the fort which overlooks a large courtyard. I am informed that the goddess came into being at the time of the Kargil War. How she extended strength to our army from the heart of the Deccan to the northern frontier is a matter of speculation, but clearly our myth-making abilities as a nation have not diminished. Currently Bharat Mata, supported by her unlikely temple wall is adorned and tidied by one of her female descendants and cheerily smiles out into a large open courtyard, that provides a view of  the lawns and the now dry water tank  beyond.

 Her descendants sweep the yards and the steps of the huge fort which apparently fell into disuse because of a paucity of water. I wonder what the women do if they need a drink of water or  have to attend the call of nature, but remember thankfully that people doing menial work are not supposed to have bodies and subsist without any physical needs and requirements whatsoever. The Municipal Corporation of Bombay is housed in splendid heritage buildings. Surely  sections of Daulatabad fort, so close to Aurangabad, Maharashtra's tourist capital,  could be made habitable, house the town's municipal offices and provide better facilities for its caretakers. This would go a long way  in  terms of reviving local fortunes, generating employment and improving the conditions at the fort and increasing footfalls.

Living Institutions

At Teen Murti there is a generous expanse of foliage and large boards with labelled illustrations of the  many  birds that inhabit the trees and shrubs in the spread out and well tended gardens and greens. Occasionally, while stopping  for a drink of water at the water cooler, the peafowl ensconced in  adjacent  tall trees engrossed in companionable mid-morning chats can be sighted.  Each time  I get back from the library, it is with a sense of satisfaction, not only because some minimal reading has been accomplished but also because, the flowers and trees and the flitting, wheeling birds fill the air with so much positive energy and purpose.

At home on a day when the city crowds into my being, I sit at my desk beside the mulberry tree that shuts out concrete and metal balconies and provides a curtain of a spreading green. Magically, this curtain opens out into its own little world. It is in intense fruit and  stocked with abundant purple mulberries that the birds have been feasting on. There is the resident purple sunbird with its less showy mate, the tailor bird whose children inspect all the pots each morning, the regular mynah, a little sulky because the brahminy mynahs have now opted for fruity breakfast mornings, and an old crow, a little disheveled and crochety at the influx of so many visitors, pointedly ignoring the crow perched at the other end of the tree.

Parrots,  babblers, barbets, treepies and green pigeons are occasional visitors but the black magpie robin, distinguished in its black and white colours is now a regular.  So is the White Eye that enquiringly meets your gaze behind a glassy mesh before it flits off  again to another section of the tree.There is also a wealth of bulbuls. The oldest are the red-vented bulbuls, who have lived in the yard for many years and can invariably be found in contemplative or connubial comfort on some limb of the tree. Since last spring two other kinds of bulbuls have established provisional  tenancy rights. There is a pair of red whiskered bulbuls, which arrive with a flourish and nest in the tree. Sprightly and enthusiastic, they strut about in their  jaunty top-hats , reducing their red-vented relatives to ordinary stolidity.

 A pair of white whiskered bulbuls also come by,  alert and watchful as they selectively  perch on the tree and eat their fill of mulberries. Last season there was a precocious chick that they raised and mornings were full of baby bulbul squackings while it learnt to fly. That was the only time that these stylish birds looked a little harried.

There are two demure doves, one with a black ring around its collar and another without and both of them visit the mulberry tree all through the year.The other regular foragers are the sparrows who go all out and gorge themselves on the fruit of the mulberry tree. In the first week of the mulberry season, they eat far more fruit than their stomachs can hold and the floor of the backyard is full of purple purges, while their systems adapt to the fruit diet. Thankfully, the stains are easy to wash off, and don't need to be scraped off in the manner of regular bird droppings.

Sometimes late in the night, when we return home from a metropolitan adventure, the car headlights glide up  the dark  mulberry tree and allow us to glimpse still,  fluffed up, shapes on the  branches of the tree. These are mostly the sparrows, fast asleep on their perches.  Yet another of the quieter mysteries of life and living that clutch and thrill the heart. Yes, sometimes, all it takes is a tree.