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.

All Of Six Yards: इसमें तो है सारी बात !

I went for a walk fulminating over an article in which Vidya Balan's wearing of saris during her public appearances was portrayed as a disturbing issue for Bollywood's fashionistas.Of course, Bollywood has popularized the ball gown and the dress and at any given point in time, malls in the metropolis abound with women   dressed in frocks. For a lot of women, the frock conceals age, highlights well toned and maintained figures,  provides  cool comfort and probably meets with M.S.Poonia's requirements of being able to get clothed in under five minutes. M.S. Poonia is the author of a piece ,Political Economy of the Saree   published in Manushi. Nona Walia was probably still unfocused after the Holi haze when she said that Balan was trapped in a sari, because surely leading ladies in Bollywood aspire to be actresses first and clotheshorses later? Manushi's editorial decision was definitely influenced by the extended North Indian Winter chill. Editorial damage control after reader outbursts is decidedly stranger. It wonders whether the responses to the article would have been as aggressive if MS Poonia had been " a female feminist instead of being a male one." For starters,Poonia doesn't sound like a male feminist. He recalls the Police Officer from the South who insisted that women dressing in anything other than saris were inviting rape. The only difference between Poonia and  The DG from Andhra is that the former is convinced that saris promote  easy access to rape, aid death by drowning  and prove to be obstacles while escaping  pursuit by ferocious animals.  What a relief  that both these cops   are not invested with portfolios to supervise women's dressing  because  between the two of them they  have  in effect  denuded  the female populace of all items of clothing, providing substance to the belief that men  constantly undress women in their imagination.

When  Shashi Tharoor,  of the clipped Stephanian English and  Page Three  elan wrote an epitaph on the sari as a dying garment, he was forced to withdraw the ill conceived obituary, reeling under the pallu backlash. Many women  have their saris and love them too, and the stretch of sari wearing is not to be undone either by  suave Tharoors or  police officers who are fully dressed  in five minutes to mark their attendance at the alarm parade in training school. Which brings on the curious question:  why exactly is there a "get ready in five minutes drill" at  police academies? Must be part of some ancient voodoo rite because the average police officer is seldom available at any moment of unprecedented crisis within the half hour?

Take heart, Mr. Poonia. If your mother did not teach you to wear a sari, it was in keeping with  heterosexual practice in patriarchal societies where  daughters alone are required to learn this skill.  So let us assure you  that  regular sari practitioners wear their saris in under five minutes, even if their mummies have not taught them to do so. No one takes two months to learn to wear a sari, because it does not involve  rocket science. Wearing a sari has nothing in common with  an alarm parade rehearsal  since after having clothed themselves, women, unlike police officers on show, undertake  a whole lot of  duties  most days of the week, whether they run homes, work in the fields,  in factories, as manual labour or as skilled trained personnel, in rural and urban areas.  And these days enough sites on the net will educate you into the mystery of  the different ways of draping  a sari,(  yes there is more than one way to drape a sari and  is region  specific)  and keeping it in place, which has flummoxed you. For  sari-aspirants such as yourself, let us divulge a secret. The safety pin was invented a long time ago. Most sari clad women despite your fantasies do not have wardrobe malfunctions, which occur with moderate regularity in the case of stitched clothing.

Incidentally, the sari is a preferred mode of dress south of the Vindhyas, which is why your  soul mate in the Andhra police  wants women to wear them all the time. Saris, as an informed observer has pointed out are worn in a variety of ways and without petticoats and blouses, and  have a longer shelf life than most stitched garments, and often cost much less. If our grandmothers heard you on the sari's inability to cover the body, they would be baying for your blood, so try to  discreetly study how women in  real India wear their saris. We realize that your insights come from an overdose of the ramp.

The average sari is  a longer-lasting garment  and serves as a great multitasking  accessory for women.  The edge of a pallu makes for an effective impromptu purse into which keys and coins can be safely  stored.  The loaded pallu edge also enables  effective self-defence. All that is required  is to swivel the pallu end towards a would be assailant.  Old saris  are used by women as makeshift cradles to allow small infants to sleep.  Grandmothers with nine yard saris would use soft fabric not only to wrap babies with, but  also to mop up a whole night of  baby piddle very hygienically, using fresh sections of the sari each time. Imagine the districts under your patrol without this environment and baby friendly technology. Our streets and drains would choke with disposed-off diapers and Johnson and Johnson would be producing mountains of  diaper rash creams  with no room to stock any other cosmetics.

 Did you know Mr. Poonia that women in Bengal handcraft quilts and bedsheets for infants with old cotton saris, because they are so soft? Are you aware that the exquisite craft of Kantha came into being because women worked with coloured yarn from old saris within households to create aesthetic baby sheets? So the next time you see a  dupatta or a kurta with kantha work, stand up and salute the sari.  Saris double up as handkerchiefs and  sunshades and provide privacy by allowing breastfeeding mothers to screen themselves if required.Sometimes(surely you must have seen hindi films,)  pallus are even  torn up to serve  as very efficient instant bandage-strips.

Your doctor friends must also be aware of contact dermatitis  that can  result from  tightly tailored clothing , metal accessories ranging from wrist watches to spectacles , synthetic garments and shoes for example?
 Have you all  made any comparative study?  If not, refrain from unleashing unfounded fears upon an unsuspecting populace with your skewered data from 140 women. You could shelter meanwhile under a jaipuri cotton quilt made from a mul sari or alternately use  a traditional double sheet(the dohar) which also devolves from old saris  expressly stitched  for cool comfort.

 And Mr Poonia, overweight and obese people on an average are that way because of ill health and poor  lifestyle choices. Ideally both men and women need to remain fit , not simply to measure up to your aesthetic standards but because of the benefits of  great health. For the record, men  and women who are fit look better in anything they wear,  irrespective of whether it is saris or  khakhi uniforms.
 There are many terrible things about patriarchy. One of them is that  many men still presume to speak   authoritatively about what women should wear, and  many women rush to defend such men and extol their thinking. However Mr, Poonia, with apologies to  Susan Seymour, isn't it unfortunate that there is no garment to measure the development of  a male from puberty to adulthood? Or does this never happen? I am confident that Foucault would have intuitively responded to the sari and understood that  each weave has its own history, and   that each sari tells its own story.   We wear sarees  Mr. Poonia, because they are there!

Not Run Off The Mill Yet

2012 is the year of the millet. This is not according to the chinese calendar but as per  new year tips from nutritionists and dieticians  to clients, patients and customers and newspaper readers  who form part of the one percent  and are on the look out  for suggestions that will qualitatively improve their lives. Millets are cereal like foods, and are no longer as well known as the two staples, wheat and rice that the world has veered towards over the previous century. In fact in the years that we grew up, we thought of ourselves as a rather evolved family as far as food was concerned.  Our parents moved to New Delhi from The South of India and rice  and its variations was our morning  and noon staple. In the evenings  we nodded at North Indian  cuisine by consuming chappatis and paranthas, occasionally even venturing in the direction of makki  and missi rotis.  Poories,( enunciated as boories in South India) were occasional fare, viewed with suspicion and consumed with  joy unpunctuated  by  gloom since  the calorific value of the oil sploshed in our food was yet to  be tabulated and white polished rice and white bread  were regular visitors on the kitchen shelf.

 Our favourite day of the week was  saturday afternoon, when we  returned from our not so public school,( government aided, and six day week) The Delhi Tamil Association.  Dad was home from work( from  a corporate job that  allowed its employees two saturdays off  and two  half day saturdays) and usually pottering about, not in the absent minded way of  story book fathers, but busying himself with the preparation of  dosas. He boiled potatoes and  minced onions which were then cooked together  for the masala and  ladled out the dosa batter on large flat  iron tavas that he had  got customized for the purpose. Endless saturdays we ate  large, fragrant ghee roasted, crisp  and thin dosas, which dad rolled out and served with aplomb. When we had visitors, this could be office colleagues or relatives,  dad would roll out dosas, while mom chipped in as  chef's assistant,  getting the batter, chutney and sambaar ready each time.   Those saturdays  have long gone by but my siblings and I  learnt to love food and enjoy  preparing  it since within our household there were no gender specific kitchen roles.

Dad  turned all of eighty a few months ago and can still make a "mean masala dosa' and  delicious  difficult to make rava dosas.. In fact both  my children insist that "Thatha's masal dosa" and "Paati's molahapodi"  taste much better than what  I dish out and always hope to get a raise out of me. Of late, coping with my son's  oil-free expectations , which began with paranthas and  toast and have now extended  to the hapless dosa, I have incorporated dad's not so recent innovation with the dosa batter.  To a quantity of approximately 700 ml of dosa batter, (which can make 10 large dosas) ,  I add one tablespoon of gingelly oil and mix thoroughly. This batter when ladled on to a hot greased skillet requires no further addition of oil.  Discounting the invisible oil already mixed into the batter, what we get  are oil free dosas. I make dosas with ragi and bajra and barley, (substituting rice flour with millet) and the oil trick works fine with all of these as well. Yet I struggle with  the cultural racism that is so deeply ingrained  in our food habits. White rice is prettier and more shapely than brown rice. Dosas made with white rice  are apparently better looking. Iddlis with white rice are more attractive to the eye. Bhaturas with maida are lighter of  complexion  than those made with Aata. Cakes with maida are softer than cakes made with aata.. Meanwhile ragi dosas  that are the colour of oil stained pink sandstone and bajra dosas that turn  mud green   are termed  coarse and unattractive.  And so the litany continues...... Eventually, hunger and the flavour of the food renders all protest irrelevant.The supposedly coarse millet which is sold at and bought  from special  niche stores is  a lot  more expensive  than white rice and white bread,  and also takes longer to cook, which is possibly another reason for its low acceptance in urban households, all of which live from time crunch to time crunch.

   I belong officially to a generation  that struggles with  the absence of knowledge on how to use millets in everyday cooking and despairs at  getting  the young to eat up their millets. I wonder whether this  nutrient dense food  continues to be accessible at all to people who fall outside the privileged one percent  Hopefully, close to the lands where they grow, in homes where there is enough to eat, millets are cooked in a variety of ways . Thenai and keyveragu form part of porridges, both sweet and savoury in Tamil Nadu and  Andhra Pradesh. I have eaten delicious bajre ki roti with kachre ki chutney at Dundlod in Rajasthan. At LMB in Jaipur one gets mouthwatering  bajre churma roasted in ghee and flavored with nuts and cardamom. At Lingsur In Northern Karnataka we feasted on  bajra and jaun rotis and ate some delicious  bajra holiges, stuffed with peanut and jaggery paste and this was local fare  at very affordable rates. In New Delhi  roasted amaranth ladoos have been stocked at the  local grocers all through the cold season, well before  niche stores began supplying amaranth at extraordinary prices. Makke ki roti with saag or gur is another well loved seasonal food.  So are kuttu dipped potato pakoras and the jhankar or bhagar kheer and chawal  made during  the vrats around the navratras in North India.  Incidentally, India is one of the larger producers of millets the world over. May the tribe of  millet consumers  in our country increase yearly!

Festivities in the New Year

New year celebrations, announced in urban heartlands get so much coverage that cyclical and  quasi agricultural festivities come and go by  rather quietly. This January has been something of a bonanza for the quieter festivals.Of course a lot of these festivals are celebrated in South India, sometimes in Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Often times  Andhra and Karnataka also pitch in and the Southern countryside reverberates with the celebrations.  On some occasions most of rural  India comes together to celebrate harvest festivals.

This year Thiruvadarai fell on a sunday, the eighth of January.The Thiruvadarai festival is bound by the complex rituals of fasting and feasting. Primarily celebrated by women and young girls, it marks the metamorphosis of Manmathan (the god of love) who had been reduced to cinders by the  radiation from Shiva's third eye. Cajoled by Uma who supposedly attains Shiva through long austerities on this  particular day, Manmathan is allowed to take on a formless entity. So young women desirous of marriage to Shiva like husbands fast and pray. Meanwhile married women  celebrate eternal cosmic concupiscence by collecting in groups, having ritual baths in rivers and ponds with much singing and joyous dancing
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 While we were encouraged to bathe diurnally, the same stimulus was not extended to ritual dancing on such occasions. So we grew up with  sombre and measured annual  Thiruvadarai celebrations  whose collateral benefits were delicious foods, produced by skilled in house female labour. There is golden brown kali, made by washing, drying roasting and then grinding rice into a semolina type texture. To this roasted mung lentils are added. The rice and lentil mix are boiled in jaggery water  with coconut shavings  and subsequently pressure cooked. What we get is a delicious sweet rice, to which a garnish of ghee and nuts is added. This is served along with a dish usually made of seven root vegetables(yezhu thaan kootu) cooked with spices and tamarind. Living in the North, away from a lot of root vegetables, new culinary variations have asserted themselves, but a combination of potato, cauliflower, zucchini, peas and carrots and sweet potato garnished with coconut makes for a delicious combine.

 A few days after Thiruvadaria begins the onrush of harvest festivals.  Boghi in the South and Lohri in the North are celebrated at this time. Beginning with Boghi, celebrated to propitiate the rain god  into sending good showers, spring clean the house and throw household waste into bonfires, all these festivals are an exercise in outstanding cosmic PR.  Lohri is part of the harvest festival in Punjab and North India , celebrating  the last day of the sun in Sagittarius and  heralding  the end  of  the  intense cold season. Bonfires are lit  in front of houses and til, gur, peanuts and popcorn are distributed. Everyone collects around the bonfire to partake of  all these snacks and songs and merriment.
This is followed by Makar Sankranti and this  is time  for thanksgiving  to the Sun god for an abundant harvest.  Apparently all the slumbering devas wake up, possibly to the smells of til patti and pongals and this morning is so auspicious that everybody rushes off to bathe in nearby holy rivers, in the hope of an instant  cold water cleansing adrenalin high, if not the promise of eventual salvation. They are of course in hallowed company, because an original patriarch, Bhisma Pitamah  waited for this day to arrive in order to depart from this world, of course in a yuga long gone by? Makar Sankranti is apparently  celebrated all over southern  Asia, is known by different names and  a range of festivities. The common uniting link is the fact that it  marks the progression of the sun in the  sign of Capricorn or makara.
 Makara sankranti is celebrated as Pongal in Tamil Nadu.  In the South rice and lentils and rice and jaggery are boiled together to make  pongals, both salt and savoury and teamed up with a coconut and yoghurt vegetable stew called avial. Within individual homes large quantities of pongal and avial are made and trays carried to the homes of immediate neighbours. Visitors to the house and domestic help also share in the feasting in the cities.
The Pongal season ends with Kanu Pongal, which falls a day after pongal.  Kanu pongal is reminiscent of   rakshabandan because  the festival involves praying for the welfare of  brothers worldwide. Brothers usually toodle off, in search of the pot of gold at the end of  distant rainbows and Kanu is the quaint custom of making offerings  to cows and  birds (usually sparrows and crows) while praying for the well being of brothers. Since cows are bespoke in urban areas and relatively difficult to access, we have confined ourselves to feeding the birds.
 .The birds who visit my terrace wonder at  the largess  doled out on huge leaves for them. There are servings of pongal, sweet and salt and avial and assorted coloured rice rolled into tiny balls.  Whimsical human, they say to each other over the unexpected  one day annual feast that  turns a Nelson's eye to their dining requirements  for the rest of the year. What of the brothers who are invoked? Do these symbolic rituals tug at their heartstrings, remind them of their natal homes, older  associations and  connections  shared childhoods and  slowly fraying ancient dreams?
The varieties of rice  though provide a multi-hued palette of colours  for the eye and flavours for the palate, reiterating the vibrant shades and textures of  a bountiful harvest. The pictures below are from last year's Kanu Pongal platters.

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.