Western potholes

Inordinate connectivity difficulties means putting stuff up here has taken a back seat. Until it makes the move up from there … here’s my fortnightly column for Mid-Day. Appeared today Monday Sep 26. Comments welcome.

As the stomach turns

There’s a lot of stomach-turning news that comes along. Possibly the most stomach-turning — if that’s possible — is the way women are regularly stripped and paraded naked, to “punish” them for various “crimes”. Here’s only the latest of these.
This time, as far as I can tell, the “crime” was that that the husbands [...]

15 and 20

Too rushed for posting substantially here over the last few days, so this will have to suffice until I’m less tied up (someone cut thru these knots, please…). Two bits off the newswires:
First: News last Sunday that many people I met in Chennai remarked on: Relief cheques worth Rs 15 crore bounce.
Makes you feel [...]

All it takes

One more article about experiences on this tsunami-followup trip through Tamil Nadu. This, about a quietly impressive woman. My fortnightly rediff.com column, here.

Harmless. Blind.

Speaking of crocodiles …
Deep in the jungle of Ankarana, in northern Madagascar, Blaid and I were on the way back to our tents. It had been a long hike, followed by some hairy clambering over knife-sharp tsingy, a sort of plateau made of spires of limestone. I was filthy and exhausted, so when Blaid suggested [...]

Name’s not there

Today’s Hindu has something I wrote after a visit to J&K last year: here. Your comments welcome.

Squawking to summon

Dama was short, squat and muscular. When he took us out canoeing one moonless night on the canal at Tortuguero Park in Costa Rica (Hi RT!), he told us we might meet some animals. Dark everywhere, vague shapes to indicate the trees, and us, swishing silently through the water. Well, Dama was silent. The rest [...]

With marker or spray

Random notings from several days on the road.
***
The “Seva Counter” in Mangalore’s Kadri Manjunath Temple has a price list. Here are some of the items on it:
Rudrabhisheka: Rs 30
Karpoorarathi: Rs 5
Shatharudrabhisheka: Rs 6000 (including santhampanae)
Thulabhara (without sothu): Rs 250
Ganahoma and coconut: Rs 100
Belli Ratha Seve: Rs 4000

***
Mangalore station has a large stone tablet, painted with [...]

Water-level life

How do little silvery fish leap out of the water and across the waves, easily 5 or 10 times their length? This important question dogs me all the way from Killai to Chinnavaikal, because little silvery fish keep doing just that all the way. This is a measure of compensation for the start of the [...]

20,000 litres

Also coming up in Shanmuganagar is a water tank. A worker sees me looking at the pillars and says to me, “Tank. 20,000 litres.”
A few minutes later, I’m walking out of Shanmuganagar. An old woman is trudging up the mild slope towards me, returning to her hut with a pot of water. She stops [...]