Malnad Diary: time to stir a bit

The tree with the tresses is the bhaine tree. They make sendhi with it, which is a crude, intoxicant drink. Some nights ago, (my son) Yashas taught me to hold an one-kilometer-beam torch with its base to my forehead, like a miner's lamp, and look into the plantation. Quite soon, I caught a pair of gleaming green eyes from the bhaine—scared eyes, it seemed to me, eyes searching my intentions. A black creature like a bandicoot; it began to slither down the tree, its eyes on the torch. Then another came after it, and another, and another. Bandicoots up a tree? A crowd of them? Turned out they were civets. During the day you see their excrement on the tracks in the plantation, which you can tell is theirs because it is full of coffee beans. The beans are special when they are processed like this in the civet's bowels, and fetch a goodly sum in foreign markets. Civet coffee sells for the price of wine in gourmet cafés. $30 a cup!

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Hard-working Basavanna owns a model plantation neighboring ours, and another some ten kilometers away. He is a religious man gifted with abundant self-belief, which shows in the manner in which he runs his plantation. He listens to no one, and is impatient when one doesn't listen to him. No matter. The proof of his attitude is in the rich green of the leaves of his coffee, the heavy coffee-filled arms of his plants, and the yield he extracts for each acre of his—said to be the highest in our area. For over three years now, Basavanna also manages our plantation for us, on condition that we give him no instruction, ask him for no plan. We have no complaints, are just happy when he calls on us with an always-friendly half-namaste, pressing a palm to the chest, and other greetings and questions regarding our well being.

This is a new model that is working well in Malnad, with planters taking on the management of the holdings of absentee owners from Bangalore who have bought the plantation, some for the love of nature, some for a an exotic alternate location where to enjoy drink and spicy chicken.

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Mornings are lovely anywhere in the world, but here on the plantation I have a greater urge to rise before dawn so as to wait for the sun's silver rim to take shape behind Parvathammana Betta, high in the distance. Goddess Parvathi's hill. The temple to Parvathi is tiny and white, and is often lost in cloud. When the sky is clear the shrine is a striking white on the hilltop, which is covered in green trees and the gray and brown of stone. The locals have been telling us the elephants that torment them walk through their plantations and climb Parvathamma's hill and then they cannot climb down. The elephants stand stranded there, until they find courage and take first steps downward. In the morning and in the evening we hear the neighboring planters setting off explosions (dadakees, which are bigger, louder patakees) in their estates to scare off the elephants. The more you scare them, the more uncertain their path. You just listen when the planters tell of their woes with the elephant. It sounds preachy to talk of the loss of the pachyderm's habitat, to ask for a concerted effort to provide it a safe corridor. If you are worried for nature, you should only begin the work for it.

It is four years since we have had our plantation, and I still haven't gone up that hill. We have planned to go there next week. I hope to experience something that I can write for you. Let me see.

the fears that accompany leisure

I spent the weekend in Malnad. On Saturday I rose a little before dawn and stood by the floor-to-ceiling window and looked up at the pulsing stars. Dark figures of silver oak loomed before me, their tops level with my eyes. At their feet the coffee were huddled and hunched over like ten-thousand bears.

It was that moment in the morning when the night animals had called it a day, and the other animals were snoozing. There wasn't a sound, except for a solitary fellow whose sound came from everywhere—a cousin of the cicada, to tell from his voice—who cried out to all with the fervor of a revolutionary: “rise, rise, rise, rise.” But the ears of all were deaf to him. They hear him too much, and all the time.

I stepped out from the room and went out the bungalow, toward two lights that were on at the labor-line in the distance—yellow lights diffused on muddy white walls. I stood by the one that lit the cowshed. Ganga the cow returned my gaze from where she lay, and, of her two calves, one stood at the edge of the shed and looked out into the dark of the plantation, and the other lay slouched in the inner dark of the shed. They were brooding as always, but more intensely now. The question that hung frozen in the chill air was: will the effects of the economic boom trickle down also to these cattle? Within the remaining lifetime of the cow? Before these calves have grown? Or would they live always like this, as now in this cold, like drudges from the pages of the great Russian books?

While I took pictures of them my ankles and my shin twitched, revealing my constant fear that a snake might rise up on the ground and have a go at me. I've never been afraid when I have encountered the snake; each time, I’ve been stunned into a cold fascination, and I have gazed at them, admiring their bright and brilliant reticulations. But there is ever the fear of how the next snake might present itself. And I have a horror of their hiss—even if no snake has hissed at me until now.

A short while later, I crouched by the plantation's lake, keeping a fearful distance from the hedge, feeling foolish about still worrying about the reptile, worrying that one could be lurking in the green thicket, ready to lunge at me. There was a fast-moving smoky mist over the water, but the mist sailed away by the time I set the controls on my camera. Then the sun reached in and twisted his long yellow hand upon the lake, and there was no more even the memory of a mist.

Over at the edge of the plantation, where the earth had been dug for new coffee, frost had gathered on the webs which the spiders had woven flat on the ground in the gaps between . They glittered in the morning light, and they were dozens and dozens of them: small flat webs like mirrors, scattered on the ground. The worms and insects had stayed clear of them, so the frost seemed to have foiled the scheme of the spiders.

Seeing the spiders I remembered the birds. Are there worms that are evolved, which start out late and outwit the early bird?

The birds had been such noisy busybodies in the morning, but had now fallen silent, and most had flown away to hunt elsewhere. Tiny yellow butterflies played at my feet over the grass. I urged them to go find the flowers, but they ignored me to my face. A lone gray butterfly crashed into my blue jeans and suffered a moment's disorientation before it recovered and fluttered about, not leaving my leg by too much. All life was fair game for a meal in the morning, except me, it appeared, but none seemed perturbed by their circumstance.

I hurried toward the bungalow, suddenly hungry for the “medium-spicy” vegetarian breakfast that my wife would be waiting with. I sucked air with each spoon of the uppittu—so hot it was. “Did you see the turtles?” my wife asked me when I described to her how the mist had swayed as it sailed away upon the lake. I didn't have the courage to tell her—she was born in the coffee belt—that I'd been too absorbed in watching out for snakes in the grass at my feet.

The lake at Nandi Thota

worrying for a school for my leaders…

The Raffles Institution shows off its produce. This picture I have borrowed without permission.

It occurred to me that if I view our current affairs like I would a movie, then I'd be entertained by these happenings around me, which would otherwise pull me down into depression.

Kumaraswamy helped Sreeramulu win by not fielding a JD(S) candidate. After his victory Sreeramulu is throwing glances at the JD(U) in Karnataka, agreeing with them that he can revive and reinvigorate their party, and we can guess that if he cannot own the whole of that party, then he'd surely purchase all its strings. He has asked to speak to Nitish Kumar on the subject. If Sreeramulu should join the JD (U), and if Kumaraswamy should stay on in support of Sreeramulu, you'd have three men in a centrifuge bed, which when it stops its flight will send the three men flying. Who will bite the dust? Who will land on his feet? The good? The bad? The ugly?

No, the vision of that doesn't lift my spirits.

I need also to deal with the bad press regarding this superpower that has stalled, having to read of it daily, when it is already hurtful enough to experience the tugging from the slowdown. But I've begun to take it rather well, and, in fact, I was thinking only two days ago why economies should grow so much, and if all the developed and developing nations and their alpha achievers shouldn't cool down a bit. No, please don't laugh at me.

I read a report in the papers that our billionaires are “sick and tired” of our leaden government and are shifting base to London or Singapore. I've been thinking ahead of these rich men, pondering that I should do just the same, and I’m annoyed that billionaires stamp their large feet everywhere, including on the plans of others. The papers seem to sympathize with them, but I ask, of what sort is the businessman who will flee his country when it encounters its first potholes on its growth path? Fair weather friend? Does it matter no more where he made his first billions? Ah, let's both laugh at my naïveté, dear reader.

Let me admit it, I have to beat down at least thrice daily the urge to leave this place. Many times during the day the faces of the probables who'll be chief minister flash in my mind—and I shudder at them. Why don’t a few good men and women who came into business in the last decade enter also into politics? At least a few like Mitt Romney in America, said to be worth $200 million, who is fighting among Republicans for the chance to take on Obama? Romney is willingly having his outward existence and all his innards clawed at by the American media, and the media has also examined his height and weight and gait and demeanor to know whether they're each one of a presidential standard. The man is standing tall through it all, even if a little naked.

I have in hand a piece by an English High Master who rues that Britons shy now from having Eton create prime ministers for their nation, for that great institution is considered elitist, but which was Eton's clear task in its historic past. Look at Singapore, the educationist points to the old colony, look at the Raffles Institution, and see how they are working to produce their next prime minister, and the other terrific leaders Singapore needs for its unfaltering forward march. I envy the high master his worry. Our worries here at home are somewhat short of that class.

Wayward thoughts in this cataleptic winter

These winters of no discontent

In December and January I will not leave Bangalore, for I cannot have enough of this gentle chill in a cocktail with the warm sun, capped by this clean blue sky. The dreariness of the daily commute is somewhat muted, and sitting in the back seat of my car I can laugh at the traffic than rage at it, with music in my ears, which this week has been Metallica and Neil Young and Feist.

And so my thoughts regarding the new posters that are splashed on my path to work are more charitable than they'd have been in another month. Sreeramulu is again elected, and his victory is not a matter of who won, but what won. With him, several things have won again, and the things that are defeated are beaten to near-burial. But I am far from Bellary, and those who elected him took what he gave and gave what he wanted, and they are at peace with each other, and these thoughts of someone like me, for whom politics is no more than a piece for conversation, are a bitching waste of time.

Thinking so, on a morning this week, I decided to join the posters, and welcome with them the triumphant hon'ble re-elected Member of the Legislature to Bangalore. And I quickly realized that this man from Bellary owns Bangalore significantly more than I, and I can no more welcome him than he can tolerate me and the category of the electorate I belong to. So now I see the posters in respectful silence, and I am not at all peeved at myself, or at the world, thanks to this lovely December.

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The don's den

With such thoughts regarding the state and strongmen, I watched The Godfather today, Saturday, for the third time in my life. The Godfather died outside in the sun, while playing with his grandson, and with his death Michael was free to take the revenge the Godfather had in a brilliant move put on pause, having pledged with enemy dons that he wouldn't be the first seeker of vengeance. Until the end, in every meeting in his dark study Don Corleone had shown no love for the drugs business, each time he was offered it, whereas he held out a whole lot of love for his family and, among them, the most partial love for Michael. I was moved and inspired by the Godfather, and when he danced with his daughter at her wedding I envied him even, for Don Corleone was so much a man, and such a father, and such a don, and he was so noble in the way he moved and spoke and danced, and in the way he gestured to people with his hands.

How is life in the inner coterie of the Bellary brothers? How moving a movie would their life make? But the brothers aren't the silent type like Corleone, if you consider the shouting they've done in the legislature, and the gross abuses they've traded on the floor of the house. They cannot have a Brando or an Al Pacino playing any of them, even in an Anglicized version. Still, I wonder, how deep does a meeting get in the study of Janardhana Reddy? Would it move my heart, watching the play of long loyalties and the alleged honor among men in his business? Would I draw inspiration from some part of it?

Such wild thoughts! But they say that it is normal for the mind to be choppy on a day like this, when the moon is in eclipse.

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End note

On the street before my house, the magnolia are falling. They were a flaming red in November, thick in a canopy over their tree. Now when I step out for a stroll at night they squelch beneath my feet and pull at my soles, like they want me on the ground with them. After I pass the tree the fragrance from my neighbor's sampigé is so sharp, I look to see the smell that has hit my nose. Every day.

The moon has been out and about all week.

Singapore: more than mere commerce

SOTA: The School of the Arts, Singapore

I've been walking ten days in the grid Singapore calls its Art & Heritage District.

Just before the start of the district, in the National Museum, they have paintings of nineteenth century masters on loan from Musee D’Orsay, and they will be on show there until February. I went there two days, and during the second visit I joined the guided tour, conducted that day by (I think) a French Lady. An erudite lady. Her manner was to settle on one hip to make one point and to sink into the other hip for the next point, while on her face crinkles shifted most becomingly for smiles and frowns. "I’ll keep van Gogh for the last," she said. Starry Night, with wild stars painted thick on a wild painting, right off the tube. And Cezanne, and Monet, and Rousseau. She told us the simpler things regarding the paintings, to accommodate art-illiterates such as me. But, of course, even one like me wants to know more when they encounter something like The Card Players, for even I could tell that I should search for more in the painting than two eyes can read. The exhibition closes February 2012, and I'm hoping to be back there before then, for another look at that Cezanne.

At the end of the displays, in a makeshift room before the exit, little masters imitated great works using prints of them, under the quiet watch of parents. It was a black room with small, sharp lights over rows of lamp-shades, designed for quiet and concentration, and it all seemed a very good idea, though some parents held out a grim visage while their wards worked.

Across from the Museum, before the corner where Orchard Road ends and Bras Basah Road begins, there stands the high SOTA (The School of the Arts of Singapore) with a vertical garden all round its upper walls, clinging like ivy. (Forgive me, but why does that nice building seem in my memory like a toad set to leap?) Down Bras Basah Road, from Queen Street to Waterloo Street, is the Singapore Art Museum, where this week they had colored elephants in front, in participation with the Elephant Parade, an effort to conserve the Asian Elephant.

Back of these institutions, on Waterloo Street and Queen Street and Victoria Street and also on Bencoolen Street there are other large and small art schools and galleries. Sculpture Square, a small gallery that promotes sculpture on the corner where Waterloo Street hits Middle Road is shaped like a small chapel. The Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts on Bencoolen shows off on its front the pictures of its alumni who are now celebrity. And, in the midst of them all, in the unimpressive Bras Basah complex, you see stacks of easels leaned on every storefront, and you can get there the Copic pen which is said to be “available only in America.” It is an old complex; it has been dealing in arts supplies a long time.

What I didn't see is graffitti like you see on European walls—Singapore will not allow them, of course. Can great art come from a city that allows no graffitti, that unguided, unsponsored, rebellious outpouring?

Is art in Singapore like in Paris and New York? Do Singaporean artists starve and struggle in garrets, driven and mad from seeing visions that none before them have seen? Such people were not discernible on the streets in the Art & Heritage District, where everybody seemed well fed—may God bless them. But I saw that more thrives in Singapore than merely the business of commerce—even the Singapore Management University only just concluded a long SMU Season of Arts (August to November).

I returned to Bangalore Monday and am still lovesick for Singapore, and I've a newspaper in hand that has news that proves I'm not to blame: Mercer have just declared Singapore the best Asian city to live in. They've also declared Bangalore the best Indian city to live in, but that bit doesn't move me at all.

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See: some more pictures.

This post also appeared on Lonely Planet: Blogs we like

Older posts by me on Singapore

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