From the category archives:

Malnad Diary

The Planters Club celebrates its Silver Jubilee

November 29, 2008

The first signs in this season of harvest are disappointing. Harsh rains have felled coffee beans, which were red and ready for picking. So earnings will be poor this year in the coffee belt. But the disappointment did not show at the Planters Club where three hundred people from the planter community assembled to celebrate [...]

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a much-loved beast of burden

August 31, 2008

I’ve told you about elephants that descend from the hills at night and visit the plantations in Malnad. A recent post of mine tells of the torrent of trucks from the mines of Bellary that has already ruined the Sakleshpur highway—soon the green on either side of the highway will be laid waste, when the [...]

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elephantine things

August 11, 2008

While trekking in Bhumthang in Bhutan some years ago, we asked our guide, a strapping Bhutanese, how to escape if we were to encounter a bear. He didn’t know. Sujaya remembered what someone had told her, that you should run in a wide zigzag, so as to beat the bear’s side vision. The bear can’t [...]

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Why is Shankar Shetru leaving Sakleshpur?

July 5, 2008

Some like me are half-settling in Sakleshpur. Some illustrious ones are leaving. Like Shankar Shetru. We telephoned him and he offered to tell us how to plant and maintain pepper and he asked us to meet him with a two-hundred page notebook, and with two hours on hand. But he is seventy-six years old and [...]

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labor pain

June 27, 2008

The location of the new Ossoor Restaurant caused such envy in me, the lush green in the trees and in the coffee all round the restaurant (and across the highway on the front) paled before the green on my face. The Ossoor plantations run hundreds of acres each, and probably total to some thousand acres [...]

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all this ado…

June 14, 2008

I’m puzzled at Dharmappa. His war with the writer has been about wanting to send labor to us. And, after that—so the writer says—to sell us saplings from his nursery, and to also ask for a loan to buy a second jeep. It is ten days since we relented and asked him to bring us [...]

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the threat

June 6, 2008

Yesterday, Balan called Sujaya with grave news: he’d received a call, a voice he didn’t recognize. Balan generally reports with much sound and excitement, and this time the intensity of both was twice higher. The gist is, the caller had abused him, had alleged that he was too damn tough with labor, that he ought [...]

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please bear our cross

May 29, 2008

The goat was tethered some feet away from the two stones that are Banta, attendant to Chowdeshwari. A black goat, spotless as Chowdy desires, is sacrificed each year in her name after the Kenchammana Jathre, at Banta’s rocks. Chowdy is denoted by another set of rocks at the base of the tree neighboring Banta’s. On [...]

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