Posts tagged as:

malnad

trifling with history in Halebid

March 17, 2010

Two minutes before arriving in Halebid a farm came up, its house painted in pink and green fluorescent colors completely foreign to this region, but our eyes were drawn beyond the startling walls of the house to a mound shaped like the smooth top of a giant sarcophagus fifty meters behind the house. The mound, [...]

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a coffee-table story of Angadi

January 13, 2010

There isn’t an outlet that serves a decent cup of coffee in Malnad. The little shops that make it use instant-coffee powder; but if you are desperate for good coffee, knock on the door of the coffee-planter. His woman will serve it with a fluff of froth with a wee bit of powder on top, [...]

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Kadamane: kal, aaj, aur kal

August 2, 2009

Their meal is a mess on the plate and a mess round the mouth—the kids seem to like what they are eating. For the smallest children the ayahs squeeze the morsels dry in their hands and push them into the mouths, a child at a time, patiently drawing them back from constant distraction. This creche [...]

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A Giant Theater

July 26, 2009

In such a vast panorama only a fifth—maybe tenth—of the land is filled with trees. The rest is taken by thigh-high, chest-high cones of the shrub. The shrubs in a given patch are all trimmed to the same height and, seen level, seeing the height they have climbed and the depths they’ve plunged, they are [...]

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seeking a turn…

July 12, 2009

They were at the gate, by its post, taking shelter under umbrellas; how did they get there, and why? They had that disconnected look that has now grown permanent on them; and they were cold and shivering when I peered at them through the thin columns of rain in the dull misty morning. My Jeep [...]

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the view from Munzerabad club

June 9, 2009

Years ago, I often shuttled with my parents between Bangalore (and Mysore) and Mangalore, and crossed the coffee-belt midway. In all my memories I peer through the trees of the plantations from the rear window, always through mist or rain or the dark, looking for the fabled estate-mansions. I saw my first plantation-homes these last [...]

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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 [...]