The Flower and the Flutter

 Around the first week of October every year, something magical unfolds.  Ceropegia is a tiny little creeper, nondescript for about fifty weeks in a year, one that you could easily pass by if not a trained botanist.  

Then one day it blooms, a lemon-yellow delicate bloom of rare beauty, nestled amidst grass and cumbersome touch-me-nots, with soft petals and a furry leaf, hence ceropegia hirsuta.  There is no fragrance for humans to inhale, for this is a fly-trap flower that is pollinated with ingenious design (more in the fascinating article below)..https://deponti.livejournal.com/1344391.html

 

There are a precious few of them here at the base of Laburnum Hill, just three plants as far as one can search but in the forest yonder, there are more.  Over the years, I have associated this little creeper in its beauty and simplicity with the Mahatma for they share birth-and-bloom days.  And never has this plant been seen in abundance.  

Wild boars, I am told by Ananda, the knowledge repository, scoop up the tuber of this plant, as do humans on occasion and, for once, I am dismayed at the thought and hope they - boars and bores - fail, give up and let live-and-bloom.  But is there a story to tell here of commensalism between boars and this plant, where the boars dig in (literally) but the plant stays unaffected?  A story beneath the earth, the secret life of a plant that will grow no matter what depredation happens?  Or one that needs the boar’s excavation skills to thrive?  

We don’t know what we don’t know.

And in that distraction of thought, a butterfly comes into view - the Common Silverline, I later learn - resplendent in the warm evening glow, flitting by, pausing briefly on flowers for a last sip before twilight sets in, searching.....

But then, aren't we all?

Dog Eat Dog Turned Panda

 

The most interesting news from last week, of course, was that a Chinese zoo painted a couple of dogs and displayed them as pandas in the Star Attraction category.  As you can see, since this under-panda-is-dog event, the word ‘underdog’ has now got a whole new meaning (which is currently in Chinese and inscrutable).  

Now, we in India are trying to beat China in most things and have only succeeded in population so, in my usual thorough dedicated way, I immediately decided to check if we have done the dog-into-panda routine with those cheetahs in Kuno National Park and whether, after the rains, the paint has washed away and they have gone back to being oversized domestic cats that run very fast because they were fed growth hormones left over from WWF wrestling matches.  My diligent research showed that, as always, the answer is like the answer to the question “What is India’s population now?” or “What is our national debt?”, which is, We Have No Freaking Clue.  So for the time being, I will assume they are cheetahs since they run like cheetahs and don’t say meow (at least loudly) and haven’t tried to rub themselves against someone’s leg when he isn’t watching, giving him the fright of fourteen lifetimes.

But back to dogs-and-pandas or dogs-cum-pandas or dogs-that-were-pandas-but-are-now-bow-wow again or whatever.  I love this idea totally and will actively campaign for more such things in life in general.  For the following reasons:

Near Random Rubble, the farm, lives a goat with strong opinions on people who wear clothes (its owner generally doesn’t and Ramappa can attest to it). It has a robust set of horns (the goat, not the owner) that are clearly made of some evil metal like wrought iron and are sharper than my thankfully-now-dead aunt’s sarcasm (I speak, with deep feeling, of both creatures).  The sinister nefarious plan is to have this goat painted and anointed with headgear to be the cutest calf out of Walt Disney and then left near those noisy retarded pubs in Indiranagar with the result that the word Butt - hereinafter used in verb and noun form - will be in substantial evidence, followed by the fastest evacuation ever recorded in peninsular India after the Rashtrakutas.  

I have also thought of painting up all the street dogs around my place as pandas so then WWF - not the wrestling scamsters but that NGO with the panda as its logo that keeps asking you for money - will round up these blokes, feed them bamboo bark (note the ingenious pun) and keep them around.  Until it rains, that is.  When, of course, we paint them again, this time as penguins.  

As you can see, I dream big in the race against China and am hard at work to explore possibilities that will one day leave pandas wondering if they could become dogs for a change.

Curator Pilav

Among the words fashionably in vogue now is ‘curate’. This means it gets my malignant attention. 

Earlier, a curator was an old fuddy-duddy in a museum, whose only skill as an archeologist was that he knew seven different ways to dig his nose. Then things changed (though his nose remained the same). I read some years ago of a nude museum somewhere in Europe that advertised for a Curator and got more applications than the population of Belgium.  Imagine the ad: “Wanted, Curator for Museum of Birthday Suit Art.  Previous exposure required.  Dress code: none at all”.  The job profile involved going through heaps of photographs, (which task if you did in regular jobs would get you locked up) and passing comments that – it being Modern Art – nobody including you would understand, all the while having a great time and getting paid for it. 

But back to the word Curate.  Nowadays, people curate anything – fashion, cakes, watches, handbags, furniture, veggies. This means that they choose what you can buy - at their price.  The other day I was staying in a biggish hotel and walked downstairs for dinner, only to discover that it was curated by a Chef Somebody.  I was looking for rice, dal and dry veggies, but was told that I could have Zaphrani Pilav with mustard-apple sauce and tamarind baigan (mustard baigan and tamarind apple sauce.  It does not matter.)
“But why can’t I have rice and dal?” I asked with some petulance.

The Chef – that Curator chap – was hurriedly called, so he came by with a big smile (in big hotels, they are trained to do jackshit, but with big smiles).

He was (and remains) the fattest human I have ever seen.  The many layers of his stomach rolled over and – this is fascinating -  his belly button (that had dispatched a reluctant shirt button into outer space) was within whispering distance of his knees.  And if that doesn’t impress you, he had a triple chin on his double chin (ie, subsect of main set – pls refer Set Theory for photographic description).  
As he ambled slowly towards me, there was steam from his nose, so there was probably someone inside, feeding coal to keep the engine moving.    
“Sorry Sir, today’s dinner is curated,” he said, as if that explained everything including global warming.  
“But I want something light, a little rice?” 
“Sir, you can have the Zaphrani Pilav with mustard-apple…..”
“No, no.  I want something light like plain rice.  You know rice?  Stuff that is boiled in water? Pressure cooked?  White in colour? Grown in a paddy field?” This was a weak attempt at sarcasm, which, of course, is completely lost on fat curator chefs.

He gave me a big smile and ambled off never to be seen again.  After reading about half the book that I’d carried down, I went back to the room and ordered baked beans and bread from the Room Service menu.

The baked beans was tinned and therefore utterly ghastly but the bread was good.  Nothing, not even the salt, was curated, so, on the whole, all’s well that ends well

Philip Kotler Is Passe

 

Marketing has its 4 ‘P’s.

So do Bongs  who travel in Calcutta buses (the male ones, I must be careful to emphasise).  The 4 ‘P’s of Bongs in Buses are: Phight, Pheesh, Phone and Phootball.

Calcutta buses were all made around the time shock absorbers were just an idea. but the bongs aren't concerned.  Bongs board them partly because they need to go somewhere, but the larger, deeper reason is simple:  every Cal bus doubles up as a free-for-all arena to express a Bong’s views in the most uninhibited manner.  In general, the Bong in Bus will phight about anything and if the fare has been revised to the minutest degree, it’s fair to expect a sequel to the Bolshevik revolution.  Nobody stays neutral, of course - you could get the worst from both sides.  In the deeper philosophy of cooperation, everyone joins in with spirit and verve, has his say, disagrees with everyone else and mutters under his breath with an air of superiority.  It’s really win-win.  

When he speaks on the Phone, the Bong in Bus can get positively splenetic, splaying his hands, eyes narrowed and staring at the imaginary opponent, the words rattled off at top speed, with a series of insults, each sentence ending with a rhetorical question.  Once I heard a fellow call the chap on the other end something related to a dog (kukkoor), after which he called him - or so it seemed - a stale fish (maach) and continue in the Natural History vein. The other fellow was up to scratch too, but this guy wasn’t listening and I had to lean it closer since the conversation wasn't on speaker, which seems to have got the fellow to think that I was part of it and he began staring at me with virulence.    

The only time the Bong in Bus is silent on the phone is when his better half gives him an earful, such episodes being regular and most lively (for the party of the second part).  When the women in Calcutta buses have an opinion, they do not just express it, they imprint it on stake, much like the common Bee Eater impales its prey.  

I have had many rides, but my shortest in a Cal bus was when, after boarding at Gariahat, I smelt the presence of at least four pheesh, one of which was in an advanced stage of digestion in someone’s intestine.  But pheesh is everywhere in the Cal bus: on top at times, under a seat, in a bag or box and the conductor no doubt neutered his sensory glands with his first salary.

When silence reigns in the back of a bus where the men stand or sit, with their heads uniformly down staring at their mobiles, you know it’s phootball time.  Often, phootball will be interrupted with phight, but these are listless efforts, for the Bong’s attention is on a higher plane.  Occasionally, the Bong in Bus will slap his thigh in irritation and freely curse, and when there is goal by his favourite team, he will slap his thigh in joy and freely curse.  

And, on a philosophical note, if he has reached his destination, but the match is engrossing and he has a seat, he will continue, for the journey, you see, is the destination.

Divine Bovine

The other day I noticed an elderly gentleman – a regular walker in our area – trying to circumambulate a cow of local breed, possibly because it was his puja day.  I understand that if you do this three times and each such time touch the rump of the above-defined cow (not some other passing bovine since infidelity is frowned upon) and then your forehead, hold your ears with cross-hands and do a quick twist-and-turn and pray for wealth, luck might shift to your side. 

 
While I am uncertain if luck would shift to your side, I do know that dung will definitely shift to your shoe, particularly if it is new, expensive and white (the shoe, not the dung) .  And, despite crippling and persistent inflation and everything that Baba Scamdev and Sigma Sri Sri and Jags-in-turban will tell you, dung is not the same as wealth (if it were, the cows around your home would each have shares in Google and a linkedin profile which says, Author of ‘Downloaded without Bullshit’. She/Her/Moo).

Now, you might find all of this unremarkable, but that is because you are not - when reports last came in - a cow. 

But I digress, as always, so back to the story.  This one was a fine HF specimen and she had strong, unambiguous views about being circumambulated, which were expressed by her turning, along with the man’s slow walkaround, so that she was always facing him head-on, with the other end - the tail-on, shall we delicately say - in Slow Release Splatter Mode.  

It took him a few seconds to realise all this, possibly because of an incomplete education in landscape geography where cows are concerned.  When he did realise, he jumped a step back in the well-founded belief that the cow was likely to poke him in, shall we again say, a delicate place, which thereby increased the circumference of the circumambulation.

And there they stood facing each other.

His problem with the cow now, in succinct summary, was that it would either charge or discharge.  

Now, all this was great entertainment for the public and he was advised by one and all (except the cow that kept its own counsel) to do a quick anti-clockwise round and take the cow by surprise but the idea was rejected:  the opposite of good luck is misfortune , he reminded the 8% of India’s unemployed who were now deeply involved in trouble-shooting and hardware updates.  

All this while, the cow stood unmooved - that is a rather feeble pun - and gave him a stony gaze that reminded me of Fr. Shenoy in high school, after a football had got him in the same delicate place mentioned elsewhere in this news account.

A few minutes later, after aborted attempts made in some embarrassment - for he was now the rock star of 13th main - he decided to do a larger circumambulation, by walking around the block a couple of times, while the cow stayed put, its nose in the abundant garbage that he (and others) had left behind.

I am sure there is a moral here, stay posted.  

In The Flood Lies A Tale

 Sometimes you hear a story that makes you sit up.  This is one such story.

“The water was like the sea.  Trees were floating by.  When I looked outside, my neighbour’s two-storey house was collapsing…..it fell and destroyed our house.

I heard my granddaughter, Mridula, crying as I was trying to get out.  I grabbed hold of her little finger, covered her with a cloth and began swimming through the flooding water.  My son pulled each one of us - my daughter-in-law, my grandson and the two of us - through the water and my back and my grandson’s chest were badly injured.  I cried for help while swimming but no one could hear me.  

When we finally reached the shore and moved through a coffee plantation, a wild elephant appeared in our path. 

I told him, ‘We are coming from a great tragedy, don’t do anything to us.  We are afraid.  There is no light and water is everywhere.  We have just survived death.  Don’t do anything to us.’

And then, his eyes welled up with tears…..

My granddaughter and I sat at his feet and he stood there motionless until dawn when,eventually, we were rescued.  Two other wild elephants stood nearby.”

Isn't this a breathless story?

And, just so that we know, until the 1950s, 85% of Wayanad was under forest cover; 62% of those forests disappeared between 1950 and 2018, while the area under plantations - tea, coffee, rubber, ginger - went up by 1800 percent. A thousand eight hundred percent.   

This, then, is another story, a tale of Wayanad.

These two stories aren’t disparate, for at the hip they remain bonded by a common bind.  Listen to the storyteller.  His eyes - and those tears that Sujata saw in them - tell the whole larger story.

How We Tell A Story....

 The best stories that we hear are the ones that we tell ourselves.  These are the most ordinary of stories, yet there is heroism, longing, sadness, contentment, justification and confirmation.  Those stories form from a lazy haze that works up a pattern upon the stencil we once had etched out on the table.  Each such story is but a version, just as history has always been, and those versions - of crystal haze - are the straws we cling to. If those straws form a bundle, we float under a warm, satisfying sun and – this is astonishing – we can stay that way for a long long time. 

The truth and a fact or two weave in and out of these stories, they have a place like the lamp beside our bed or the bread knife on the kitchen counter.  Elements of truth pick and arrange themselves along the strand of DNA, each a tiny weight of realism.  No story that we hear must be overweight, so the rest – what remains of truth and fact – is discarded into the neat recesses of conniving memory. 

The best stories that we hear are the ones that we tell ourselves.  All else, we have always known to be fiction.