I am just not doing nothing enough

What if I kept aside those little things that have piled up
On the right on my table
And in the centre of my attention
That email reply
That request from a friend for a reference
The car jack I need to buy on Amazon
The preparation for a workshop 
And for a difficult conversation
The gym or a swim, for a hundred reps
Within those hundred secs
Tidying up that cupboard because someone wrote a book on it
A silly payment on the card for something
I never needed in the first place.  Agreed, I don’t do this often.  

Even those little things

We pile up to Chill With

That movie, reviewed as dark humour and gripping

With comfort food and an open packet of something

The holiday on an Instagram bucket list 

Not even mine

That has a to-do list of its own

Planning. Heating. Washing. Booking

Searching. Deciding. OTPing. Cutting.

Lifting. Scrolling. Messaging. Packing. 

What if when opportunity knocks

I ask it to go to hell

And instead spent the day in indolence

Waiting for the stars on a monsoon-drenched evening

To twinkle

And the half-moon to shine

So that I would sit under them

Doing nothing

And ask for tomorrow to be like today. 

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?

Moth-eaten? Well, partly....

Above the front door of Random Rubble

Is a moth with about half a wing

Those eyespots...they look ominous

And I wonder if it will sting?

(Well, no, that wasn't a thought.  It just sounded nice)

An owlet moth, I learn later

When consulting a guide

For once, I know why that name

And I am not stymied.

Random Rubble

June 30th 2024

8 pm
 

If You Follow An Elephant, Click The Like Button On Your Torch

At Random Rubble, the farm, an enthralling addition to my vocabulary is the utterly delectable phrase, “One tarah looju”.  Now, being the studious, researchy sort who likes to get to the root of the deeper questions of Life (such as, Why are there so many certified idiots on Whatsapp groups?), I embarked on the project to enrich Society’s vocabulary and get to the bottom of it (the phrase.  Not to the bottom of society, which will not be a pleasing sight in daytime). For a long time, I had no clue on what this laden-with-meaning phrase meant until the power went off one day at RR and a local electrician looked at the switchboard and told me that the problem was with the fewju which was looju.   

Tarah, of course, means ‘like’ and it’s only fair that everyone and his cow use it, since the younger gen in the city say Like whenever they say anything (about which deeper question of Life, I have, like, published papers. This you, like, know).

Ananda, my indispensable farmer, friend, philosopher and guided missile, uses this phrase to refer to anyone he thinks is – in his immortal words – ‘mental’.  Which is much of the rest of humanity who has views that are below his exacting standards (I almost certainly fit neatly into that category, but he has not called me One Tarah Looju yet.  Maybe because I pay him.  Call this protection money). 

There is a broad and generous brush to the usage of this priceless label as well.  A couple of years ago, a prominent male elephant in our area named Makhna was in musth and it was promptly agreed by all present and voting that he – the elephant – was One Tarah Looju.  And hence to be avoided by anyone, unless that anyone was…, well, you guessed it and you are getting better, One Tarah Looju as well.  

But Ramappa, my neighbour, is known to follow an elephant in the middle of the night on foot, shining his torch at the elephant’s backside (which, you will rightly argue, is unlikely to increase his body temperature, if that is Ramappa’s admirable objective) so this luminary, this shining light of Modern Civilisation has been regrettably labelled One Tarah Looju as well. 

Others – most of whom do not follow elephants on foot in the middle of the night - can be One Tarah Looju too.  Such as a distant neighbour, an overweight, opinionated windbag who thinks no end of himself (given his size, it admittedly takes a while to find the end).    Ramappa claims to have seen this One Tarah Looju stalwart with a cap on and nothing else under the broadly liberal definition of clothing, which visual has me awake at night with a torch and quivering, Makhna-the-Musthful-Misanthrope be damned. 

Our larger Society forms opinions on grave topics like One Tarah Looju generally after the third peg of Red Knight Deluxe - courtesy Tasmac - has lit a flame in the small intestine and is radiating in seven unspecified directions.  In such senior leadership conclaves in our village, the following sub-species are classified as One Tarah Looju: 

- people who spend more money than is prudent, in Society’s opinion

- people who do not spend more money than is prudent

- people who use a tractor

- people who do not use a tractor

- people who don’t work

- people who work

- people

You get the picture.  Hopefully. 

If not, there is a chance – a slender one, just a sliver of a ghost of one, a fractional proclivity – that you may be One Tarah Looju.  

Of Twins in the Spring

March-April 2023

This is the season of bloom.  Bangalore city has its share of flowers this season – my favourites the Beech Tree (Honge) and large-leaved Mahogany both bearing their own mild, yet distinct fragrance.  In our village though, it’s just the Honge,  taking over from where the Palash (Flame of the Forest) left off.  In a few sunny days, the Laburnum will follow, the profusion of bunches of delicate yellow flowers altering the landscape in a stunning explosion of contrast and colour.   But, for now, Honge rules.

These are the warm days to stroll around and do nothing in particular.  Six years ago, in 2017, at this time of year,  I stood outside the gates of the farm, admiring the carpet of flowers under the two beautiful Honge trees that stood on either side of the narrow path leading to Rama Reddy’s farm,  both heavy with fresh green leaves and a million light-purple flowers.  

And there were a thousand bees as well, buzzing over the gorgeous  flower-carpet and the fragrance was heady yet light; what a moment to be alive! These trees always looked like they were twins, about the same age and girth as each other.  I must have stood there for quite a while, for the sun dropped over the lake and, at length, I turned back and went home. That season, I did this as often as I could and was a better person for it. 

A few months later, one a fine morning in January 2018, I heard a drone, but ignored it for a while, being my usual absent-minded self.  Yet the sound of a crash got me moving – I ran up to the gate just in time to see the last chunk of the trunk of one of the twins being chopped up.  The area around was littered with leaves, broken branches and pieces of the trunk in what can only be described as a cacophony of destruction.  The  stump, jagged and white, stared up at the sky.

Rama Reddy stood there supervising the operation and, seeing the anger on my face, appeared sheepish, making no effort to look up, even as the men with the power-saw went about their job.  “But, why?” I asked him in exasperation, for this tree was outside the entrance to his farm and on a public path.  “I am getting Rs 2000,” he replied truthfully.  There was little one could do, but lament and curse, and make him promise that he’d leave the other twin alone.

So now there was one.

I remember that spring, five years ago, that season of the bloom.  On my visits, I often walked up to the lone twin and looked at the floor beneath the tree in dismay.  For it was bare with a few scattered buds, shorn of the carpet of flowers that I had watched entranced once. The fragrance and the bees were missing.  The tree, I could have sworn, was in mourning.  Or was it revenge as well?  

A few flowers adorned the low canopy, along with young, light-green leaves, and a vigorous breeze made them come alive, yet, like the loner by the path, I missed the twin deeply.  And I wondered if the bees had joined in the mourning by staying away.  I missed them too.

Since then, that tree has been a friend.  Perhaps I am good at commiseration or it just could be that I have a proclivity to vote for the underdog. Or it could be just that I park the car under it and am thankful for the shade.   The tree has been resolute and Rama Reddy - who, I must emphasise, is a nice person - has stuck to his promise, so one makes peace with the Real. 

There is additional consolation too, for the honge trees at Random Rubble have grown to adulthood and are rocking (no credit my way, rest assured), and I would like to think of that - many, near where one had been - as Revenge.  

Random Rubble Revenge sounds good, right?

And the happy end: this year, I am delighted to report, the standing Twin has outdone itself, flowering with the profusion of old, calling in bees of at least three species (and a solitary human).   The fragrance and soft earth, the buzz and bustle of bees and profusion of colour elicit Nostalgia and I sat under the shower of falling flowers, cradling them in my palms and hoping a bee or two would drop in.  

Nostalgia, you conclude, is exactly what it used to bee.

 

The Lone Ranger

 Coorg
Feb 15th

A walk-and-jog on a lightly-misty morning in coffee land.  There’s hardly anyone on the road at this hour and, as I pass a labour line, the enticing fragrance of a firewood stove blends with the aroma of mist.  I stop to breathe it in, chat with the devil of a dog hanging around that has strong views on strangers walking by – more so, those that have the temerity to chat with it – and look at the canopy; there are Malabar hornbills, racket-tailed drongos and golden backed woodpeckers that always sound like a fleet of ambulances with their urgent, pitched chatter.  

There are mud roads, leading off the main one, into each plantation and I always stop at their entrance for the depth of view they offer and the possibility of seeing something – or someone – out of the ordinary.
Forty-five minutes later, I stop at one such mud road and stare.  The road leads down to a clearing about a hundred metres away, and I see a dog right there; it is standing sideways and seems to be looking away, but I can’t make much more out (my binocs have been helpfully left behind in the room).  The light mist shrouds the dog’s silhouette in that morning light and lends it a glow, a radiance that makes the ordinary seem gifted.

Or am I wrong? Is this a dog or is it something else?
As I stand there, as still as I possibly can be, it turns its head and sees me.  My pulse rate quickens, for there is now doubt mingled with excitement, anticipation that seeks vindication.  We watch each other for a few moments and then it turns and, with the characteristic trot of the Golden Jackal, vanishes into the coffee bushes.  
Could a morning ever be better?

If there is one animal that deserves a better script for its story, it is the jackal.  From bedtime tales to myth and legend, from farmer’s stories to the powders sold by quacks, jackals were – and are - described as cunning, thieves, dangerous, surreal….and – if some parts of theirs were eaten – medicinal.  These stories were fiction, yet their consequences have been real: an animal on the mud road to certain extinction.  

In Coorg and elsewhere in the southern Western Ghats, the slide to the bottom has had another rapid brutal cause: pesticide usage – a particularly nasty one being Thimet, used in ginger cultivation to kill crabs, which are then consumed by jackals.  

Over the years of travel there, the two questions to those I have met have been: when did you last hear a jackal howl?  ….as a child how often did you hear it?  And in a hundred out of hundred answers, I have sensed loss and foreboding, a sense of the inevitable.

  
I stand there for a moment staring at the now-clear path, hoping that it would return for a final glimpse.  But the jackal knows better.

Yet, we – you and I – can write a new script and tell the tale of a superbly adapted, courageous, gifted, graceful, animal, one that is as crucial for our survival as the tiger or the elephant, for it is a seed-dispenser and keeps the populations of other species (think field mice and wild piglets) in check.  It is a tale for the heart and in the narration of the real story is the redemption from complicity.  
ps: the picture isn’t mine, it’s a Wiki one from Keoladeo, but about sums it u

When It Rains, It Pours

Not a good year, Ramappa said.  

I had stopped by to chat with him.  He is normally an effusive chap, with a ready smile and the standard question, “When did you come?”  Today, the question was asked but the smile was weary and worn. 

It has been a hard year in our parts; agriculture seems increasingly stitched together by a thread that will cause it to tear further as it comes apart at the seams, a mosaic of the inevitable, the causative, the jagged and the linear.  Rice – a rich-red large grain called dodaberu nellu and the staple of a feast – was given up years ago, when the rains played truant and low-cost polished grain inundated the ration basket; the road to hell, they say, is paved with good intention.  

The ragi economy, once the palliative, inches towards history, as rains this year were on, then off, then, well, on again at the wrong time; the elephants were missing, but wild boar marked their attendance alright.  Ours is a hardy ragi-consuming landscape; it is eaten twice a day, stored for a year.  Ragi is an insurance, it is belief, faith.  An emotion. 

Ragi needs labour to harvest –now rarer than it ever has been and therefore costly - and the threshing machine is a feature these days, not a bug.  Capital and weather combined, the risk category has changed to high now, but – here’s where economics stays theoretical – the return hasn’t.  At twenty-five rupees a kilo, a price fixed by an oligopoly of buyers with capital and staying power, it has been a ruinous crop to grow this year.  The TN Government could buy ragi at the minimum support price and change the script, but wishes aren’t horses…..   

Ragi is grown for another reason, of course: its straw is staple cattle feed in our parts, but that – the cattle economy, in normal times an epitome of stability and the only source of capital gain, when a calf or milch cow is sold – has had a lightning strike with the lumpy skin disease; vets – private and Government – and quacks have made their money, a wicked transfer of wealth from the believer to the soothsayer, from the prey to the predator. Seenappa paid twenty thousand, then sold his cow for nothing, in despair; he is minus seventy overall in this asset.  

So, ragi, avarekkai and mustard, all low-input, rain-fed and low-maintenance crops, and cattle don’t work anymore; roses, chrysanthemums, beans and tomatoes are the choice for they work occasionally with fluctuating return; these are high-input, pesticide-heavy games of chance, each harvest a lottery with the price a game of Russian roulette, for the revolver is loaded with debt.  What kind of economy is that?  

Ramappa sits on his haunches & looks away.  “I will not grow ragi anymore,” he says.  I don’t believe him, for ragi isn’t a crop, you see. It is an emotion.  

It is time to fix what is broken before that changes.  

Stuck In The Mud (No, Not Me)

 The other day I did something that I am really good at: got the car stuck in mud, this time on the dirt track leading to Random Rubble (the farm).  I am an old practiced hand at this, so when I get a car stuck in mud, I do a thorough, systematic job following a CMM Level 5 process, with Six Sigma for company.  This time the car swayed sideways like Mariappa after his evening brew and the wheels got stuck in a deep groove formed by a tractor.  We – the car and I – sunk so low down that I could plant tomatoes and palak on my accelerator, no questions asked.  
So, I switched off the engine and waited for help.

Muniyappa was the first to walk by.  By way of intimate introduction, this Error-of-Evolution has the Intelligence Quotient that falls in-between that of a plastic chair and a caterpillar.  He had a puzzled look and tapped the car’s bonnet, expecting it, no doubt, to be made of banana fibre or Sentient Life or something.

“Sir, why did you not take this route?” he said, pointing helpfully to what I should have done.  I tried telling him that I didn’t see the mud from the driver’s seat, but gave up after the third attempt because Seenappa and two of his buddies landed up and asked me the same question, shaking their heads and grinning like that asinine scarecrow with a pot for a head in the avarekkai field.  

Everyone and his mother-in-law then got into a big argument on whether the car should be pushed forwards or backwards to get it out.  I suggested that they include up and down as well in the list of options, but sarcasm is generally wasted in my village after it is translated into Telegu.  Then Ramappa – whom I call Universe Boss because Society in general is carefully wary of him - turned up with his A2 cows and stated emphatically that we would propel the car forward. Forward, he growled again, so everyone, including the cows, nodded their heads with Deep Understanding.  

So, when I started the car and revved the engine on first gear, three out of the five stalwarts in attendance, including Error-of-Evolution, pushed backwards with all their might.  The car dug itself deeper in, of course, and Ramappa got three bucket loads of mud on his shirt, after which he used words for his fellow-countrymen that may be classified as Higher Education In Pursuit Of Infinite Reality.

Muniyappa stood aside and looked at me thoughtfully. “Sir, you should not have taken this route,” he said, shaking his head like he was doing a stress test for the Timken ball bearings at the base of his thick skull.   

Ramappa then began to fill in the grooves with mud – the first sensible thing that anyone had done – while everyone else agreed that we needed a tractor, though no one knew why, while Venkatesh kept us engrossed with three tragic, deeply emotional stories of cars-in-mud that had become discounted scrap metal.  When Ramappa was done filling in mud and swearing at the others, everyone promised this time that they would only push forwards which, I am happy to report from the trenches, worked out.  So, the car was saved from being scrap metal (for the moment.  Watch this space).

I then parked the car by the gate just ahead and Muniyappa landed up, this time examining the wiper blade intently and testing it on his finger.  
“Sir, tell me,”he said, “why did you drive into the mud?”

A Spring In The Step

 It is quiet and warm in the afternoon, as we tread on fallen leaves inside the forest, a dry deciduous belt of green, now turning colour with the change in season.  The morning mist is lighter and has given way to warmer mornings and the forest has taken note.  We – my old friend Ananda and I – see the solitary, yet astonishing orange of the flame of the forest, the odd wine-reds of the flowers of the silk cotton tree and russets of the terminalias.
 
Our walk though has a purpose, so we stop but briefly.  Ananda has spent all his life in this forest, so he knows the trees, small rock formations (‘this is kebballamma bande’, he informs me, as we stand on an outcrop of stone that is four billion years old, and counting), and bushes and grasses that I would easily miss.  Walking with him isn’t a trek, it is an education and he is a skilled, if sometimes dismissive, teacher. 
We have a purpose today. 
 
Every year, a few days before Shivratri, a magical event unfolds in our forest. Trees of a single species– Shorea roxburghii - are always always grouped together in stands and for much of the year they are non-descript (I wonder what they think of me.  On second thoughts, I’d rather not know).  Around this time of year, the stands of Jalaari mara – as the Shorea rox. is called in our parts - shakes off its collective somnolence and blooms, a word that cannot possibly do justice to an utterly fantastical panoply: each tree, hosting many thousand flowers of a delicate cream with the stand of a few dozen trees glistening from afar in the warmth of the midday sun. 
 

When we get there, the fragrance is over-powering, a million outpourings of scent that is delicate, bewitching and, once inhaled, never forgotten.  I am hesitant to pluck a bunch but Ananda has done it in a jiffy, so I sit with them around me, breathing in the fragrance and listening to the drone of a thousand bees. Pick a flower: it is science-meets-beauty-meets elegance, for the petals-and-stamen are intricately designed for the bees to reach the nectar and for you to paint with abandon on mind’s canvas, for your fingers to touch and caress.  This isn’t just botany and evolution, it is extraordinary magic at work, evolutionary caprice - a contradiction, if there ever was one – and a microcosm of enchantment. 

If you have read The Hidden Life of Trees, a brilliant, enlightening book of science, you will know that the Shorea cannot survive as a single tree, separated from its kind.  You will know from the book that these trees communicate with each other and with other species as well, exchange resources and work with collective altruism.   And knowing that they are sentient, alive in every conscious way like we are and, in so many ways, superior (ok, do you produce oxygen?), only increases the wonder.
 
A herd of elephants passed this way at night and they may have ruminated here too; in a deeper way, we are brethren, stopping by the Jalaari stand for those moments when even that great traveller – Time - sits still.
 
A fortnight later, as we will stroll under the stand, stepping on a million now-dried flowers that will nourish the soil, that afternoon will be a memory. 
Memories sit still too. 

The Day of The Jackal - reprise

I was at the farm yesterday for the first time after the heavy rains of mid-May.  My neighbouring farmer, Ramappa, took me to see his farm pond (the photo above), which is larger than the one I have and deeper, and is next to his borewell.

"When you made your pond next to the borewell three years ago," he said, "I did not understand why you were doing this.  This year, the bore ran dry and I got the pond dug next to it for the sowing.  The pond is full and the bore, which had run dry, is now working!"  

There's a delight in that weather-beaten face and I look back at the many months and a score conversations with this then-recalcitrant fellow and feel doubtfully vindicated.  Doubtfully I say, for I am not sure if the pond could have recharged the bore this quickly (a couple of weeks), but he is hardly the person to hear my misgivings.  

"One more pond this year Sir," he adds and I offer to match him in this challenge, foot for foot. 
And to round off this happy news, I see the pugmarks of a canid by the pond. It's the day of the jackal.

May Day - 2017

 A pleasant and instructive morning, as Sir PG would have written.
  
Ananda, the repository of all forestry knowledge, and I set out early morning into the forest at Jawalagiri in search of the Adenanthera Pavonina (manjadi) tree, which we did not find.  What we did find were elephant tracks - the same male that had been at the farm and its surroundings last night and caused much local excitement. Anand suggested that we follow the elephant and find out where he was.  
Now he does this all the time, of course, so I concurred, but it isn't an exercise calculated to strengthen anyone's nervous system (I am happy to suggest other less taxing options, should you doubt). 

The footprints of the elephant (if you could call large craters, with lava creeping in at the bottom, footprints) were clearly headed into the forest, after a night of crop raiding and local duels with villagers.  At places, these footprints were indistinct on the caked ground, which often made the heart skip a beat (for Ananda would look around with a furtive air of one caught stealing fodder from under Mama's trunk).   We walked carefully past the small lake bed, on which there were signs of chital, gaur, wild boar, a lone leopard and jungle cats, and then reached a rock clearing that I had some years earlier christened Fragrant Rock, for, from the  soil here rise a number of Jalaari trees (Shorea Roxburghii).   
Then we stopped.

Ananda pointed to the valley below, "That's where he is," he asserted with authority; you can be assured, I was unlikely to be the Verification Manager.  
And, indeed, the faint smell - that distinct pachyderm odour - wafted upwards to where we were.  We waited for a while to hear him at work, for elephants are noisy fellows when they lounge around, but without luck.  

We wished him Good Day in absentia and headed back to a patch where a menagerie of bird life - blue bearded bee eaters, parakeets, babblers and mynas and bulbuls and robins, ioras and white-eyes and other birds in the higher canopy - were chirping, whistling, shrieking and calling, and took it all in with enthusiasm, for we were not in Jumbo's vicinity anymore.  In the early sky, the crested serpeant eagle sailed overhead and came to rest on a Terminalia Bellerica; an ominous figure of great size and fine beauty, the yellow on its cheek resplendent in the morning air. 

Our search for manjadi could wait.