Photo credits : Vijay Mampilly
Gol Gumbaz is one of the largest and most famous monuments in India. Gol Gumbaz was constructed as a mausoleum for Sultan Mohammed Adil Shah, the seventh ruler of Adil Shah dynasty (1627- 57). Construction was completed in 1656. The monument’s central tomb remains a popular tourist attraction, but in fact the entire building, despite its simple design, stands as a masterpiece of Deccan-era architecture. Continue reading
Carara National Park, Costa Rica
Full moon shot Kayal Villa. Photo: Milo Inman
That traveling state of mind woke up a part of my brain that’s been sleeping for a while. I’ve been feeling my grey matter stretch as a fellow Raxa friend put it. An idea I’ve been thinking about started while on the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage when a man told my friend and me not to walk the Camino at night. He said, “If God wanted us to walk the Camino at night, he would have put a light in the sky so we could see the Camino’s beauty”.
We were confused- why didn’t he see beauty in walking at night under the full moon and stars? After that, my friend and I began to contemplate how darkness has been associated in both sacred and secular literature with the lack of spiritual enlightenment, lack of awareness; in our language, to say something is dark has bad connotations. We felt more motivated than ever to walk at night.
Bazar Road, Mattanchery
This post is about as random as we get on this blog, but still, there is a mission-driven point. Along with all our work, there must also be reflection and communication; education in the classics strikes us as an excellent preparation, as excellent as any, for our line of work. In further honor of James during the last week of his work in person at Xandari, we share a book review to help us understand laughter in the olden days:
…Even a simple comic device can land us in deep water, psychologically speaking.
What, if anything, does Geng’s piece have in common with the movie Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment? What does either have in common with knock-knock jokes, or with Gilbert Gottfried’s famous performance of “The Aristocrats” a few weeks after September 11? These are not easy questions to answer, even for a culture we know from the inside. And the difficulties only multiply when we confront the humor of another time and language. It is that challenge that Mary Beard sets herself in Laughter in Ancient Rome, the printed version of her lectures as the 2008–2009 Sather Professor at Berkeley. Continue reading
Photo credits: Aparna P
The Tamil Lacewing Butterfly (Scientific name: Cethosia nietneri) is endemic to the Western Ghats of India and Sri Lanka, where it commonly cuts through the breezes from the months of June to September. Frequent at the onset of monsoon season, the beautiful insect usually disappears by September or October. Catch it while you can! Continue reading
Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary, Rajasthan
India’s famous flower markets are testiment to the people and culture’s strong identification with flowers in all aspects of their daily lives, both sacred and secular. Flowers are found in food and drinks, and as part of all the rights of passage of daily life, from birth to death and everything in between.
Although I’ve never been to Calcutta, I’ve read about the flamboyantly colorful Mallick Ghat Flower Market along the banks of the Hooghly River. Danish photographer Ken Hermann captures the proud men who make their living as Calcutta’s flower sellers.
‘I first went to the flower market during a visit to Calcutta three or four years ago and have wanted to do something on it ever since,’ explains Copenhagen-based Hermann.
‘It’s a beautiful and, at the same time, very stressful place but I was fascinated with it – and the flower sellers in particular. I really like the way they carry their flowers,’ he continues.
‘Sometimes it almost looks like they are wearing big flower dresses. I like that you see these strong and masculine men handling the flowers with so much care as if they were precious jewels.’
Hermann, whose work usually takes him into the grimier side of Indian life, was also enchanted by the flowers themselves, even if there were a few that he wasn’t allowed to photograph.
‘There are a lot of superstitions and religious belief in flowers in India,’ he explains. ‘I wasn’t allowed to photograph some of them because they were considered to be holy flowers and they would lose their power if I had.’ Continue reading
Photo credits: Ramesh Kidangoor
Munnar is famous for its tea plantations, rolling hills, sparkling waterfalls, and sprawling estates, a combination of features which makes it a popular tourist destination. Visitors to Munnar can not only enjoy Kerala’s natural beauty but also learn about and participate in the area’s culture and economy. As attested in these photographs, Munnar has been one of Kerala’s hotspots for tea production, with tea plantations scattered throughout the rolling mountain ranges. Continue reading
Tarde de Café con Doka Estate (An Afternoon of Coffee with Doka)
As mentioned in a recent post, Xandari was joined last week by one of Doka Estate’s coffee experts, Natalia Vargas, who gave a presentation on the estate’s process of growing, harvesting, and preparing coffee. The presentation also involved a coffee-tasting session so that we could see… er… taste the fruits of Doka’s hard work. This latter part of the presentation is what I’ll be mostly focusing on in this post. I don’t want to give too much away, in case I spoil the fun of visiting the Doka Estate for yourself when you’re next staying at Xandari, but seeing as it was a very informative and enjoyable a presentation (at least for a coffee lover), and that Xandari should soon be in a position to capitalize on the knowledge in its own coffee endeavors (most recent post here), I thought I’d spill just a few of the beans here, no pun intended.
Coffee table set-up
Natalia first walked us through the actual growing, selection, and harvesting process. All the beans at Doka originate from plants alread Continue reading
Damian Mulinix — Chinook Observer. A small portion of the cormorant colony as seen from a bird blind.
You can read about this in a major media outlet, but try another approach for this story. Local journalism is alive and well, and covering complex, important topics through the local lens:
A plan to kill 16,000 double-crested cormorants on East Sand Island has some residents on the North Coast scratching their heads. Although still in the proposal phase, the plan drew many to an open house in Astoria last week to ask questions of the federal agencies involved. “I can’t believe in this day and age we can’t come up with an alternative solution to killing things,” said Tommy Huntington of Cannon Beach. Continue reading
Photo credits: Ramesh Kidangoor
Ezhara Ponnana is a unique temple festival at Ettumanoor, a temple to Lord Shiva near Kottayam. “Ezhara” means seven-and-a-half and “Ponnana” means golden elephant. Statues of these elephants are made of nearly 13 kg of gold each. Seven of the elephants are two feet high, but the eighth one is only one foot tall, which gives the procession and festival of Ezhara Ponnana its name. Continue reading
As Kayleigh continues work begun last month, bringing our attention to all the ways we can improve our food sourcing, this book review seems timely. Barbara King, the reviewer, is a noted anthropologist but even more noted author on the topic of animal emotions. We have not read the book yet, but as always with a good book review our attention is drawn to reasons why we might, or might not, make time for this one.
Thanks to National Public Radio (USA) for sharing the review:
For Philip Lymbery, head of the U.K.-based Compassion in World Farming and his co-author Isabel Oakeshott, a visit to California’s Central Valley amounted to an encounter with suffering.
In Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat, Lymbery and Oakeshott write that the mega-dairies of the Central Valley are “milk factories where animals are just machines that rapidly break down and are replaced.” At one huge dairy they visited, cows stood idly outdoors, some in shade and some in the sun. No grass cushioned their feet and certainly none was available to eat since, like almost all factory-farm cows, the animals were maintained on an unnatural diet of crops such as corn. The stench in the air was “a nauseous reek.” Continue reading
Photo Credit: Grist Article
I came across this article on Grist.com about General Mills’s new action plan to reduce their contribution to climate change. After being called out by Oxfam International, Oxfam says that General Mills will be, “the first major food and beverage company to promise to implement long-term science-based targets to cut emissions.”
With both a mitigation and adaptation plan, I am pretty impressed by this corporations efforts to take responsibility of their role. On the official page of their website describing this policy, they cite the 2014 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group II Summary for Policy Makers, which suggests to me that they have people on their team helping them make really informed decisions grounded in scientific evidence. I appreciate in the report the full acknowledgement of the IPCC’s call to action:
“Science based evidence suggests we must limit the global mean temperature rise to less than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels in order to avoid permanently altering the atmosphere and negatively impacting the environmental, social and economic systems that sustain us – both today and in the future.”
I haven’t seen a big corporation like this that would normally be considered a “dirty business” so blatantly speak to the environmental reality we face. To see a corporation cite this gives me hope that mainstream conversations around climate change are moving towards what we can do and away from whether or not its real. I hope more corporations follow their lead just for the sake of drumming the beat of awareness.
The true colors of this policy will show in how effectively it is implemented, because that will determine whether it is a fluffy ‘greenwashing’ tactic with loopholes built in.
Here are a few of the main points of the policy:
For a more extensive look at the report, click here.
While I raise my eyebrows at some of the vague wording in their initiatives, like “support”, “work with”, and “ensure” that are less concrete objectives, I also see timelines and checkpoints to keep themselves more accountable to this than they had to. I have learned to appreciate initiatives that move in the direction of the ideal, rather than criticizing anything that doesn’t model the most perfect action. While it is good to remain skeptical, I think it is important to acknowledge leadership in the right direction when we see it.
Ezra, a red-tailed hawk, perches outside Schoellkopf Stadium. Photo credit, Christine Bogdanowicz.
In the interest of what we consider essential news about environmental or conservation issues we occasionally share an article in its entirety here, with the encouragement to give the source its due. The nature of blogging is to be quick but not sloppy, brief but clear, and missionary but unorthodox.
The link to this article is deeply missionary, in that our blog has more bird-related content than any other type of content; birds are both a metric for and icon of our conservation mission; quoting the article in entirety is our unorthodox way of getting the writer’s attention (and if he or the publication prefers we will be happy to reduce our republishing of this article to the normal “fair use” excerpt standard) because his article is about the topic Seth has been working on for the last several years at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and its far reaches. We think he might find the work Seth and James are doing at Xandari an interesting extension of this article’s focus:
Thanks to Cornell Lab of Ornithology webcams and local bird enthusiasts, anyone in the world can see into the lives of a family of red-tailed hawks that resides on a light-pole about 80 feet above an athletic field on campus.
More than five million viewers across 200 countries have been following the exploits of Ezra (father) and Big Red (mother) and their offspring since in 2012. This year three nestlings hatched.
Photo credits: Ramesh Kidangoor
Situated at the south-western tip of Lake Vembanad, Allappuzha had its heyday as a commercial hub in 1775-76 when Dewan Raja Keshavadas built it as a major port of the erstwhile Travancore state. Allapuzha had the dual advantage of cheap inland water transport on its eastern end and calm seas suitable for an all-weather port on the west. Continue reading
Measuring the length of our new monkey-protected area in the organic farm at Cardamom County
Building a 15 meter x 20 meter vegetable cage is no small feat. The last estimate we had was that it would cost about 4 lakhs, which is apparently the cost of a small house. A lakh is a unit in the South Asian numbering system equivalent to 100,000. So, is 400,000 rupees worth it for a vegetable cage? I think spending energy to get a smarter design would be more worth it.
With the help of Raxa Collective’s head engineer, it is very likely we will be able to lower that cost significantly. As I talked about in my post about quantifying farm-to-table, I think that with a combination of lowering the cost and then taking advantage of the monkey-protected area as vigorously as possible with efficient use of the space, it will be worth it. There are elements of farm-to-table that are not quantifiable but can be seen in the overall conservation story of supporting smart land-use practices.
At the end of the day, at least the food here is locally sourced mostly from the Cumbum vegetable market in Tamil Nadu. This market is only about 25 km away and the farmers in that market are relatively close. This is far better then the way most food is sourced in the United States.
In the United States, eating local is a challenge. Most agriculture in the states is for corn and soybeans, rather than vegetables. And “local” is difficult when the local environment has few green spaces left, let alone farmland. So even though we don’t have “monkey-challenges” to growing our food locally in the states, we have monocultures and rapid suburbanization keeping us farther and farther away from fresh food. Continue reading
