Photo credits: Jithin Vijay
Fireworks are an important part of all festivals in Kerala, traditionally happening on the last day to mark the end of the festival. In the case of the famous festival of Thrissur Pooram, the fire works start at 3am and end at 6pm. Continue reading
The Rodi Gallery, parked in Astoria Park in Queens. Credit Aaron Graham
Thanks to the New York Times for its coverage of the arts in general, and for this specific reporting on the efforts to get art where it may be seen outside the normal venues:
On a recent Saturday, Elise Graham and her 22-year-old son, Aaron, pulled a 12-foot van into a parking spot on West 14th Street in Greenwich Village, swung open the back doors, lowered the aluminum stairs, and welcomed visitors inside their mobile Rodi Gallery.
Around the United States, art is on the roll. Inspired by the success of food trucks, gallery owners like the Grahams, who are based in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., have been taking their show on the road. For the last year, they have traveled to populated spots like the meatpacking district of Manhattan, the Peekskill train station and Astoria Park in Queens. This Saturday, they are parking in the center of Bushwick Open Studios, a three-day festival in Brooklyn. Continue reading
During tagging by trained researcher
Photo credits: Salim
Eravikulam National Park is situated near Munnar in Kerala’s Western Ghats of Kerala. It covers an area of 97 sq km of rolling grass lands and shola forests. It’s an ideal hill station for seeing the biodiversity of shola grass land eco-systems. Continue reading
The New York Times continues to prove its journalistic value in the realm of today’s most important topics, notably with regard to the environment:
KEWAUNEE, Wis. — Bryan T. Pagel, a dairy farmer, watched as a glistening slurry of cow manure disappeared down a culvert. If recycling the waste on his family’s farm would help to save the world, he was happy to go along.
Out back, machinery was breaking down the manure and capturing a byproduct called methane, a potent greenhouse gas. A huge Caterpillar engine roared as it burned the methane to generate electricity, keeping it out of the atmosphere. Continue reading
Munnar, Kerala
Common leopard butterflies are found across the Western Ghats up to 2000 meters. These butterflies prefers forest edges, grasslands, damp patches and wild flowers. This butterfly has black spots and wavy lines with a-pinkish violet tinge underneath the hind wing. Continue reading
Not all of it is spectacular (zoos are not our cup of tea, generally speaking) but especially the “budding birders” initiative has our attention; we are grateful for the Hindu’s coverage of some the news about several conservation schemes to be established in Kerala:
A primary environment care project with the cooperation of grama panchayats; Rs.259-crore ‘Krishi Raksha’ scheme to protect crops from wild animals; forest academy at Arippa; and ‘Urinunarvu Kadinunarvu’ for the development of Adivasi settlements are among the projects identified by the Forest Department for implementation under Mission 676. A Rs.15-crore project will be launched to conserve water in the catchment areas of rivers and forests during the summer. Continue reading
Thanks to Genevieve Fussell for pointing this exhibition out to all of us:
In 2009, the Irish photographer Paul Gaffney walked nearly five hundred miles through northern Spain along the Camino de Santiago. Inspired, in part, by his interest in Buddhist meditation, he set off, three years later, on a series of walking trips through rural Spain, Portugal, and France. Continue reading
Photo credits: Renuka Menon
Pahalgam is a famous Indian tourist destination situated at the state of Kashmir. The Lidder River runs through a beautiful, undulating meadow called Baisaram surrounded by thickly wooded pine forest. Continue reading
Ansun Sujoe, of Fort Worth, Texas, and Sriram Hathwar, of Painted Post, N.Y., were named co-champions of the 2014 Scripps National Spelling Bee on Thursday. Their siblings helped them celebrate the first shared title since 1962. Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP
Thanks to National Public Radio (USA) for keeping us apprised of who’s who in the world of words, spelling edition:
For the first time in 52 years, the Scripps National Spelling Bee crowned two winners last night, after the final two competitors exhausted the word list. The winners were Sriram Hathwar, an eighth-grader from Painted Post, N.Y., and Ansun Sujoe, a seventh-grader from Fort Worth, Texas.
“I like sharing the victory with someone else,” Ansun said. “It’s been quite shocking and quite interesting, too. It’s very rare.”
Here are the words that brought Thursday night’s competition to a close, from the Scripps Spelling Bee site (we’re including the definitions just in case you’ve forgotten them): Continue reading
Shutterstock/KuLouKu
We appreciate the increased interest, across all the media we track, to the cultural and environmental aspects of beer production. Thanks to the Atlantic‘s intrepid investigators for this one:
In late November of 2009, the town of Cockermouth, in the Lake District of England, had a flood. Heavy rains—16 inches in 24 hours—led the rivers Cocker and Derwent to overflow their stone barriers; the buildings of the medieval town, as a result, ended up submerged in 10 feet of water. Among those buildings was Jennings Brewery, one of the few establishments in the world that brews real ale—a beer, rich and dark and featuring a texture that connoisseurs might call “chewy.” Real ale is, to the extent that beers resemble animals, endangered. This is partly because it requires a very particular type of yeast in its brewing: a yeast that, during fermentation, sits on top of the wort, the sugary liquid extracted from the mashing process, rather than sinking to the bottom. Continue reading
Hebbal Lake, Bangalore, Karnataka
shutterstock.com
In its weekly “good reads” section Conservation has this following summary of an article in Scientific Reports, of interest to our reef watchers/protectors:
In November 1835, the HMS Beagle visited Tahiti, in the South Pacific. Climbing up the island’s slopes, the young Charles Darwin looked across the sea to nearby Moorea, and saw an island surrounded by a barrier reef. During and after his voyage, Darwin constructed a theory for reef formation that explained how fringing reefs grow into barrier reefs, which then convert into atolls. “The close similarity in form, dimensions, structure, and relative position between fringing and encircling barrier-reefs, and between these latter and atolls,” he wrote, “is the necessary result of the transformation, during subsidence, of the one class into the other. On this view, the three classes of reefs ought to graduate into each other.” Continue reading
Photo credits: Renuka Menon
Poori is a deep fried flat bread made of wheat flour. A dough is prepared by mixing fine maida flour with water and a spoonful of ghee, which is then divided into small balls. These balls are flattened using a rolling pin and individually deep fried in cooking oil. Continue reading
Kaziranga National Park, Assam
Photograph by Robert Harding/Corbis
A blog post at the New Yorker‘s website rounds up recent news from the Antarctic’s underwater environs, and its not what could be mistaken for good:
It’s been an exciting news month for the polar ice sheets. A study published on May 28th in the journal Nature indicated that, fourteen thousand six hundred years ago, the rapid shedding of Antarctic icebergs raised the world’s median ocean levels by six and a half feet in a little more than a hundred years. That bit of paleoclimatology comes on the heels of a pair of studies, published two weeks ago, concluding that glaciers in the West Antarctic have passed a tipping point and are now doomed to disintegrate and melt. Sea levels will rise by four feet, and up to ten feet if the rest of the West Antarctic ice sheet follows. A third study concluded that parts of Greenland’s ice cap will be eaten away from below, since it is piled atop newly discovered canyons, which will allow warm ocean water to encroach inland for up to sixty-five miles. The rising waters won’t be witnessed by anyone reading this post, as the really big effects lie hundreds of years in the future. But, if the predictions are correct, all of Florida south of Fort Lauderdale will eventually drown. So will broad swaths of the coastal countries bordering the Indian Ocean. Continue reading
The Common Tiger Butterfly is found across the Kerala’s Western Ghats up to 2500 meters. These butterflies prefers open forest, flying close to the ground in wooded habitats and migrating to the higher hills during summer. Continue reading
State bird of Karnataka
Bangalore, Karnataka
