Bandipur forest, Karnataka
Bird of the Day: Rufous-bellied Hawk-Eagle
Bandipur forest, Karnataka
MC’ing Christmas & New Year’s Eve
When I was asked to be the “face of RAXA Collective” during the Christmas/New Year’s Eve celebrations at Cardamom County, my impulsive nature overtook any kind of rational thinking and I said “yes”. I didn’t stop to think for a minute if I could do a decent job or not. But once I’d already made a commitment, I realized that I shouldn’t think too much of it and decided to go with the flow. So when the day dawned, I was my usual self, but honestly, quite anxious.
There were about 120 guests and to keep the crowd occupied is one thing, and entertained is another. Continue reading
Committing To More Conversation In 2014
Well over a year ago there was an interview podcast that several of us at Raxa Collective listened to, discussed, and determined to write about, but none of us did. The idea was lost for nearly 15 months. Then, all of a sudden, in the first post today the word conversation appeared in a manner that reminded us of the Fresh Air interview with Sherry Turkle headlined:
In Constant Digital Contact, We Feel ‘Alone Together’
October 17, 2012
The book was reviewed in the New York Times three years ago this month, and together with the interview we just remembered, is still very much worth the while:
As soon as Sherry Turkle arrived at the studio for her Fresh Air interview, she realized she’d forgotten her phone. “I realized I’d left it behind, and I felt a moment of Oh my god … and I felt it kind of in the pit of my stomach,” she tells Terry Gross. That feeling of emotional dependence on digital devices is the focus of Turkle’s research. Her book, Alone Together, explores how new technology is changing the way we communicate with one another. Continue reading
Kavadi Aatam: Ritual Dance
Photo credits: Ramesh Kidangoor
Kavadi Aatam is a religious dance offered to Lord Muruga during a pilgrimage, made mainly by men, which originated in Tamil Nadu. It is a colorful (as you can see in the photos) ritual dance widely prevalent in the Subramanya Temples in Kerala and Tamil Nadu during the festival season. The Kavadi, which are set on top of the dancers, can reach 10-15 feet high, and when the dancers twist and spin in a row it creates a quite beautiful effect.
Can Hunting Help An Endangered Species?
Tom Brakefield/Getty Images
To Save The Black Rhino, Hunting Club Bids On Killing One
by NPR STAFF
December 29, 2013
Hunters of wild ducks have been extremely important contributors to, and activists for, wetlands preservation in the USA. Does that mean hunting is good for conservation? National Public Radio in the USA covered a story a few days ago that, as a headline cast hunting in a grotesque light, but listening to the participants there was a whole new perspective. Raxa Collective has no plans to add hunting to the list of activities it offers travelers, but we are obliged to participate in the conversation:
Fewer than 5,000 black rhinos are thought to exist in the wild, and in an effort to preserve the species, the Dallas Safari Club is offering a chance to kill one.
The Texas-based hunting organization is auctioning off a permit to hunt a rhinoceros in Nambia. It’s a fundraiser intended to help save the larger population. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Sandhill Crane (Horicon Marsh, Wisconsin)
Getting The Story
His autobiography has been in print since 2007, but Longform helped bring that book back to our attention by bringing Gay Talese on stage at New York University recently, to talk about his life writing for Esquire in the 1960s and for The New Yorker today. He tells his story during the onstage interview as only a master story-teller can. It is about listening; crafting; working: building a community of sources and fellow-writers:
“I want to know how people did what they did. And I want to know how that compares with how I did what I did. That’s my whole life. It’s not really a life. It’s a life of inquiry. It’s a life of … knocking on a door, walking a few steps or a great distance to pursue a story. That’s all it is: a life of boundless curiosity in which you indulge yourself and never miss an opportunity to talk to someone at length.” Continue reading
New Year and New Beginnings, 2014
Photo credits: M N Shaji
New Year’s Eve is a time of new beginnings.We believe in celebrating with all our guests all the achievements and learning of the previous year along with the joy of stepping into a new year with new expectations and beliefs and hope for new opportunities. We welcome our guests in the traditional Indian way with a small performance followed by aarthi and tikka and blessings from an elephant who represents the elephant headed god Ganesha, the god of beginnings. Continue reading
If You Happen To Be In Denmark
We have been paying a lot of attention to Iceland in the last year, and we do not expect that to change very soon. At least not until May of this year. But we will always consider the two poles of the planet worthy of our time and investigation. There is an excellent exhibition website separate from the museum’s website pages about this exhibit whose last month has just begun:
ARCTIC
September 26 2013 – February 2 2014
Louisiana’s major, multi-faceted autumn exhibition explores a wonderful, fragile, frightening and powerful world. ARCTIC is a story about dreams, destiny, adventure and beauty. It is a tale of fear, fascination, desire, downfall, and survival in spite of everything. A quest for a location, real and imagined, that through the centuries has stirred up strong drives and emotions, fascinating and attracting artists, scientists, writers and adventurers alike. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Malabar Pied Hornbill
Dandeli Wildlife Sanctuary, Karnataka
Snow Leopard Caught In Camera Trap
The shot of a snow leopard captured by one of the six cameras installed at Gangotri National Park, Uttarakhand, on Monday. Photo: Virender Singh Negi
We have one last 2013 story about cats caught in camera traps, and intend to continue in 2014 highlighting camera traps as scientific tools in the interest of conservation, not only cats, but all types of creatures great and greater as well as small and smaller. Thanks to the Hindu‘s reporting on this good news out of one of India’s protected natural areas in the north:
Officials of the Gangotri National Park have a reason to rejoice — the camera trap set up at the Gangotri-Gaumukh road has captured video and still images of a male and female snow leopard, confirming for the first time the existence of these cats there. Continue reading
Sharing Enthusiasm for Wildlife
Sightings of the Day
Five years ago we started the “Sighting of the Day” board at Cardamom County with the goal of asking guests to share their experience inside the Periyar Tiger Reserve with us. Today this board has grown to much more than just a list, Continue reading
Entrepreneurship In India
Atul Loke for The New York Times. Rahoul Mehra and his wife, Glennis Matthews Mehra, started Saf Labs, a biotechnology trading company in Mumbai.
India Ink closes out 2013 with a story near and dear to the hearts of all entrepreneurs in India at this moment, and Raxa Collective appreciates the coverage (even if we are not exactly an American-style start-up, we can relate):
American-Style Start-Ups Take Root in India
In a nation with a reputation as a tough place to do business, American tech entrepreneurs are importing the Silicon Valley mind-set. Continue reading
Los Cedros Reserve, Ecuador
Bird of the Day: Common Tody-Flycatcher
Ornithologically Challenged
In his new book about the passenger pigeon, the naturalist Joel Greenberg sets out to answer a puzzling question: How could the bird go from a population of billions to zero in less than fifty years? Painting by Walton Ford.
No sooner had we completed our reading of this article in the last issue of 2013 when the New Yorker‘s first issue of 2014 arrived with a practically unbelievable account of the history of passenger pigeons, which we know many of our readers will appreciate this link to (note to the man behind the illustration: Walton Ford, the welcome mat is still out for you in Kerala, and we extend it to welcome you in Costa Rica now as well; plenty of interesting creatures in either place to captivate your fertile imagination):
Imagine that tomorrow morning you woke up and discovered that the familiar rock pigeon—scientifically known as Columba livia, popularly known as the rat with wings—had disappeared. It was gone not simply from your window ledge but from Piazza San Marco, Trafalgar Square, the Gateway of India arch, and every park, sidewalk, telephone wire, and rooftop in between. Would you grieve for the loss of a familiar creature, or rip out the spikes on your air-conditioner and celebrate? Perhaps your reaction would depend on the cause of the extinction. If the birds had been carried off in a mass avian rapture, or a pigeon-specific flu, you might let them pass without guilt, but if they had been hunted to death by humans you might feel honor-bound to genetically engineer them back to life. Continue reading
Sree Padmanabhaswamy Temple, Trivandrum
Photo credits: Ramesh Kidangoor
Sree Padmanabha Swamy Temple is believed to be at least 2,000 years old, and is a Vedic Temple dedicated to Lord Vishnu. It rests in the heart of the city of Trivandrum, Kerala. Treasures with an estimated value of around US $18 billion make it one of the richest temples in the world, if not the richest. Continue reading
Journeys, Science, Souvenirs, Photographs
A GLORIOUS ENTERPRISE. Photographs from a book of Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences’ collection depict the making of American science. Cleared and stained specimens of youg horse-eye jacks (Caranx latus) from Dominican Republic, Santo Domingo. ANSP Ichthyology Department. This is a species that was first described by Academy member Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) in 1831. Photography by Rosamond Purcell
Click on the image above to go to the Audubon Magazine website, where a review of the photographs in this book, A Glorious Enterprise, was published. Just realizing that, for a blog that features birds every day, we do not link to stories in the best magazine in the world for bird lovers, we aim to correct this. First, credit where due. The photographer Rosamond Purcell, whose work accompanies the text in a book that sounds worthy of accompanying a long journey, has more work featured in an article currently on National Geographic’s website:
Walter looks comfortable. Dead for 50 years, the giant Pacific octopus is resting in a ten-gallon tank of ethanol solution, six-foot arms folded in cephalopod repose. His next-door neighbors hail from the Atlantic: a jarred colony of sea squirts, their blue-green bioluminescence long extinguished. Corals and algae bloom on a shelf. Leis of Tahitian snails dangle from hooks. Pearly shelled mussels from the Mississippi River, source of a once profitable button industry, glisten under glass. Continue reading
Self-Sufficiency Taken To The Outer Extremes
Before the lights go out on the last New Yorker issue of 2013, one more of several articles we found worth the read, and relevant to our common themes of interest–community-building, innovation, environmentalism, farming, etc.–on this blog, even if we tend to incremental change rather than the radicalism on display here:
Marcin Jakubowski, the owner of a small farm in northwestern Missouri, is an agrarian romantic for high-tech times. A forty-one-year-old Polish-American, he has spent the past five years building industrial machines from scratch, in a demonstration of radical self-sufficiency that he intends as a model for human society everywhere. He believes that freedom and prosperity lie within the reach of anyone willing to return to the land and make the tools necessary to erect civilization on top of it. His project, the Global Village Construction Set, has attracted a following, but among the obstacles he has faced is a dearth of skilled acolytes: the people who show up at his farm typically display more enthusiasm for his ideas than expertise with a lathe or a band saw. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Common Kingfisher
Hebbal Lake, Bangalore, Karnataka
An Entrepreneur’s Entrepreneur
The video above captures some of the spirit and personal style of a lesser-known but behind the scenes very influential entrepreneur in the hotbed of entrepreneurship. Better yet. listen to this interview with Nolan Bushnell to appreciate more fully what the early days of Silicon Valley were like, from one of Steve Jobs’s confidants:
Nolan is considered one of the pioneers of the video game industry. Nolan developed the first coin operated game (Computer Space), as well as Atari’s popular debut game, Pong. Nolan also founded Chuck E. Cheese’s, a game centric restaurant chain. Continue reading
