A few months ago while staying at Cardamom County, I spent a morning with a wonderful character named Jain – a tribal man with an avid interest in insects and arachnids, working as a guide in the Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary, and incidentally, a friend and student of Mr. Vijaykumar Thondaman‘s. Both armed with cameras, Jain and I entered the reserve just after dawn, and spent the best part of the morning hunting dragonflies and damselflies across streams and fields, ponds and gullies. Continue reading
Shark-Free Shark Fin Soup
The hot hand remains hot. One of the horrible culinary traditions that persists around the world, even though it is repugnant from an environmental perspective, is the harvesting of fins from sharks to make soup. Click the image to the left for but one small data point in the effort to end the illegal harvesting and sale of shark fins.
Better yet, don’t click that. Continue reading
Alberta Tar Sands: 1984 – 2011
Try as we may to accentuate the positive, from time to time there seems to be a hot hand of unpleasantries reported in the news. Rather than hide our head in the sand, we thank Scientific American yet again:
As they used to say in New England: Continue reading
Last Chance To See
Thanks to Scientific American and its excellent blog posts, this video above is set up with some context. The video shows what will likely be the one chance most of us get to see of this animal. Continue reading
License To Obsess
If your life has a certain soundtrack and you read American literary fiction, you may have already encountered the novels of Michael Chabon. Click the image above for a snapshot interview with him. When he announced at the beginning of this year that he was working on a new novel, it was seen by many in a blog post split over two days. A turn of phrase in the middle of the second post resonates with the small group of people who form Raxa Collective:
…thanks to Wax Poetics, one unexpected but maybe not unforeseeable result of the decision to have some characters own a shop together selling battered old things that are beautiful and valuable only to a small number of randomly assorted Geeko-Americans has been the joyful return to my life of hip-hop…
Things that are beautiful and valuable only to a small number: those are the things we are focused on here. See all of Salim’s recent posts for examples. Milo’s too. Chabon’s new novel may focus on the culture of hip-hop, which you will not likely encounter on our pages, but the underlying idea has both profound and light-hearted implications. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Malabar Grey Hornbill-Male (Thekkady, India)
Experience
My routine interaction with the guests staying at Cardamom County provides first hand information about their experiences at the resort and various activities in and around wild Periyar. I recently happened to speak with Mr. Namjoshi and his family, who stayed at Cardamom County a couple days ago.
Here are some of their comments and photos:
Wordsmithing: Trend
A beautiful origin, thanks to OED for reminding us, of a word that has come into the possession of statisticians, demographers, political scientists and such:
1. A rounded bend or circuit of a stream.
c1630 T. Risdon Chorogr. Surv. Devon In the trend of Touridge,‥stands Meeth. Continue reading
Vive La Différence
One of our favorite phrases comes to mind upon seeing the news that Umberto Eco, whose book on experiential travel is as must-read as it is little-known, is curating an exhibition on lists at a museum. Long live the difference: the man of letters, whose academic work on semiotics even many scholars are challenged by, can write trash-free page-turners as well as travel books and, why not, curate a museum exhibition. Long live the difference: the museum that resists the trashy blockbusters can invite a man such as this to open his cabinet of curiosities. Continue reading
Fringe Physics
We have a soft spot for unusual geniuses, whether formally defined, or recognized in other ways, so it is with pleasure that we discovered this book (click the image to the left), its author, and a TED talk (after the jump) to boot.
For the past fifteen years, acclaimed science writer Margaret Wertheim has been collecting the works of “outsider physicists,” many without formal training and all convinced that they have found true alternative theories of the universe. Jim Carter, the Einstein of outsiders, has developed his own complete theory of matter and energy and gravity that he demonstrates with experiments in his backyard‚-with garbage cans and a disco fog machine he makes smoke rings to test his ideas about atoms. Captivated by the imaginative power of his theories and his resolutely DIY attitude, Wertheim has been following Carter’s progress for the past decade.
Click the picture to the right for a podcast that gives a nifty overview of the book. Click here for a review of the book from a great blog connected to Columbia University’s math department. Click here for an excellent review in a once great and occasionally still good newspaper’s website. And click here for a review from an always great magazine’s website.
Bird of the Day: Common Kingfisher (Gavi, India)
Any Given Christmas
While the paper Christmas stars of Kerala are often just cheerful adornments to a rooftop, shopfront or hanging eave, there are also an entire range of much larger, homemade stars. Ranging in size from large to gargantuan, they are meant to convey messages from simple well wishes to the deepest ideologies…. Continue reading
Mexican Sunflower (Tithonia diversifolia)
Mexican Sunflower is a member of sunflower family native of mexico, introduced in India.
Saip!
In my own favorite post of the last few months (Kerala: Seeing & Learning), I briefly mentioned the word. But I didn’t make it clear just how hilarious the instances of its utterance can be, especially when the subject knows its significance.
A New Zealand writer who lived in Kerala for a few years describes a few bizarre Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Flameback Woodpecker (Thekkady, India)
Flame Vine (Pyrostegia venusta)
Flame vine is an evergreen climbing shruby vine that blooms in winter and spring with spectacular reddish-orange flowers which is also called as Flaming trumpet.
Bird of the Day: Juvenile Cormorant in Rain (Thekkady, India)
Kerala’s Stars
The colorful stars that begin to grace Kerala buildings in December from homes, to businesses, to places of worship have humble beginnings despite their current flashy status. The were originally a simple white 7 point star that correlated with the beacon leading to the Christmas manger.
Many of these folded and cut paper stars are the handiwork of a group of women in a fishing villages around the southern Kerala city of Kollam. Continue reading
Blue Dawn Glory (Ipomea nil)
Blue Dawn Glory is an annual twiner seen commonly throughout India in areas up to 1800 meters altitude. This twiner is commonly known as Morning Glory due the fact the flower opens around sunrise and fades before sunset.
Bird of the Day: Great Cormorant on Nest #2 (Thekkady, India)
