jayantiblogshere

Vijay Thiruvady who conducts the Lalbagh botanical walk in Bangalore and floors his audience with his amazing well researched knowledge on the history of lalbagh botanical gardens and the flora of Bangalore once remarked this…. ‘If you think Cricket is what unites us Indians as a country, think again. If there is anything as grand and diverse that us Indians experience that we can uniquely claim as our very own it is our mangoes.’ ( Sorry Vijay .. I may not be quoting you Verbatim but I think I have’nt lost the essence of   what you wanted to convey )     Dussheri , payari , langda , chausa ,   badami , pairi, raspuri , haapoos ( alphonso), sindoora , mallika, banganapalli , imampasandu , sugar baby( Sakkara kutty) , malgoa, Totapuri , keshar and the late season entrant Neelam (my favourite) …       It is a shame I can hardly remember a few varieties. There are probably thousands of them and that is the one thing th...

I spent this weekend lazing around at home, soaking in the art of doing n othing. In my mental 'to-do' list lingered the long pending dusting, tending to the little balcony garden that was getting wild and reading Fritjof Capra’s, The hidden connections, all in no particular order. It has been a couple of weeks that Capra's Hidden connections has been besides me on my bed now.  This one is not one of those unputdownable ones that grips you and engulf you with a passion that cannot stop until you reach the climax and then linger around for a while taking in the little joys of a creative price of work. ( The last I experienced this was a couple of months ago with Amitav Ghosh's 'Sea of Poppies' )  Capra is a slow and steady read... that lingers on and on. It is a book you can pick up and flip through any page any chapter, depending upon what takes your fancy and reflect upon it like a cow chewing its own cud. Some chapters are heavy on me and some are not. ...

The photographs say it all ... Do not forget to click on the video at the end !!! 

This unusual flower caught our fancy when we went for a walk into the layout this evening. We asked the man who tends that garden and he said it was called ‘bald lily’. He allowed us inside his garden to take some up and close pictures of the exotic flower .            It is the season of Gulmohars. The gulmohars are in full bloom all over at this time of the year. The bright orange colour of the trees is striking from a distance.     Somewhere in March it was the season of Cherry Blossom. In just about a week’s time trees all over Bangalore blossomed and withered away before you knew it. Around the third week of march , just about it was time for Holi I was doing a lot of drving around since Appa was admitted into the hospital. What could have been days of extreme stress were lightened up by the amazing sight of these cherry blossom trees planted all alon...

It was a lazy Sunday afternoon and I could not miss out on my Sunday afternoon nap. However a vague sense of duty kept reminding me of an unfinished task on this day. Billboards of good looking kannada stars like Ramesh Arvind and Aindrita Ray have been up all over the city reminding its conscentious citizens of their duty to vote. On my way to work a good looking Ramesh Aravind ( although he now looks a little middle aged) has been beeming out of billboards and starkly reminindg the onlookers that they have no right to complain about the state of affairs if they do not bother to vote. That is a fair statement. And a compelling one on the conscience of all the globetrotting Information Technology workers who drive the  past  the billboard on their way to work. So compelling, that I cut short my Sunday afternoon nap, picked up my voter id card and went to the polling booth, braved the long queues to cast my vote. Ab...