jayantiblogshere

It is the day of Ayudha Pooja. I take my car to the temple for the annual worship of my vehicle that enables me to drive to work and make my living. A coconut, four lemons, a flower garland and two hundred rupee notes is what it takes for me to broker with goddesses of wealth, knowledge and power ( Lakshmi, Saraswati and Durga ) to express my gratitude and also throw in my wishes for the future through the priest who has been doing this for my car for five years now. As the priest goes through this ritual children from the nearby huts where construction workers live swarm up around my car. The tractors, that,  later in the day pick up garbage from the streets do their early morning rounds when they arrive to pick up the workers to take them to building construction sites for work.  In the afternoons when their parents are at work the children loiter around the temple. Some of them go to the government school run by the municipality more often than not for the free after...

Tucked away in the second floor at the KR market is the marigold wholesale market. On an ordinary day where tons and tons of marigold and woven over long threads for fresh flower decorations across temples, marraige halls and funeral procession across the city.   This is a post for the Thursday photo challenge where the theme this week is    ORANGE (Fruit, Vegetables, Flowers, Signs, Clothing, Vehicles,...)

The Year of the Runaways - Sunjeev Sahota  ‘ Unputdownable’ could be the apt word to describe the book. It is no thriller. Sunjeev Sahota’s ‘The Year of the Runaways’ is a neatly crafted work on the struggles of migrants desperate to earn a living in the hope of making it big someday in an economically struggling England.  The narrative is so well researched, intricately described and honestly portrayed that it gets difficult to find a fault with the novel. The main reason behind it is simply that it is probably so close to the near truth that it does not read like a fiction. You meander through the heart wrenching poverty of Bihar, the caste politics of small town Punjab, the desperations of families struggling to make a living, the promise of the west as a one stop solution solve all the financial woes and most of all the heart wrenching exploitation of the immigrants, illegal or otherwise who throng Europe, particularly England in search of a bette...

Satin Island - by Tom McCarthy McCarthy’s Satin Island is’nt a book with any kind  of format and structure. It breaks all conventions of what structure a novel would generally follow and probably questions the necessity of a format. To be fair it follows a strict format that reads like a corporate dossier. By the time you are through into a couple of chapters you wonder if this structure is meant to be satirical or if this is a deliberate attempt at conveying something.   Brutally honest, unashamedly ambiguous and written like a bullet point corporate power point presentation, it is the ramblings of a consultant employed by a corporate consulting firm. U – the main protagonist of the novel if you may call him so is an ethnographer -anthropologist  employed by his boss Peymann to help bring in an ethnographers perspective for a massive project they have just won. Throughout the novel U is rambling about perhaps tyring to tell the reader and assembly of his ...

On my book shelf for October are : A Spool of Blue Thread By Anne Tyler The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara A Brief History of Seven killings by  Marlon James The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota Satin Island by  Tom McCarthy    Reviews will follow soon ... Meanwhile  the Man Booker prize itself will be announced on Tuesday the 13th of October. P.S : I happily drive two and a half hours ( both ways) through maddening traffic every weekday , spend hours in my kitchen garden over weekends, dust, clean, dishwash and look forward to doing every bit of monotonous work without complaining. Thank you Audible.

This is a submission for the Photo theme for Thursday where the theme for this week is NIGHT" (Dark, Low Light, Twilight, Evening, Shadows, Long Exposure, City Lights,...)

Basavanagudi  walk Starting at the foot steps at the famous big bull temple in Basavanagudi the Basavanagudi Darshan Walk was a walk into the almost 500 year old history of the city that has now burst and expanded way beyond it seams for what was conceived by its then Cheftain Kempe Gowda. Ancient Clock tower built around 1537  With four clock towers connected by a mud wall that ran across marking the city boundaries legend had it that if the city expanded beyond the boundaries great misfortune will fall upon the settlement. Bangalore city - dubbed the silicon valley of the east ironically seems to have been blessed with fortune much to the disdain of the ancient legend. But Mansoor Ali our Tour guide conducting the walk thinks otherwise. Perhaps the city's mounting garbage problems, nearly  poisoned water bodies the maddening urban chaos are warning signals for the misfortune that awaits the city in the no so distant future, he says....

Catch ‘em young At the stroke of ten my door bell rings. I am not even half awake .  After all it was a Sunday. Alas !!! Vedant, James, Jessy and Shreya are at the door letting me know they are ready for the day.  That is when I remember and  hurriedly gulp my Sunday breakfast, slurp my tea conscious of the fact that I am keeping my  eco-warriors waiting. We have been a team for a few months now.  We pick up plastic, water the plants, plant seeds  and do whatever else that needs to be done to enrich the soil around the little patches of land left in our apartment.   The gardener appointed by the apartment management considered our company a  nuisance. We  persuaded him to stop growing the typical ornamental crotons  that are mindlessly grown in all apartment landscapes so that we could plants trees, shrubs, herbs and vegetables. He is still not a convert but our pester power has won him over and he lets us have o...

The Sambrani Man     The smell of the Sambrani incense wafts through the dingy dungeons of the nearby corner shop as the oppressing heat of the mid-afternoon blazing sun darts the eyes.  At the end of the row ahead in the shop the Sambrani Man  is collecting his ‘dakshina’ ( donation) after  having spread the lingering fragrance of his Sambrani incense through the interiors of the pan shop.  He will stop at the tea shop next before he heads to the Xerox and stationery shop.  This is the Sambrani man's routine everyday except on Fridays when he takes his weekly off.  His customers are the shopkeepers who donate a few rupees into this bowl as a matter of routine. Sambrani in English is called the benzoin Resin which is obtained from the bark of a tree. It is then dried, powdered and sold either in powder form or as blocks.   When powdered and put into charcoal fire it gives out a dense smoke that wafts through with a s...