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...

My office was located at 18 Grosvenor Place, London SW1X 7HN. The fourth floor of our office overlooked the queens backyard in Buckingham palace. On winter days when the trees shed their leaves and were bare some of my collaeagues would claim they saw the Queen’s dogs being taken for an afternoon walk inside the Palace gardens .   It is not just the Queen's dogs inside the Palace but the men and women outside the Palace who worked in offices around central london take a walk in the afternoons because that is pretty much the only time where there is some decent amount of shine and warmth to venture outdoors. Weather permitting, I would walk the length of hyde park until the serpentine or the Speaker's corner during my lunch breaks. That was probably the only physical exercise and a breath of fresh crisp air  I would get during the course of a work day.     When my walk had to be short it would not be to hyde park or th...

My previous post of the famous F word could not have been complete without its female counterpart the 5 letter B***** word. But for all that claim to fame that this four letter word seems to boast of … There is much to be said about its female counterpart in English vocabulary … Research done by some fucked up university scholars in UK, US , New Zealand and Australia suggests that a certain male of the species use the F*** word 83.4 % more frequently than the female of the species. On Analysing the reasons they found that the females of the species is so fundamentally fucked up with intense soul threatening experiences that they find it easier to mutter the silent five letter B**** word than utter the loud four letter F*** word as an intense form of expression.      Some time back I was in the tube ( underground metro for the uninitiated and the perverts whose imaginations could run wild) . There was this woman whose cleavage was bursting fr...

F*** is arguably the most versatile english word ever coined. It is   an English word with recent origin.    It can used to mean different things at different times depending upon the context. It can easily fill in the roles of an adverb, adjective, verb, noun, pronoun and whatever else.  It can be used in present tense, past tense , future tense ... anytime you are tensed.  Here are just some of the examples...  Fuck … I have won the million dollar lottery ( Fuck as in ‘ wow … ’) Fuck … boss caught me minimizing the window of bookmyshow.com ( Fuck as in   ‘ Oh shit’ ) You are so fucking funny ( as in ‘ so .... funny’ ) Fuck off – angry expression ( as in sod off / bugger off ) Fuck off – with a coquettish look and a blush in the cheeks ( as in I am enjoying the attention but too coy to accept)   Fuck off – friendly expression   ( as in ‘just forget it’ ) Fuck … you have put on so much we...

Naduvula konjam Pakkattha kanom I am normally not an active watcher of Tamil movies. I honestly cannot tell the difference between an Ajith from a Suriya or a Vijay and I do not really know who the latest among the heroines is the hot babe these days.         This is not to say I avoid Tamil movies. To the contrary I am passively exposed to an overdose of Sun TV, Jaya TV, K Tv, Vijay TV and the rest everyday from the drawing room where my folks watch them like their life depended on it. Much as I   try to shut myself up in my bedroom and get cocooned to the internet or curl up with a book, the not so soft subtle Humour of Vadivelu, Vivek,   kavunda mani and Senthil pierce  the walls of my bedroom crystal clear and attack me from time to time.    My blood pressure occasionally shoots up when I try to decipher the exact point the participant tries to make in Visu’s 'Arattai ranagam' when I am try...

The richness of the colour of peacock feathers have always fascinated me.         I know they were a common bird in many parts of india until urbanization decimated them and drove them to the rural and forested areas. Bred in urban jungles, I always associated Peacock as a gentle creature.   Until that day at Kew gardens.  In the lush 368 acres of Royal botanical gardens at Kew in London, I was walking along the thames admiring and photographing the various species of koniferous trees planted from the world over and the occasional peacocks.  A cold february winter day does not qualify as the mating season and so none of the male were in their flirtatious best with their feathers spread out.    Picked up a few peanuts from my bag to feed them so I can have an up and close view of the feathers to photograph them.     As I got clicking them away I found one taking me head on and walking towards me… d...