Posts
One of the events I always used to look forward to in childhood was the arrival of the monsoons. It meant suddenly the hot sun would no longer be seen for days together. Everywhere would be greenery. The walls between houses would turn black and green with the moss growing on it. If your house had a tin sheet roof, you would hear the first "TTUN TTUN TTUN" of the first drops, then would come the sudden "DDHUSSSSSHHHH" of the sudden downpour and when it ended, it would again be a "TTUN TTUN TTUN" dripping drops of the receding rain. The trees would sway and droop under the heavy rain. If there was a strong breeze, you could see the coconut and arecanut palms swinging to the side, almost uprooting themselves. Crows wouldn't be able to fly and would go haphazardly across the sky, flying sideways or backwards, against their will in front of the wind's strong fingers.
The drains would not be able to handle the deluge and overflow onto the road.There would be no difference between the flooded roads and drains. We would have a jolly time, walking in the rain, drowned to our little knees, dragging rubber slippers which would slip off and float away, once in a while. Then we would have to catch it back, before it flowed away. All kinds of wonderful things would float in the swiftly flowing water. In houses, you could see plastic buckets and cooking vessels kept under leaks in the roof. Wandering cows & goats would take shelter in bus shelters and in front of closed shops, alongwith people.
Then the rain would stop, and in the break, children would try to catch small fish and tadpoles in the drains.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Monday, June 2, 2008
Elections in Karnataka
We now have another new government in Karnataka. First it was the Congress, which was overthrown by the Janata Dal-BJP. Then came a Janata Dal government led by Kumaraswamy, followed by a very shortlived BJP government led by Yediyurappa. But then the Father-Son combo of Devegowda and Kumaraswamy torpedoed Yediyurappa's dream.This was followed by the Governor's rule and now the elections have brought in the BJP under Yediyurappa once again. Coming from Kerala, I could draw parallels between Devegowda-Kumaraswamy in Karnataka and Karunakaran-Muralidharan in Kerala.
It does provide for very interesting newspaper reading in the morning, wondering who is going to pull the rug out, from whose feet. More like one of those unending TV soap series. Takes your mind off the daily traffic deaths, the unaffordable fuel prices, the murders and rapes.
I have to confess that when in college, I got totally put off the BJP's ideologies by Advani's Rath Yathra, the Babri Masjid destruction and the riots. The riots following the Godhra massacre only reinforced this feeling. Though not a practitioner of any ideology, I always had an affinity for the ideas in Communism, of helping the poor with the rich people's money. This idealism has been tempered over the years by the practicality of capitalism. Without money making people, there would be no money to share with the poor. There were many things I didn't understand in Kerala. When the Communist party opposed capitalism so strongly, why didn't they create their own industries in their ideals, where there were no bourgeoise class, where there were only workers working for each others benefits, to provide employment to the hundreds of unemployed in kerala. They too have enough money to start a few industries of their own, but besides starting their own TV Channel and Print publications which are limited in scope in terms of employment perspective, there have been no significant employment generators.
Coming back to Karnataka, Everyone except one of the independents supporting him,have been made ministers. Wish I too had won a seat somewhere, then I too could have been made a minister. He'll need a referree, and many line referees to run this show smoothly. I doubt whether it will be smooth running, but I wish with all my heart, whoever is in power has a stable term, taking and implementing real positive changes in a normal citizens life.
It does provide for very interesting newspaper reading in the morning, wondering who is going to pull the rug out, from whose feet. More like one of those unending TV soap series. Takes your mind off the daily traffic deaths, the unaffordable fuel prices, the murders and rapes.
I have to confess that when in college, I got totally put off the BJP's ideologies by Advani's Rath Yathra, the Babri Masjid destruction and the riots. The riots following the Godhra massacre only reinforced this feeling. Though not a practitioner of any ideology, I always had an affinity for the ideas in Communism, of helping the poor with the rich people's money. This idealism has been tempered over the years by the practicality of capitalism. Without money making people, there would be no money to share with the poor. There were many things I didn't understand in Kerala. When the Communist party opposed capitalism so strongly, why didn't they create their own industries in their ideals, where there were no bourgeoise class, where there were only workers working for each others benefits, to provide employment to the hundreds of unemployed in kerala. They too have enough money to start a few industries of their own, but besides starting their own TV Channel and Print publications which are limited in scope in terms of employment perspective, there have been no significant employment generators.
Coming back to Karnataka, Everyone except one of the independents supporting him,have been made ministers. Wish I too had won a seat somewhere, then I too could have been made a minister. He'll need a referree, and many line referees to run this show smoothly. I doubt whether it will be smooth running, but I wish with all my heart, whoever is in power has a stable term, taking and implementing real positive changes in a normal citizens life.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Living in Bangalore - the past and present
I have been in Bangalore for the last 3 years. I was once here in 1999 and left in 2001. This is my 2nd time around,and it is like I have been in 2 different worlds
The bangalore of 2001 was mildly crowded, but the people were good. The people from bangalore were friendly and the general attitude was of good humoured indulgence. Only the people who were from outside bangalore showed any signs of intolerance towards people from other states. This I always felt was normal, as in any social order, resentment would occasionally crop up against an outsider if the outsider was doing better than the resident population.When u relaxed, you did it with a group of close friends in one of the new pubs with themes, which opened fairly frequently.You could drive around on saturdays and sundays without getting stuck in traffic.Marathahalli was a faraway place. Whitefield unknown,and...the outer ring road was not yet fully complete.
Then I went away and came back in 2005. In the interim I met many friends from Bangalore,who told me, how all the projects were making life difficult, and traffic was unbearable.
In 2005 when I came back, I landed in the middle of a traffic jam on the hosur road and the traffic conditions have only got worse, the longer I have been in bangalore.The call taxis which were such a blessing in 2001, have turned into an evil monster, with crazily driven tata sumos and qualis' running all sane drivers off the road. The drivers are foul mouthed creatures, who have no sense of traffic rules and for whom the bigger their vehicle, the better to ignore traffic rules. People grew rich overnight and big real estate brokers with no class, are everywhere. Rents have hit the roof and the dreams of middleclass professionals to buy a house, went up in smoke. Overnight,the average population turned from yuppies from small towns to rude uncouth people.
A terrible feeling of sadness and longing comes when I remember 2001. Where are all the nice people of those days? Like little fish in a river who go into the sea, have they been eaten up by the big fish of the sea ?
The bangalore of 2001 was mildly crowded, but the people were good. The people from bangalore were friendly and the general attitude was of good humoured indulgence. Only the people who were from outside bangalore showed any signs of intolerance towards people from other states. This I always felt was normal, as in any social order, resentment would occasionally crop up against an outsider if the outsider was doing better than the resident population.When u relaxed, you did it with a group of close friends in one of the new pubs with themes, which opened fairly frequently.You could drive around on saturdays and sundays without getting stuck in traffic.Marathahalli was a faraway place. Whitefield unknown,and...the outer ring road was not yet fully complete.
Then I went away and came back in 2005. In the interim I met many friends from Bangalore,who told me, how all the projects were making life difficult, and traffic was unbearable.
In 2005 when I came back, I landed in the middle of a traffic jam on the hosur road and the traffic conditions have only got worse, the longer I have been in bangalore.The call taxis which were such a blessing in 2001, have turned into an evil monster, with crazily driven tata sumos and qualis' running all sane drivers off the road. The drivers are foul mouthed creatures, who have no sense of traffic rules and for whom the bigger their vehicle, the better to ignore traffic rules. People grew rich overnight and big real estate brokers with no class, are everywhere. Rents have hit the roof and the dreams of middleclass professionals to buy a house, went up in smoke. Overnight,the average population turned from yuppies from small towns to rude uncouth people.
A terrible feeling of sadness and longing comes when I remember 2001. Where are all the nice people of those days? Like little fish in a river who go into the sea, have they been eaten up by the big fish of the sea ?
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
The Professional Bathroom cleaner
After the rigorous 3 years spent trying to learn how to manage a hotel and its various aspects, but then finally not working in the hotel industry, the only takeaway I appear to have had from the course, was my attitude to life, and doing things.
To do things there are 2 ways, one the Amateur way where you ask or learn from somebody before you do something. The Professional way is to pick up the info from somewhere and in the supreme confidence that nothing you do, can possibly go wrong, go ahead and do it. The results do not matter as long as “the Professional” has followed his own brilliant ideas. The brilliance sometimes is diminished by the attitude of others who have not understood the significance of a Professional way of doing things.
One such enterprise was my bathroom cleaning mission.
While in college, my instructor had drilled into my head, how cleanliness is next only to godliness, and to check it, you had better look at all the hidden corners where normally, even self respecting germs wouldn’t bother. The bathroom had to be dry always, unlike normal Indian homes where it would be wet after somebody’s shower. The toilet was the lab where you acted out your secret desires to murder germs, bosses and such like creatures.
And … in case there were stubborn stains on the tiles which refused to go away, your ultimate weapon was THE ACID.
Everybody in the family, except for yours truly, was away for the vacations, and as they say, an idle mind is the devil’s workshop. And.. so I decided to clean the bathroom. It is beside the point, that, the bathroom was clean and dry already. But since I didn’t have anything else to do, and the urge to do something extra-ordinary came about, I decided I would use the bathroom as my lab. To clean the few hardwater stains and the imagined numerous other stains, I decided I would do it like a professional. I went out bought some bathroom cleaning acid and got ready.
Now, a few days back, I had got another bathroom cleaning agent and had liberally sprayed it all over and scrubbed it clean. The newly shining bathroom was appreciated by the wife. This is where the devil lay in wait, for me to be alone in the house, and incite me to take the bathroom cleaning to the level, beyond which no mortal, could aspire to surpass.
I went into the bathroom and liberally started pouring the acid all over the floor, the walls and the washbasin. My first warning, that something was wrong, was when the liquid sizzled angrily, as it touched any surface. I hadn’t seen, concentrated acid in this form, since maybe my college days. The second warning was, when there was whiff of, pungent gas, that opened my nose, which had been clogged by cold for 2 days, in a jiffy.
But as a professional, I believe it is my responsibility to leave no task half done, so I went ahead and quickly emptied half the bottle in the bathroom. Even before I finished, the gas exploded in my nose. It was like somebody had pulled an electric cable through my nose into my brain and connected it to a bell. The moment the bell went off, I gasped for air. In the couple of seconds it took me to understand the situation, my eyes started watering, and my lungs cried. Without further ado, I exited the bathroom in 2 graceful bounds like the antelopes in National Geographic.
Once outside, I realised that the monster I had unleashed in the bathroom had come out into the hall as well, and I wasn’t safe there too. I opened the door of the hall, and all the windows as fast as possible. But the electric quality to the air, persisted. So I switched on both the ceiling fans. This made it worse, my eyes started watering and I was starting to feel like somebody had woken me up from deep sleep with an electric shock to my sensitivities.
I tried tying a cloth around my face, going into the bathroom and opening the ventilator windows wide. I did look like one of those bandits you see in the comic books, and had to exit once again from the bathroom in true cartoon character fashion, when my mask proved ineffective. I waited for it to drain away by itself.
It took around 2 hours of waiting outside my house, for the power of the acid to diminish, enough for me, to venture back into the bathroom, and do a quick scrub, pour water, and wash away the remaining acid which hadn’t flowed into the drain by itself.
Of course, as we professionals talk of disastrous episodes, it was a ‘learning experience’. The Tiles in the bathroom were clean[the colour did not change dramatically as I hoped, because, it was clean enough in the first place).
Funny how, I haven’t seen any sign of mosquitoes, for 2 nights straight now. Must tell the acid manufacturers of this additional benefit. Though I suspect if there were people in the house when I tried out this experiment, and they weren’t as nimble as me, I would probably be buying body bags.
Must say, and I am sure you will agree, there is nothing to match the way, a professional does things.
To do things there are 2 ways, one the Amateur way where you ask or learn from somebody before you do something. The Professional way is to pick up the info from somewhere and in the supreme confidence that nothing you do, can possibly go wrong, go ahead and do it. The results do not matter as long as “the Professional” has followed his own brilliant ideas. The brilliance sometimes is diminished by the attitude of others who have not understood the significance of a Professional way of doing things.
One such enterprise was my bathroom cleaning mission.
While in college, my instructor had drilled into my head, how cleanliness is next only to godliness, and to check it, you had better look at all the hidden corners where normally, even self respecting germs wouldn’t bother. The bathroom had to be dry always, unlike normal Indian homes where it would be wet after somebody’s shower. The toilet was the lab where you acted out your secret desires to murder germs, bosses and such like creatures.
And … in case there were stubborn stains on the tiles which refused to go away, your ultimate weapon was THE ACID.
Everybody in the family, except for yours truly, was away for the vacations, and as they say, an idle mind is the devil’s workshop. And.. so I decided to clean the bathroom. It is beside the point, that, the bathroom was clean and dry already. But since I didn’t have anything else to do, and the urge to do something extra-ordinary came about, I decided I would use the bathroom as my lab. To clean the few hardwater stains and the imagined numerous other stains, I decided I would do it like a professional. I went out bought some bathroom cleaning acid and got ready.
Now, a few days back, I had got another bathroom cleaning agent and had liberally sprayed it all over and scrubbed it clean. The newly shining bathroom was appreciated by the wife. This is where the devil lay in wait, for me to be alone in the house, and incite me to take the bathroom cleaning to the level, beyond which no mortal, could aspire to surpass.
I went into the bathroom and liberally started pouring the acid all over the floor, the walls and the washbasin. My first warning, that something was wrong, was when the liquid sizzled angrily, as it touched any surface. I hadn’t seen, concentrated acid in this form, since maybe my college days. The second warning was, when there was whiff of, pungent gas, that opened my nose, which had been clogged by cold for 2 days, in a jiffy.
But as a professional, I believe it is my responsibility to leave no task half done, so I went ahead and quickly emptied half the bottle in the bathroom. Even before I finished, the gas exploded in my nose. It was like somebody had pulled an electric cable through my nose into my brain and connected it to a bell. The moment the bell went off, I gasped for air. In the couple of seconds it took me to understand the situation, my eyes started watering, and my lungs cried. Without further ado, I exited the bathroom in 2 graceful bounds like the antelopes in National Geographic.
Once outside, I realised that the monster I had unleashed in the bathroom had come out into the hall as well, and I wasn’t safe there too. I opened the door of the hall, and all the windows as fast as possible. But the electric quality to the air, persisted. So I switched on both the ceiling fans. This made it worse, my eyes started watering and I was starting to feel like somebody had woken me up from deep sleep with an electric shock to my sensitivities.
I tried tying a cloth around my face, going into the bathroom and opening the ventilator windows wide. I did look like one of those bandits you see in the comic books, and had to exit once again from the bathroom in true cartoon character fashion, when my mask proved ineffective. I waited for it to drain away by itself.
It took around 2 hours of waiting outside my house, for the power of the acid to diminish, enough for me, to venture back into the bathroom, and do a quick scrub, pour water, and wash away the remaining acid which hadn’t flowed into the drain by itself.
Of course, as we professionals talk of disastrous episodes, it was a ‘learning experience’. The Tiles in the bathroom were clean[the colour did not change dramatically as I hoped, because, it was clean enough in the first place).
Funny how, I haven’t seen any sign of mosquitoes, for 2 nights straight now. Must tell the acid manufacturers of this additional benefit. Though I suspect if there were people in the house when I tried out this experiment, and they weren’t as nimble as me, I would probably be buying body bags.
Must say, and I am sure you will agree, there is nothing to match the way, a professional does things.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Rakesh
I met Rakesh in college. Though he moved, in his own circle of friends,all through the year, he stayed with us before the final exams, for studying together with us bunch of friends who stayed within easy reach of college. Until then I hadn’t known him well, except a passing reference to him from our common friend, or when I saw him drive around on his old Yesdi bike. The Yesdi was a substitute for the Harley he wanted, which he couldn’t afford at that point in time probably. The Yesdi is an old bike, some might even refer to it as an antique, though being more charitable, a bike lover might call it, a classic.
It had 2 silencers and what it didn’t have in terms of pickup in relation to a modern performance bike, it made up in attitude. It had one of the most annoying sounds for a bike. To start it, like its compatriot the Enfield Bullet, you had to pump it with the kick lever many times before, before kicking it into life. The Kick start itself functioned as the gear lever too, which was a unique feature. When you kicked it into life, everybody in the neighbourhood would wake with that annoying “Ttun Ttun Ttun” sound. The smoke from the silencers was unbelievable, thick white smoke. In the late 70s’s and 80’s when bikes became popular among the young men in Kerala, the Yesdi was the bike of choice, except for Vijai super scooters with a pierced silencer. Though it didn’t match up to the bikes seen in English movies popular at the time like John Travolta’s in “Grease”, both made up with sheer noise and smoke, to create an ambience for the grand entry of the campus hero, on the bike or scooter, as the case might be. Both of these have ceased production, but even now I occasionally see an Yesdi around.
Rakesh used to call his bike his girlfriend and used to say, the reason that he didn’t have a real girl was, because “she wouldn’t let me ride her anytime I want, like my trusty bike”. Though to an outsider it might sound tasteless or insensitive, we were used to his foul mouth. We suspected he used foul language to hide his real self. We had found him to be a jolly chap with a sharp sense of humour. The girls in our gang too had seen through his rough and tough exterior. For all his dirty jokes and professed dislike for girls, they had a sort of affectionate indulgent attitude to him.
The ritual washing cycle we followed for our clothes while staying away from home, was a bit elaborate. It consisted of soaking all the clothes in one of 2 buckets we had. The guy who soaked his clothes in the bucket would continue to leave it there, till the next guy who needed to wash his clothes, would soak it in the second bucket. The next guy who needed the bucket would let loose a volley of the most colourful endearing terms he knew, and some which he used his own imagination to create. Depending on the impact of this attack, the 1st chap would immediately or in a little while, do a quick scrub, rinse and handover the empty bucket. One day, in the room I shared with 2 other friends, I was doing the weekly washing, while Rakesh was just outside the window, wiping his precious girlfriend clean. He was humming a familiar sounding tune, so I listened. He was humming Stevie Wonders song “Hello”. But, in true Rakesh fashion it had some embellishments. It went
“Hello,
is it me you are looking for,
I wonder where you are,
I wonder what you do,
Are you somewhere feeling lon’ly
Or, is someone loving you
…..and if he is, I’ll kicking his fxxxin balls off”- the last line, Rakesh’s own addition.
It had 2 silencers and what it didn’t have in terms of pickup in relation to a modern performance bike, it made up in attitude. It had one of the most annoying sounds for a bike. To start it, like its compatriot the Enfield Bullet, you had to pump it with the kick lever many times before, before kicking it into life. The Kick start itself functioned as the gear lever too, which was a unique feature. When you kicked it into life, everybody in the neighbourhood would wake with that annoying “Ttun Ttun Ttun” sound. The smoke from the silencers was unbelievable, thick white smoke. In the late 70s’s and 80’s when bikes became popular among the young men in Kerala, the Yesdi was the bike of choice, except for Vijai super scooters with a pierced silencer. Though it didn’t match up to the bikes seen in English movies popular at the time like John Travolta’s in “Grease”, both made up with sheer noise and smoke, to create an ambience for the grand entry of the campus hero, on the bike or scooter, as the case might be. Both of these have ceased production, but even now I occasionally see an Yesdi around.
Rakesh used to call his bike his girlfriend and used to say, the reason that he didn’t have a real girl was, because “she wouldn’t let me ride her anytime I want, like my trusty bike”. Though to an outsider it might sound tasteless or insensitive, we were used to his foul mouth. We suspected he used foul language to hide his real self. We had found him to be a jolly chap with a sharp sense of humour. The girls in our gang too had seen through his rough and tough exterior. For all his dirty jokes and professed dislike for girls, they had a sort of affectionate indulgent attitude to him.
The ritual washing cycle we followed for our clothes while staying away from home, was a bit elaborate. It consisted of soaking all the clothes in one of 2 buckets we had. The guy who soaked his clothes in the bucket would continue to leave it there, till the next guy who needed to wash his clothes, would soak it in the second bucket. The next guy who needed the bucket would let loose a volley of the most colourful endearing terms he knew, and some which he used his own imagination to create. Depending on the impact of this attack, the 1st chap would immediately or in a little while, do a quick scrub, rinse and handover the empty bucket. One day, in the room I shared with 2 other friends, I was doing the weekly washing, while Rakesh was just outside the window, wiping his precious girlfriend clean. He was humming a familiar sounding tune, so I listened. He was humming Stevie Wonders song “Hello”. But, in true Rakesh fashion it had some embellishments. It went
“Hello,
is it me you are looking for,
I wonder where you are,
I wonder what you do,
Are you somewhere feeling lon’ly
Or, is someone loving you
…..and if he is, I’ll kicking his fxxxin balls off”- the last line, Rakesh’s own addition.
Monday, May 12, 2008
Driving my bike back from work in Munnar-1
A few years back, I used to work in a Resort near Munnar, Kerala. Munnar is a hill resort, about 4 hours drive from cochin or Madurai. It is a nice cool green place, where TATA TEA had its tea plantations. Most of the town was linked to TATA TEA or to some other plantation company like Harrisons Malayalam.
The rolling hills and tea gardens give Munnar a level of greenery, that is not seen in a normal hill resort. From September till Feb, the Fog is heavy in the evenings. Initially I used to stay in a small room, about 35 kms away from Munnar, and about 16kms away from my place of work. The drive to office and back was along a long winding road, with lots of turns, and a few tight hairpin bends, and a little portion of about 4 Kms was through cardamom plantations. Having spent all my life in cities, the drive to work and back to my room was an adventure, which my citybred education hadn’t prepared me for.
A cardamom plantation is not like a tea garden. Tea grows as shrubs which are pruned like a bonsai plant, and is grown on the hill tops with no other trees except occasional silver oak trees which are grown to help retain the soils moisture. So when u look at a tea garden, you can see long distances without many trees to obstruct your view. The hills themselves look various shades of green, depending on each patch of plantation, whether it had been plucked, or was sprouting new leaves, or had been burnt by dew
Cardamom plantation on the other hand was a thick forest of cardamom plants which would have lots of other trees within it. This was wild elephant country. There were numerous elephant corridors crisscrossing this, since it was close to Thekkady- the Periyar Tiger reserve forest. An elephant corridor is an elephant created highway where herds of elephants cross regularly on their way between forests. When a herd of these heavy creatures move, nothing stands in their way, they flatten everything and everybody in their path, when moving from forest to forests which are connected. These elephant corridors sometimes cross human roads. Woe is, if u happen to be in their path while they are crossing. It would result in either a Photostat copy of your former self or a new kind of fertiliser paste
There was about 4 Kms of cardamom plantations that I had to drive through every day.The morning drive was quite pleasant, the cool shady trees and the myriad birds chirping in them. The road had 2 shoulders, one higher than the road, and one lower. The upper shoulder would have the cardamom plants higher than me on my bike, while the lower half was below the road level. In places, the shoulders would have crumbled by soil erosion or crushed to form a slope by the elephants. My mobile phone was pretty useless, as the range was never stable and in the cardamom forest, there was absolutely no range. When I reached these parts, I would normally slow down, looking nervously on both sides, to see if any elephant was hiding to jump out on me, and say”Peek a boo” before smashing me and my bike to kingdom come. When I drove through this stretch, each turn would hold a surprise, there might be fallen trees across the road, elephant dung, or jeep taxis coming silently down the wrong side of the road, having switched off their engines to save fuel, and taking advantage of the steep incline of the road. Once I did meet a jeep taxi in this fashion on my bike and literally fell head over heels on it, ending in a passionate hug of its bonnet, breaking my left forearm. This required a steel rod to be screwed on inside my arm for a year. Before this misadventure, every night, after work I had to take the 16 km drive back to my room. The thrill ride started then.
The 1st stretch through the tea garden would usually be in thick fog, where the lack of streetlights on the road meant, the only light was my headlamp, which wasn’t much use in the thick dense fog, limiting my vision sometimes to a few feet in front of the bike. Sometimes it meant literally walking, while astride the bike, so that I went slower than my bike would permit me. If I tried any thing faster on the bike, I would either drop off into a sheer fall on one side or go smashing into the tea shrubs at the corners. Either way, wouldn’t have done me much good. Each time there was fog on the road, my heart would go into overdrive, blood rushing into my head, as I peered into the fog to make out if it was in fact a wild elephant standing just ahead out of reach of the bikes light. Then as I got closer, it would turn out to be just a rock or the result of an overactive imagination. If there was a slight breeze and the thick fog was flowing towards you, then it was easy to imagine hidden shapes materialising just out of your eyesight, but waiting for you to reach them.
The cardamom plantation stretch was a living nightmare for me. It was only 4 Kms, but it felt like 40. I would enter it expecting my nemesis the hidden elephant to jump on me any time “Surprise”. All the wild elephant stories I had heard would be going through my head. “Lone Elephants are dangerous. They would attack you for no reason”. “Mother elephants are dangerous because they guard their calves” “If its been raining and is cold, its dangerous to drive through the cardamom plantation. The elephants would be standing on the road which would still be warm from the days sun”. “Its dangerous to be crossing the elephant corridors, because you might cross when there is a gap among a herd crossing the road, and they may not like a human standing between them and the rest of the herd”. “Beware of mad elephants which will attack for no reason”. “You are not safe in the Tea gardens either, because elephants come there too.” In short the general idea conveyed to my city bred mind was to stay as far as possible from them, if you could help it. The straight stretches of the road where the plantation ended, would mean the bike would be literally flying along, to get out as soon as possible, but the hairpin bends inside the plantation meant I had to be very careful and slow going down, wondering if there was any loners waiting to meet me as I turned down the bend towards them. I always used to wonder, what would I do, if there really was one, when I turned my bike down the hair pin bend. I wouldn’t be able to turn the bike fast enough, on the steep upward slope of the hairpin bend, to escape. The only choice would have been to get off the bike and run into the plantation itself, hoping to out run it. But then there was no guarantee I wouldn’t bump into it again in the dark plantation, or one of its other kin.
Thinking of all this elephant lore and the terrifying stories of people, who told me of narrow escapes which they had when elephants attacked, the ghosts in my head had a merry time, when I entered the cardamom forest. My heart would be having a peak cardiac workout. I would be licking my lips to wet my dry mouth, and my eyes would be dry because, I wouldn’t close my eyes for fear of missing to see an elephant. Each tree, each clump of tall bushes would mean my heart did a tap dance. If the bikes engine faltered, because I didn’t shift up to tackle a climb, I would have a minor heartattack. Every night, when slowly negotiating a bend and coming down, I see the plants crushed on both sides of the road with me in the middle, fresh elephant dung on the road, and the wind blowing from the plantation brings the strong smell of elephants. My heart stops beating,the blood rushes into my head, my mind freezes, I peer anxiously into the shadows out of my bikes light area, and pray. These are moments when you understand what they mean by animal instincts and survival instincts.
Luckily or otherwise, during the one year I travelled through this stretch, the elephants did not fix an appointment with me, though there were many times, jeep drivers and people who took the same route, before me or after me, asking me afterwards, “Didn’t you see the 2 Tuskers today. They created hell on the road, smashed a small grocery store and then went into the tea gardens where the workers had to chase them away. You must have narrowly missed them.It was a memorable sight” or “Do you know, yesterday night around 10.30,2 labourers who were repairing the road were attacked. After work they had had a couple of drinks and walked into the forest to take a leak and they bumped into an elephant in the dark. The elephant picked one of them and threw him. He landed on a tree and escaped with some broken bones. The other guy was squashed like a bug. Ooh! you should have seen the sight”
I used to thank my guardian angels for missing the memorable sight. After I broke my arm in the Jeep accident, I couldn't drive the bike for some time and had to shift to a house in Munnar town, and the night drives through the plantations stopped.
The rolling hills and tea gardens give Munnar a level of greenery, that is not seen in a normal hill resort. From September till Feb, the Fog is heavy in the evenings. Initially I used to stay in a small room, about 35 kms away from Munnar, and about 16kms away from my place of work. The drive to office and back was along a long winding road, with lots of turns, and a few tight hairpin bends, and a little portion of about 4 Kms was through cardamom plantations. Having spent all my life in cities, the drive to work and back to my room was an adventure, which my citybred education hadn’t prepared me for.
A cardamom plantation is not like a tea garden. Tea grows as shrubs which are pruned like a bonsai plant, and is grown on the hill tops with no other trees except occasional silver oak trees which are grown to help retain the soils moisture. So when u look at a tea garden, you can see long distances without many trees to obstruct your view. The hills themselves look various shades of green, depending on each patch of plantation, whether it had been plucked, or was sprouting new leaves, or had been burnt by dew
Cardamom plantation on the other hand was a thick forest of cardamom plants which would have lots of other trees within it. This was wild elephant country. There were numerous elephant corridors crisscrossing this, since it was close to Thekkady- the Periyar Tiger reserve forest. An elephant corridor is an elephant created highway where herds of elephants cross regularly on their way between forests. When a herd of these heavy creatures move, nothing stands in their way, they flatten everything and everybody in their path, when moving from forest to forests which are connected. These elephant corridors sometimes cross human roads. Woe is, if u happen to be in their path while they are crossing. It would result in either a Photostat copy of your former self or a new kind of fertiliser paste
There was about 4 Kms of cardamom plantations that I had to drive through every day.The morning drive was quite pleasant, the cool shady trees and the myriad birds chirping in them. The road had 2 shoulders, one higher than the road, and one lower. The upper shoulder would have the cardamom plants higher than me on my bike, while the lower half was below the road level. In places, the shoulders would have crumbled by soil erosion or crushed to form a slope by the elephants. My mobile phone was pretty useless, as the range was never stable and in the cardamom forest, there was absolutely no range. When I reached these parts, I would normally slow down, looking nervously on both sides, to see if any elephant was hiding to jump out on me, and say”Peek a boo” before smashing me and my bike to kingdom come. When I drove through this stretch, each turn would hold a surprise, there might be fallen trees across the road, elephant dung, or jeep taxis coming silently down the wrong side of the road, having switched off their engines to save fuel, and taking advantage of the steep incline of the road. Once I did meet a jeep taxi in this fashion on my bike and literally fell head over heels on it, ending in a passionate hug of its bonnet, breaking my left forearm. This required a steel rod to be screwed on inside my arm for a year. Before this misadventure, every night, after work I had to take the 16 km drive back to my room. The thrill ride started then.
The 1st stretch through the tea garden would usually be in thick fog, where the lack of streetlights on the road meant, the only light was my headlamp, which wasn’t much use in the thick dense fog, limiting my vision sometimes to a few feet in front of the bike. Sometimes it meant literally walking, while astride the bike, so that I went slower than my bike would permit me. If I tried any thing faster on the bike, I would either drop off into a sheer fall on one side or go smashing into the tea shrubs at the corners. Either way, wouldn’t have done me much good. Each time there was fog on the road, my heart would go into overdrive, blood rushing into my head, as I peered into the fog to make out if it was in fact a wild elephant standing just ahead out of reach of the bikes light. Then as I got closer, it would turn out to be just a rock or the result of an overactive imagination. If there was a slight breeze and the thick fog was flowing towards you, then it was easy to imagine hidden shapes materialising just out of your eyesight, but waiting for you to reach them.
The cardamom plantation stretch was a living nightmare for me. It was only 4 Kms, but it felt like 40. I would enter it expecting my nemesis the hidden elephant to jump on me any time “Surprise”. All the wild elephant stories I had heard would be going through my head. “Lone Elephants are dangerous. They would attack you for no reason”. “Mother elephants are dangerous because they guard their calves” “If its been raining and is cold, its dangerous to drive through the cardamom plantation. The elephants would be standing on the road which would still be warm from the days sun”. “Its dangerous to be crossing the elephant corridors, because you might cross when there is a gap among a herd crossing the road, and they may not like a human standing between them and the rest of the herd”. “Beware of mad elephants which will attack for no reason”. “You are not safe in the Tea gardens either, because elephants come there too.” In short the general idea conveyed to my city bred mind was to stay as far as possible from them, if you could help it. The straight stretches of the road where the plantation ended, would mean the bike would be literally flying along, to get out as soon as possible, but the hairpin bends inside the plantation meant I had to be very careful and slow going down, wondering if there was any loners waiting to meet me as I turned down the bend towards them. I always used to wonder, what would I do, if there really was one, when I turned my bike down the hair pin bend. I wouldn’t be able to turn the bike fast enough, on the steep upward slope of the hairpin bend, to escape. The only choice would have been to get off the bike and run into the plantation itself, hoping to out run it. But then there was no guarantee I wouldn’t bump into it again in the dark plantation, or one of its other kin.
Thinking of all this elephant lore and the terrifying stories of people, who told me of narrow escapes which they had when elephants attacked, the ghosts in my head had a merry time, when I entered the cardamom forest. My heart would be having a peak cardiac workout. I would be licking my lips to wet my dry mouth, and my eyes would be dry because, I wouldn’t close my eyes for fear of missing to see an elephant. Each tree, each clump of tall bushes would mean my heart did a tap dance. If the bikes engine faltered, because I didn’t shift up to tackle a climb, I would have a minor heartattack. Every night, when slowly negotiating a bend and coming down, I see the plants crushed on both sides of the road with me in the middle, fresh elephant dung on the road, and the wind blowing from the plantation brings the strong smell of elephants. My heart stops beating,the blood rushes into my head, my mind freezes, I peer anxiously into the shadows out of my bikes light area, and pray. These are moments when you understand what they mean by animal instincts and survival instincts.
Luckily or otherwise, during the one year I travelled through this stretch, the elephants did not fix an appointment with me, though there were many times, jeep drivers and people who took the same route, before me or after me, asking me afterwards, “Didn’t you see the 2 Tuskers today. They created hell on the road, smashed a small grocery store and then went into the tea gardens where the workers had to chase them away. You must have narrowly missed them.It was a memorable sight” or “Do you know, yesterday night around 10.30,2 labourers who were repairing the road were attacked. After work they had had a couple of drinks and walked into the forest to take a leak and they bumped into an elephant in the dark. The elephant picked one of them and threw him. He landed on a tree and escaped with some broken bones. The other guy was squashed like a bug. Ooh! you should have seen the sight”
I used to thank my guardian angels for missing the memorable sight. After I broke my arm in the Jeep accident, I couldn't drive the bike for some time and had to shift to a house in Munnar town, and the night drives through the plantations stopped.
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