[caption id="attachment_152" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Nesting Grounds Amphitheatre"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_154" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption=""Light, Action, Camera""][/caption]

Some time ago, we had a spell when there were lots of kids visiting, and we f...

Frisky is a jolly good fellow, All of us do state; But Frisky's gone to Piyush's now, And left us all to our fate.

Three years ago, three pups were born, Magically, so to speak. Gobla, Rusty, Frisky--Thekambattans all; Growing rambunctious week by week.

Gobla left us, the others stayed: Mother...

Boy wants to marry classmate-girl. Boy's father forbids it because girl's family is not so well-off. Pays off the girl's father to get her married elsewhere. Sends boy off to do a Teacher-training course far from home.

One day, boy calls father to say he has a stomach complaint, and will the fathe...

EB (Electricity Board lineman) Vellian came by one morning, a couple of weeks ago, to say he "thought of me". There had been a terrific hailstorm the previous evening; and I had been very surprised to find that the electrcity supply had been restored pretty soon after the rain stopped.

Vellian inf...

Early in the morning, while the milk was on the boil, Chandran and Selvam from Valagapattu came by, to exhort me to vote: "Your voting slips are with us, you are in our ward, come by 8 o'clock before the rush".

I said that I knew that I was in their ward; and that I would definitely come to vote....

A couple of days ago, I was sitting in the Back Verandah, sipping tea, when I spotted the male Paradise Flycatcher (Terpsiphone paradisi) near the upper tank. I was able to watch it through binoculars and was treated to a spectacular display of flying, diving, swooshing... Alas, when I tried to...

[caption id="attachment_105" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Frisky by Varun"][/caption]

Yesterday, early in the morning, Ananda and Rajkumar came up to say that Frisky had attacked a sheep and skinned it. Badri, Varun and I went down to see: Kumar, Parman and their families were there n...

After a week of really intense heat, we had some welcome showers a couple of days ago, which reduced the temperatures drastically. The colours outside are really dramatic. The boys immediately got down to work with the soft mud So now we have a rhino in front of the house

Murugesan and Chinnamma's son Ponnusamy hanged himself last Sunday sfternoon. I went down to Valagapattu, later, to meet the bereaved parents. and found the whole village in a state of bewilderment. Ponnusamy was 12 years old. And why did he commit suicide? Because, that morning, his father had sold...

Meeta came from Dilli last week

We met after ten years or so.

She brought us all clothes from Kaladera

Vegetable-dyed, don't you know?

Sunny was nursing a migraine at home

But was here, in the spirit, so to speak.

Just one phone call from him, and

Our ears were ringing for a week....

One evening, about 3 weeks ago, Sonati spotted what she thought was a baby python behind the house. She squealed, and Frisky came running to see what was up. The snake made a dramatic "leap in the air" and then coiled itself up, and started "hissing like a pressure cooker". The rest of us came to th...

[caption id="attachment_46" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="A basket of Mesta fruit"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_47" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="Varun shelling mesta fruit"][/caption]

When (Sonati's) Ma visited us in October she had taught us to make jam from the M...

Gautam Doshi, a friend of ours who works at Intel visited us last month for a few days. He wanted to "immersively" find technical solutions to rural problems; to see what solutions Intel may have to offer here...

It was good to have him over, to sample a different world-view (both parties). He bro...

In these days when the only thing that seems compatible from one day to the next is the USB (Hats off to all those who made it happen), it was amazing to find that a clamp made almost a century ago works with our new digital camera bought earlier this year!

Badri Baba took the picture, and (no p...

Badri Baba's birthday flagged off the visitor season here. Ata and Abu were here to celebrate. Here finally is his Birthday "pome":

Badri is a little lad Version 8.9 today, Badri is a young man now I guess we ought to say

Nine years ago, two candles sufficed And suffice they will this year: He...

The last couple of months has seen us deluged by visitors (hence our disappearance from cyber space:-). One couple, uninvited but very welcome was the Paradise Flycatcher. On a couple of occasions we thought we had seen the male but were not sure. One day, last week, we heard a lot of bird alarm c...

Never a dull moment!

A couple of evenings ago, Sonati and I were out gardening, when Sonati heard some noise in the bushes. She thought it was Frisky and looked up to find an enormous pig snuffling around.

My immediate thought was for the newly planted bananas; so I shooed it vigorously...

Watching the boys over the last few days, we were struck by the fact that much of their learning is "top-down" or "radial", and hardly ever "bottom-up"

For a long while now, they have been involved with Space, the Universe, Planetary Probes and so on.

All of us go out every night post...

Arunachalam, Chinnathambi and Thenan were working with mud, one day last week: we are in the (slow) process of converting our cowshed into a room. The first step in this was levelling the floor and knocking down and rebuilding a crooked wall.

While the clay was available, Arunachalam kneading it...

I heard the sound of wood being cut (to which I am sensitised), and went to the Hippo Rock to find two boys from Gundiyapattu, cutting some "villeri", as bold as brass.

I started shouting at them -thieves... how can you just come into our land?... what if someone came into your land?...-, a...