The shoe repair man

At the bus stop near home, there sits a man who repairs shoes. He has appeared there since the last 1 - 2 months or so. Initially when he started sitting there, I wondered whether he would ever find any customers. But I soon realized my folly and why he was in the right place at the right time. He had very prudently picked his place. It was bang next to a busy bus stop which saw heavy footfall at all times of the day. It was close to a couple of schools and colleges. With that many feet in the vicinity, surely somebody is bound to walk around with footwear which needs mending, broken straps which need a stitch or two, worn out soles which need replacement. Proving his business acumen true, he is quite a busy man these days. Whenever I pass by, I see him stitching or sewing or applying glue, with a customer or two waiting patiently nearby. Even one of my shoes came undone at the sole one of these days and I found myself limping past him in my half-split-open-at-the-toe shoe trying not to catch his eye. Nowadays, it would seem like what our area was doing without a shoe repairer all these days.He has merged unobtrusively into the landscape.

He is a dark and wiry man,always wearing a white shirt darkened with time and dirt. He has a small cloth bundle next to him, which I always imagine contains his life's possessions. I have even contemplated where he was before he came to our area, whether he is remaining thin because of retro infection (stereotyping on my part; it could be a plain and simple case of  no-money-to buy-anything-to-eat), how much he earns per day and so on.

Today as I passed by him, I found my self remembering what someone told me some time back. When asked why we Indians cannot manufacture good quality shoes which wont get damaged within a month or 2 of use, one Indian retorted, "Then what would all the poor cobblers who make a living out of repairing our damaged shoes do for their livelihood?" So true, I found myself thinking today.

PS: I wanted to take a pic of him and all his tools which he spreads out on a cloth in front of him. But I was not very confident of my clandestine photo snapping skills and abandoned the idea. On an ideological level, is it proper to make 'poverty porn' out of someone's struggle to eke out a decent living?

This is how we help our poor countrymen to earn a living!

In this Pic, I'm trying to show my only 6 month-old shoe which came off at the sole. [I'm also trying to show off my mint green nail polish ;) ]

The seedy Delhi (under)belly

It has turned out to be the incident that shook Delhi most since the Anna Hazare fast. Day after day, crowds are turning out relentlessly to protest the brutal rape and assault which happened inside a Delhi private bus. So much so that even my usually 'oblivious to any thing not trending in FB' BIL also voiced his concern on the heinous incident. What I want to write about it is not clear, all I know is, I should not fail to write about it. It is almost passe and mundane to write about how tough it is for women to walk on the streets or use public transport. It is so common that it does not even count as a mentionable expereince. May be what caused the outpouring of outrage over this particular was that probably it was gruesome even by Delhi standards. Rape is an everyday matter in Delhi and even as I write now, 2 cases of rape of a 3 yr child and a 40 yr woman is trending on news channels.

After the news about 'Amanat's' rape broke, for days together, R and I would talk about it with disbelief. We would discuss how those men could do this so cold bloodedly? We talked about how these thugs should be made to suffer for the rest of their lives so that every living moment, they would regret what they did. Even if you are drunk, how can you inflict so much damage so as to rupture the intestines? If they were these base animals when drunk, they could not have been any less filthy vermin when sober. The very thought of her physical condition was painful to me and I avoided thinking of the trauma she would have gone through.Over days, as she struggled on the ventilator, I wondered why she should remain after all this, for society would never allow her wounds to heal, atleast not mentally.  It was heartening to hear that she was a fighter and remaining alive and weaned from ventilator. But now septicemia is setting in and it will take all the prayers and miracles to keep her alive.

What use is tougher laws, dress codes death punishment for rape, removing tinted windows from buses and other token measures when attitudes wont change? Today this happened in Delhi. But this could happen anywhere in India. A mob assaulted a girl in Guwahati and few months later, the same has happened to a Manipuri theatre artist in Bangalore too. India is no country for women.

The search for Inspiration

There was a phase a few weeks back during which I was going crazy about nail polishes! Yes, and that's the same me who did not own a single nail polish for close to three years. Gasp. This time I decided to go online to purchase since the stores often did not stock up on the shades I liked. I decided to do some research before I actually decided to take the plunge and order them online. After all, I have to know if the red nail enamel I am going to spent my money on is actually going to scare me off when I see it the first thing in the morning.

Thus it was quite accidentally that I stumbled onto the huge online community of Indian beauty bloggers and sites like makeupandbeauty.com, peachesandlblush.com, where people have actually posted pics of makeup products which they have used on themselves. It amazes me that there are these blokes who would actually spent time & money buying these products, trying them on, take pics and post them for the benefit of others. It was quite a big help to me to see how the colours would come out, whether they actually resemble the shades as claimed online. After substantial research I went ahead and bought 3 shades (*gasp*), orange (remember, I was crazy), bright red and a beautiful pink. The same day I received the shipment, I tried on the orange enamel. Needless to say, it was as crazy and eye popping as I imagined, but I have loved every moment of having it on. It somehow reminds me of summer, sun, sun light, all things warm and cozy.
This is the pic I clicked of it.

Orange orange...

 For anybody who cares, this shade is called Laranja citrico, from Maybelline colorama series. I was quite satisfied with the result as it closely resembled the pics from real life users which I had seen in other sites I mentioned here.

Yes, now coming to the title, I was going through one of the sites mentioned above and found that it is owned by a lady who also works in an office and has makeup blogging as her passion and hobby. (It is another matter that she appears to have deep pockets too). I was quite smitten by the fact that she could identify what was her passion in life and follow it diligently so early on, in her early 20s. This set me thinking what would I take up as a passion if I were in her shoes, what I would follow as a serious hobby despite all the demands on my time? Hard to tell as of now. Well, its never too late in life to recognize what could be your passion and inspiration. I take solace from the fact that Capt. KrishnaMenon was 65 years old when he started the Leela Palace chain of hotels! So I'll wait and be on the lookout :)

Shame, Shame Ireland

In India, women deliver at home, they deliver in the autos while on the way to hospital, in ambulances. Sometimes they deliver babies even on the doorsteps of hospitals because the hospital sentry did not allwo them to enter the hospital. We have a maternal mortality of around 250/ lakh which comes to a staggering number of 250,000 maternal deaths (well, I might have missed a couple of zeroes). So if Savita Halappanavar had died in India, she would have been only a blip on the map of maternal mortality in India. but unfortunately, she died in Ireland, where the MMR is 6/ lakh! And it is a country with a mere population of a mere 4.5 milliion. Are you kidding me?, Bangalore has 10 million people, and India has 1000 million.

A mother and newborn in a district hospital in Karnataka.

It is a tragedy of enormous proportions when a mother dies in a developed country like Ireland because of lack of medical care. And that too because of trivial religious excuses. "This is a Catholic country", is what her husband was told by the doctors who refused to terminate her pregnancy. I would consider this as a case of medical negligence. Any doctor is bound by the Hippocrates oath and the Geneva convention which urges you to save the life of the patient irrespective of religious or racial/ethnic concerns. If a doctor waited to terminate a pregnancy and endangered the life of the mother because of it, he/she is guilty of failing to provide the expected standard of care. They cannot hide behind the excuse of the country's laws and rules. After all, what law is there which outlaws saving the life of a person?

Will this happen in India? Yes, why not? Here patients lose eyesight after cataract surgeries in camps, women are sterilized by scamsters and ward boys give injections. Anything can happen in India. But no hospital waits for the foetal heartbeat to stop before deciding to terminate the pregnancy. It is plainly an outrage. As Savita's mother lamented "You sacrificed the life of my 30 year old daughter to save a 17 week old foetus".

Now the Irish government is on record offering all help for Savita's husband to rebuild his life. What are they gonna do? Provide him with women to date so that he can select a suitable wife? How does a government help to rebuild the vaccuum left by the loss of a spouse? A responsible government should have never let that happen in the first place. And to this moment, the Irish politicians are evasive and dilly-dallying about legislating to make abortions legal. How many more lives have to be lost for them to wake up and act? Shame on you Ireland.

What's (not) in my bag?

It is a common joke to contemplate what you may find in a lady's bag. They say you can find almost an entire house inside the hand bag! Initially it used to be funny for me before I decided to throw away my old bag and empty the contents so that I could transfer them to a new one I just recently brought. I had a mini-shock to see the things which spilt out of my handbag, stuff I din't know I owned, other stuff which I had taken for granted as lost. .

I found lumps of bus ticket stubs from journeys of yore. Bills from restaurants I ate few months ago. ATM receipts from god knows when. Old toffees which had flattened out with age and pressure of things lying above them A white hairband which I had never used and had turned brown with time.

Buttons from tops which I have forgotten how they looked like, broken off ends of zippers. A packet of face wipes (provided thoughtfully by R) which I always ended up using as hand tissues.

2 wallets (why? why? I keep asking myself), 2 mobile phones (geez). A plastic cover (I really don't know why I kept it there). A comb, an umbrella (ok i get it, when you are from Kerala, you are under a perpetual rain cloud in side your head). A notepad. 2 pens of which I can never find more than one at a time. A pouch with pencils, eraser, sharpener, scale. A set of head phones (what if I have a sudden urge to listen FM radio), well its another matter that they are always out of my bag when I really need them. A lip gloss, a spare sanitary napkin  (for the ever unpredictable female physiology, which has come in handy for a couple of my girlfriends). A bunch of keys from houses and rooms and almiras I moved out months ago.

Given the clutter, I find it difficult to retrieve any given item at any given point of time. Visual inspection is useless and I often resort to stereognosis (thank god for that sensation!) to retrieve any thing. 
 Why cant I de-clutter ?, I often ask myself. But what if I go out and my hair clip gives way, then I need that old white hairband, so goes the line of thought.
 I sometimes envy women who can walk out of their houses with their hands free, like my mom, she as a matter-of-fact, hates handbags.The biggest drawback has been that if I want to go out with another handbag, it takes me 10 minutes to transfer the contents, after all, everything is essential! The solution I came up with - have a bag-within-a-bag, so that all you have to transfer is the smaller bag!!
Oh how so sweetly neurotic.

A Coorg Get away - Stewart Valley homestay

It was on a whim that I decided to stay in Stewart Valley home stay in Madikeri. The inner critic gnawed my thoughts day in and day out questioning whether it was right to risk taking my parents to a place which has not been listed in trip advisor or reviewed anywhere. “What the heck? Let’s go and see” I thought. All I knew when we drove into Madikeri was that it is a red painted house in which Mr.Ganapathy and his wife lived. The house is an old but tastefully re-furbished and well maintained ancestral house. He gave us directions to reach the house (past the TV tower) and was waiting outside the house to make sure we dint get lost (which of-course, we did). But even if he wasn’t waiting, I think we would have identified the house, after all who would miss a huge red-painted house bang on the road? 

The courtyard and garden

Gerberas in the garden

The moment we drove past the gate and stepped out of the car, somehow I felt very relieved. May be it was the sight of the smiling Mr. Ganapathy and his wife Veena, or maybe it was the sight of a beautiful portico and a beautiful garden with flowers, or it was the cool breeze brushing our  sweaty, grimy faces. Whatever the reason was, it was a really cozy, homely feeling that swept over me and I felt relieved that I had chosen rightly. The house is sort of in the middle of the town, just a 5-10 min walk downhill (yes, it’s kind of the highest point in Madikeri town) and you will be walking past Raja’s seat, Gen. Thimmiah circle, the markets, the bus stand, good hotels and everything else. Despite being so close to the town, you are never perturbed by the hustle and bustle, being far removed from the noise and dust of the city. You can simply laze around in the veranda surrounded by the garden and enjoying the view of the hillside, or you can sit in their back yard and do nothing and snooze. We stayed in 2 rooms on either side of the house. This was kind of good; being in a house and at the same, not unncessarily bumping into other people. The bathrooms were extremely neat and clean and modern (yes, we are fussy bathroom people), they had also provided soap etc.etc. The rooms aren’t that big as you would expect in a hotel, but then who would want to remain cooped up indoors in Coorg, when there is so much to see outside?

A what's- its-name climber in the garden with beautiful pink flowers

They give complimentary breakfast and we had kadubu, sambar and a delicious coconut chutney to go with it. R also had some bread and honey. It was a welcome break after all the hotel food we were eating from outside. Veena aunty was always ready with coffee or tea whenever we requested.

Kadubu with sambar

My father had interesting long chats with Mr.Ganapathy. My mother was happily doing rounds of their beautiful garden with vibrant flowers. R even managed to try his hand at Mr.Ganapathy's airgun. He gladly regaled us with vignettes of Kodava culture. He was more than ready to tell us how to drive to Abbi falls, Talacauvery and other places, where to buy wines from and so on. We also had a tryst with Blacky, the family dog who was in a playful mood and had to be dragged back into his cage. We had to leave at 5.30 in the morning and Aunty graciously offered to make breakfast that early also but we declined. I can confidently say that one of the highlights of our trip was our stay in Stewart Valley.

[ PS: the credit for the pic below goes to R, he hinted he would kick my a*# if I dint mention him in the credits ;-) ]

A night view of Madikeri from Stewart valley

A Coorg Getaway- the Tibetan settlement in Bylakuppe, Kushalnagar

We decided to put the series of holidays in this week to maximum use and head to Coorg or Kodagu. The taxi driver pulled out at the last moment and we gingerly took up the gauntlet to drive the odd 270 kilometres all the way to Coorg. It was a decision which sparked much concern and confusion from R and me; ours is a 10+ year old car, nowhere near top condition, never taken for such long rides, lots of dents, bumps and scratches, and to top it all, no A/C!.  On the pros side, we both could drive in turns and the car was our trusted foot soldier since our courtship days and it would be our first road trip. Thus at night 10'o clock, we finally decided to take the plunge and place our trust in our rickety car to take us all the way to Coorg. At night 10.30, we were frantically looking at Google Maps, Google Earth and all other possible resources to identify the route; yes, we dint know the 'how to' part of the getaway. I searched and searched for a good free GPS app and finally gave up.

We set out before the crack of dawn at 5.00. The road was smooth and devoid of any traffic. Till Srirangapatna we had absolutely no confusion, it was a straight road. After that at major junctions, we asked the locals for help whenever in doubt. I learnt that the best GPS is to ask around! Never once did we lose our way till we reached Madikeri. We reached the Tibetan settlement  in Bylakuppe at around 10.30. Bylakuppe comes 4 kms before Kushalnagar. It is home to the second largest Tibetan settlement in India.

Bylakuppe, of the Tibetan settlement

 We headed straightaway to the Golden temple and the Namdroling monastery. It is a 4 Km drive  from the main road.The place was swarming with visitors. The Golden temple is an imposing structure, visible from a long way off. The monastery has monks of all ages staying and studying there. Inside the temple, there are 60 feet tall idols of 3 Buddhist gurus. The walls are decorated with murals depicting the life of various gurus. The paintings are intricately done beautifully in vibrant colours.

The first look

The 60 feet tall idols of 3 Buddhist gurus

Young monks in prayer

The intricate doors with murals of guardians on either side

The interplay of light and colours

A female deity

There were two things about the paintings which struck me. One was the depiction of female deities in the paintings. The second thing was depictions of evil spirits/ deities in some of the murals. Both these are owing to my ignorance of Buddhism, but from a layman's point of view, I was quite struck by it as I was unaware of  any female Buddhist goddesses. Also I also associated Buddhism with peacefulness
and hence was surprised to find depictions of menacing figures on the walls.

A mural of one with a fierce countenance

Purple through and through

We did see this interesting plant on the monastery grounds. It had purple leaves in addition to purple flowers.












Within the monastery compound there is a shop selling curios, Tibetan fans, trinkets, hangings etc. It is managed by 2 monks.

Trinkets, I wanted to buy every one of them!

Good luck charms

The Tibetan houses within the settlement prominently display multicoloured Buddhist prayer flags. I thought they were simply plain flags but a closer look showed they had prayers written on them.

Prayer flags fluttering in the breeze

Prayer flags in close-up

 The Tibetan cause invariably finds resonance in the minds of the settled people, as is evident from this girl sporting a t-shirt with 'Save Tibet' logo.

Championing their cause

You can spend hours together inside the various temples which are less crowded by tourists. The grounds of the monastery are vast and fit for a peaceful stroll.

Another look at the temple

The Final word: It is a must see for any tourist to Coorg.