Sanctuary Of Random Keystrokes

Yet another visit to Coorg. A detailed travelogue will have to wait but this picture deserved a post of its own:

Living without a TV and a newspaper has many merits. For instance, last year’s IPL was a non-event in our house. Yes, we did visit a Barista at Indira Nagar (now long closed) for catching the IPL opening ceremony on the telly, but that was it. Bangalore’s loss in the opener didn’t help either and I ended up backing up the team I felt least connected to – Rajasthan Royals (though only after they were decidedly close to winning – everybody loves a winner).

This year is different though. I’ve warmed up to the tournament, mostly because cricket is a large part of what I do now but partly because I seem to have arrived at a complex set of “loyalty” equations that help me chose which team I put my money on during a match. Without going into too many details, this is how it works:

Bangalore Royal Challengers (I live in Bangalore! And I admire Kumble and Dravid. And Kevin Pietersen is no longer in the team.) >
Chennai Super Kings (I admire Dhoni. Muralitharan and I share birth dates) >
Deccan Chargers (I am partial to everything south of Vindhyas) >
Rajasthan Royals (Love the fact that Warne gives a lot of chances to inexperienced youngsters) >
Delhi Daredevils (ah well, I was born in Delhi and that ought to count for *something*) >
Mumbai Indians (Mostly because they’ve got Tendulkar and Jayasuriya) >
Punjab Kings XI (someone’s gotta give company to Kolkata) = Kolkata Knight Riders (well someone’s got to be last).

The equations are devoid of even traces of cricketing knowledge (oh come on, it is 20-20) and chances are that the points table at the end of the tournament (with the exception of Kolkata) looks totally the opposite.

When we went to Coorg two weeks ago, we already knew that it was not going to be siginficantally cooler than Bangalore. And indeed, save for an occasionally misty early morning, it was every bit as warm and sunny as Bangalore gets in March. A few distant clouds were seen rolling over the hills, but they were unorganized mutinous soldiers and not the disciplined brigade it takes to start a downpour. Yet, they did manage to tinge the sunset with a bit of color and drama that the clear blue sky of all day long could hardly have managed alone.

But what this visit stands out in our minds for is coffee blossoms. Given how unpredictable the rains have been in Coorg, a lot of coffee estate owners have taken to irrigating their plantations themselves. Since everyone follows their own schedule, there is no one day you on which you’ll see all the estates blossom. Apparently this year, it had rained just a week before our arrival and practically every single coffee plant was bedecked with beautiful white blossoms. It was our noses that pointed this out first to us – the breeze in Coorg was fragrant with the scent of coffee flowers. Our eyes took notice of the unending sea of white much later.

Now if you are thinking ‘coffee smell’ here (you know the sort you get when you brew filter coffee, or step into a Café Coffee Day/Barista/Starbucks outlet), you are mistaken! Coffee flowers don’t smell even remotely like coffee. In fact, if you were classifying the coffee plant based on the smell of its flowers alone, you’ll place it somewhere next to Jasmine. This I think makes discovery of coffee an even more remarkable feat!

Unfortunately, the blossom is short-lived. Within a day, the flowers begin to wilt and turn brown. As we drove back to Bangalore, it was hard not to feel sad at their decay. But we had the smug satisfaction of knowing that hundreds of tourists who’d throng Coorg a week later (a long weekend) would have no idea what they had missed.

Taken at one of the numerous parks in London on a particularly hot summer day. For me, travel and photography are inseparable. I haven’t been doing a lot of the former, and so the latter has suffered. This is the nature of things that have been keeping me busy for the past few weeks.