Krazy Kochi

The Eco-Soldier: K.S. Sanoj with the mangrove saplings Armed with nothing besides his green thumb 14-year-old K.S. Sanoj, an eco-soldier, wages a battle to save the mangroves in little known Cherukunnu, in Kannur, north Kerala. You can see him early morning or at even time, when the tide is low, tending to mangrove saplings that he has planted. When school is done, this ninth-class student is there on the banks of the Muttil river, that runs past his village, doing what he loves most. Sanoj has planted over 1000 mangrove seeds in the past three years.    (Forty years ago Kerala had 700 square kilomteres of mangrove forests but now it has depleted to a woeful 17 square kms.) Yes, Sanoj has quite a task cut out for him but undaunted by the enormity of it he quietly marches on. A couple of months ago he was honoured with the 14 th    P.V. Thampy Memorial Endowment Award.    However, his delight is still centered on what in the local  patois is...

And she gave the king a hundred and twenty talents of gold, and of spices very great store, and precious stones: there came no more such abundance of spices as these which the queen of Sheeba gave to king Solomon.  (Bible: 1 Kings 10:10) For the king had at sea a navy of Tharshish with the navy of Hiram: once in three years came the navy of Tharshish, bringing gold, and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks.  (1 Kings 10:22) A  frisson runs down your spine as you read the first of the verses. The awe the author reserves for spices in these regnal chronicles reveals that it occupied the same elevated position as gold and precious stones in 10th century BC, if not higher. The second verse gets more exciting as it proceeds to establish the trade links between Solomon’s kingdom (the Euphrates river in the north to Egypt in the south) and the ancient port of Muziris on the Malabar coast. Though the English verse is not exact about the location, etymological eviden...

On Sundays, Gandhi Bazaar in Perumbavoor, a small town in Kerala, is thick with crowd upon crowd of migrant workers from India's east. It’s a kind of meeting place for migrants employed in different parts of Kerala and they congregate here with a week’s wages bulging in their pockets. The small make-shift stalls of the bazaar spill out on to the road as the people throng to buy clothes, Bengali beedis and other stuff from way back home or simply hang out. An Oriyan bhajan in a CD shop competes with Assamese singer Akashdeep in another store, creating the exciting cacophony of a fair. Tucked away in a corner, Rihaj from Orissa runs a tailoring shop offering special designs while City Hotel serves hot bhai biriyani, samosas and Bengali sweets. As for the postal name Gandhi Bazaar–it has slowly withered away in references and has been replaced by Bhai bazaar or Bengali bazaar. 22-year-old Ajis Khan, a mechanic from Assam turns entrepreneur on Sundays. He does a brisk business b...

Book Review: Spring Flowers, Spring Frost I began this review at the start of the Arab Spring-that is near a year now- and yet it remains in a state of incompletion. I now think it is fitting that it remains so. Like the times… we have no clue how things will turn out. And the moment-it is neither here nor there: a transitional phase that is quite out of character with the normal times. This moment cannot be defined by the behavioral traits of a given period and we epileptically grapple for a definition and fail-we don’t know how to quite put it. Albanian author Ismail Kadare is not so confused. He’s been there and he calls it a hermaphroditic moment, or to use the old language of the Albanian people: a bitch and a dog . Kadare’s novel, Spring Flowers , Spring Frost (Random House 2002), attempts to capture this peculiar time when his country, Albania, is in the throes of transition from a manacled communist state to a new-found freedom that turns into a Frankenstein monster wi...

The novel begins by addressing The Lady Reader and it suggests, that as she begins reading the text of Zero Degree , she maybe upto anything—working, having sex, fantasising, chanting, screaming with labour pain etc… As Charu Nivedita spews his critique, or a disguised critique of magic realism that is undergoing an existential crisis—it gets a wee bit complicated here—one witnesses the throes of one literary genre getting transformed into another. Whatever Charu Nivedita likes to call this form of writing it is far from boring. It is a laugh riot and you are sucked into the novel not knowing how to tackle it. I am warning you that there is no easy method to read this, you will get lost in the sea of ideas and words and there is no looking back. Don’t bother to go back to unravel things—I suggest you just flow with the words. Then it gets more complicated—the existential crisis of the author gets intertwined with the existential crisis of the genre and that gets intertwined with the ex...

The Great Spoiler: It is great to be the first for a buffet. To run the spoon through the artfully designed dishes. It's hot: the chutney and preserve section Really that is not kichadi but pachadi: The bittergourd pachadi is an interesting idea If there is one dish that I like at The International Hotel it is their Seafood Au Gratin. That afternoon I had that yearning for the cheesy gooey melt with its small bits of seafood- squid and all. The rings of squid or sear cube nudge against the softness of your inner cheek and urge you to sink your teeth into them while the cheese spreads slowly over your tongue. The texture is amazing against your palate. It was one of those moments when I just had to have the au gratin with warm buttered rolls. And believe me I am not even pregnant to have that sudden onslaught of yearnings. But I guess it was one of those moments. But what greeted me at the Coq D’Or restaurant was a spread of the buffet. We were the first to arri...

yy (The Image above courtesy Moonward) The relationship between the text and the visual is perhaps most intimate in a graphic novel. Each complements the other to hold the novel together. But, there are often times when the page or the frame is devoid of text. However, the narrative remains uninterrupted. The reader then has the liberty to assume control of the space and interpret the visual to give it a language that is exclusively his own. Undoubtedly, all this is complex and gripping. Yes, these are exciting times for both the graphic novelists and the reader in India. Hardly five years in the Indian market, the graphic novel is on the threshold of a new phase. It is alluring more and more writers to the craft and interesting experiments in the structure of the novel are underway. The genre has grown by leaps and bounds and more than half a dozen graphic novels (by Indians) are expected to hit the stores in 2010. What is it all about? The term ‘graphic novel’ conjures up images of a...