Krazy Kochi

Kollan Mango: A native Kerala Mango Many of the native Kerala mangoes like Kollan, Killichundan, Moovandan... are fast disappearing from the plate and from the backyard   To write on mangoes this summer is to bite the cliché and let the juice run over my laptop. However clichéd another piece on mangoes sounds, the fruit continues to seduce and compels you to write anyway. Every year, an old essay in my college textbook pops up in my mind and urges me to eat the fruit in the prescribed manner: it tells you to rub the fruit gently and then knock off the end and suck at it till the pulp runs down your gullet in a steady flow. More importantly, the brave should take the whole mango into their mouth, the essay recommends, and chew the meat and skin and then eject the stone out or some other blah. The only mango that I dare attempt to put whole in my mouth is perhaps the uppumanga (small mango in brine) or even smaller kannimanga (the eye-shaped, baby mangoes plucked when ...

Perumbavoor: The bustling town of Perumbavoor stands around 40 kilometres from Kochi, and is best known for its plywood industry. Besides the agrarian income, its economy largely depends on the 1500 units that process the abundantly available rubber wood, employing more than 2 lakh people. When you turn into the Iringole Canal Road at the busy Vattolipaddy junction, you are greeted by a scenic silence: typical of Kerala’s rural monsoon landscape: the crowns of the tall dark trees lace the rain-lulled sky, the frolicking green undergrowth and the gentle swirl of the waters in the narrow irrigation canal that run alongside the road. However, it all seems speciously calm as if to mask the horror that occurred here over a month ago. On either side, middle-class homes sit concreted in their modest successes. Families have been rooted here for decades and some even claim for centuries- as old as the Iravichira Siva temple itself. And the peaceful neighbourhood has never reported a...

Globe-trotting PM has not visited the region; no indication of any visit in 2015. Government’s openly pro-Israel policy has not gone down well. Why, Israel has become a partner state in Vibrant Gujarat. Lower oil prices mean migrants could lose jobs and be sent back to India Perception that no outreach to 7 million poor immigrants, who actually provide a large chunk of remittances, compared to the wooing of diaspora in US, Australia *** It’s that time of the year when NRIs descend upon India in hordes. This time around, there’s plenty to celebrate as Narendra Modi has pulled out all stops to welcome an overseas Indian community that had (by and large) supported his successful campaign to become PM. However, even as the rich diaspora is feted at the two galas in Ahmedabad, there is a sense of disquiet that the BJP government has been careless about the welfare of the poorer migrants toiling in West Asia. Though former diplomats and policy wonks cautiously say that it is sti...

A line from the classic Malayalam film Ee Naadu captures all too well the mood of Kerala in the 1980s “Everyone wants to go to Dubai! They think we are Sheiks there.” Though the Gulf Malayalee toils in the sweltering desert sun all the yearlong; for a brief while, on furlough he lives it up quite like a little Sheik. The period also saw the price of goods was not governed by market forces but by the whims of the Gulf Malayalee. The dizzying growth of the manmade paradises in the desert kingdoms has the ineluctable stain of sweat and gore of the Indian migrants. And back home, Kerala’s economy, landscape and cinema was shaped by the Gulf migration. The enchantment with the Middle East which began in the late 70s peaked in the 90s and journeyed down the decades. Malayalam cinema, too, took the migratory route capturing the images of struggling migrant life with all its complexities. Ee Naadu   (1982) Set in the political milieu of the 80s, Salim (Mammooty) works in the Gulf...

London-based artist Hew Locke was in for a bit of shocker when he reached the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014 site, Fort Kochi in Kerala. His installation,  Sea Power , was apparently crafted from his imagination of what the historical kingdom of Cochin would have been. Indeed, he had yoked his imagination to that of a 17th century German printmaker. The printmaker had in turn conceived the kingdom of Cochin based on the tales of another. “My work is imagination based on the imagination of an image that was perhaps real. It was double fiction and I thought the prints were elaborate romantic imagery...but I discovered when I arrived in Cochin that this double fiction has elements of reality. People still wear lungis and walk around bare-chested,” says an amazed Locke. Hew Locke’s beaded frieze of mythological and historical figures that gently sway in the wind is a response to the biennial theme, ‘Whorled Exploration’, and suggests blips in the seminal mov­ements of history. Whorled...

The Gulf’s lunar hold on Kerala has been long and defining but Kochi’s race to become a “second Dubai” is sending the Malayali, ever chary despite his wanderlust, into a tizzy. The gold souks were always there but the cityscape is suddenly all-new: the once-quaint little coastal city is chock-a-block with hypermalls, fancy cars and designer boutiques. Its main artery, the MG Road, is crammed with ever more jewellery shops—as if gold can be panned right out of the Arabian Sea. And the parallel highway is hemmed in, even visually, by gigantic car showrooms, five-star hotels, fancy hospitals and what have you. These two lifelines culminate in that ultimate orgy of retailism, the Lulu Mall, touted as the “biggest” and fanciest mall in India. As is the wont in Kerala, this obsessive consumerist behaviour has attracted its share of caustic comments from soc­­ial scientists who fear it’s causing a “cultural erosion” and “intellectual pov­erty”. One abiding symptom is the regularity with ...