THE ART OF MEHNDI

MONSOON GONE MISSING ?

The CNN weather report showed that the Monsoon rains are drowning China and causing chaos in Mumbai and the east of India but here in Gujarat, not a drop.  Everyone is waiting for the deluge with baited breath, the sky is a uniform grey, but not a drop of rain.  Perhaps it's the cyclonic conditions over the Bay of Bengal, some say.  It might be sucking the rain away from western India.  We consider this anxiously.  Funny how the rains are looked for so longingly and yet when they come, they bring mayhem, as roads fall apart, dams of water build up because there is no drainage and flooding occurs.  Traffic grinds to a standstill.  Livestock, cows and donkeys come flooding into town to avoid the soggy fields and clouds of mosquitoes emerge.  But despite everything, we search the skies every day for a sign of rain, after all, it's been a year of blue sky and unimaginable heat !

HOW MANY MANGOES MAKE A SUMMER?

Mango mania - they are displayed in neatly packed rows, for sale on every street corner...but in this hullabaloo, the very old man, who sells only bananas, lies quietly on his wooden trolley, on the side of the road,  one leg crooked against the other, like a deckchair, reading his book of prayers, unconcerned about the passing traffic, head resting on his hand.  When I stop to buy a hand of bananas, he hardly raises himself, as he fumbles for the lead weights and lifts the bananas onto the old metal scale and holds it up to weigh the fruit..... then stretches for the curved knife, its blade blackened with age, to slice a banana off, to get the weight exact.  Perhaps one day I should surprise him and buy every banana on his trolley and send him home early ?

SUMMER

He selected one long, thick, piece of sugar cane, about 5' in length and then set the mangle whirring while he pushed the stick of cane through, with the expertise of long practice.  The pale green juice came pouring out through a muslin and into a waiting pot.  I watched fascinated as he bent the stick in half and put it through the process again. Still there was a steady stream of juice....choosing a fresh piece of cut lime from a bowl, he tucked a couple of quarters into the flattened sugar cane stick with a little piece of fresh ginger and put it through the mangle a third time !  Satisfied that he had extracted all the juice, this was then poured into a beer mug, with a straw and handed to me.  It's kind of sweet and peppery and half the fun, is watching the technique for 5 minutes before you get to taste it - with no additives or colouring, this pale green brew is delicious at the end of a long, hot, day in Gujarat.  Since this is a 'dry State' with a prohibition against alcohol,  sitting on his old wooden bench on the side of the road, is the next best thing to a 'Bar Culture' !

BAMBOO

                           The many uses for bamboo....the love story of Krishna and Radha....

WIND, SAND AND RAIN

44 C - Sunday afternoon was hot and sultry as usual.  The electricity had been out since early in the morning and without  the overhead fans you could feel the constant prickle of sweat.  The wind arrived without warning - ferociously blowing up clouds of dust - palm fronds waved wildly, the mango trees bent in every direction - the sky was grey with sand, as the wind veered this way and that and seemed to smack everything, as if this was some huge climatic temper tantrum.  Everything was sent flying, as it  ripped through the beakers and cooking pots of  the pavement dwellers - shrieks,  as chaos reigned....

Following on its heels eventually came the rain.  The first drops were as hard as pellets, then grew in strength, as it established a pent-up rhythm - the first rain of the year !  Windows were quickly closed as curtains leapt out of control....but the coolness of the air was like balm.

And then it stopped, the long hot summer days had been interrupted and Nature had fulfilled her contract, this was a foretaste of what was to come - the Monsoons were on their way and in this cathartic moment,  the monkeys came out to play scampering here and there, chattering with excitement, as they chased each other, up and down and over - a large one contentedly eating a rain washed mango high up in a tree nearby and down below,  girls ran out giggling, to see how many windfalls they could retrieve. 

CROC POT

WE, RATHER THAN, I

He had been a Corporate Executive in the IT industry in India, handling business with top companies, around the world.  But now he had decided to give his time and expertise to managing a Centre for the local Tribal Communities, in the depths of Madhya Pradesh.  "The tribal people think in terms of 'we' not 'I'......and that is a profound difference between them and us"  he explained.  "They are not competitive and they don't seek to blame or exploit - they have a collective mind.  It's so refreshing, after the Corporate world and I never come away from one of these trips, without feeling renewed"!

The countryside we were driving through was as dry as a bone.  We had set off from Vadodara at 7 a.m. and it was a two and a half hour journey. We crossed wide river courses baked by the sun and bleached white, vast expanses of sand.  The Monsoon rains arrived in the South of India two days ago, so in another 2 weeks, this would be a changed scene, but this was hard to imagine.

The Tribal Community Centre, had been set up in this arid terrain, at a point where three of India's biggest and driest States meet - Rajasthan, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, at the base of a rocky hill, where there also happened to be ancient cave paintings - so the site must also have been attractive to people thousands of years ago

The main purpose of the Centre was to provide some basic training in health care, education, art and culture and to encourage the local tribal people to maintain their cultural traditions.  "There are 1600 languages in India", I was told "....and in Gujarat, alone, there are 45 different languages, each with its own oral tradition, stories and folk lore, some of it passed by word of mouth, all completely different.  We are trying to write it all down, so that it is not lost"..  

"If there are so many differences in the folklore of all these groups"   I asked..."do their stories have anything at all in common?"   After some thought, the Executive Director said with a smile....."yes, the triumph of good over evil" !

The Museum at the Centre housed contributions from various tribal groups, which they had brought from the villages and donated to the Centre.  There were wooden Deities, carved with crude power, which seemed to have a certain presence, clay pots, robust in shape, the change in angle marked with simple incised patterns, bamboo arrows, woven baskets.  No matter how simple the object, the proportions had an innate harmony.  These were decorated artifacts - art for art's sake, would not feature in their rural life, for they themselves were the embodiment of art, their simple lives so much a part of nature.