Kindness

Most Indians are very kind. Like today I forgot my new phone at a tea house, and someone came calling after me to give it back to me.

Sometimes people will really go out of their way to be helpful. Once I arrived in a small town in a tribal area and hadn’t a clue how to get to a friend who lived somewhere in a nearby village. It was early morning and raining. So I sat down in a tea house and people started talking to me. Someone knew where my friend lived. He asked me to wait, went to borrow someone’s scooter, and took me there himself. It was about 20 minutes away. He wouldn’t accept any money either.

Libreoffice Endnotes

This book that I’m preparing for reprinting has two kinds of endnotes, one set goes at the end of each chapter and another is collected in an appendix. I’m not sure how to handle that second set in LibreOffice. There seem to be some third party extensions, but I don’t think this is their purpose. They are intended to help researchers in handling citations and bibliographies. They do seem interesting in themselves though. The one that I downloaded is called Zotero, and it is in the Debian repositories. I could imagine that this could be a powerful tool for writers and researchers.

But I’m still stuck with this problem of the endnotes. 🙁

Garbage

The tiny guest house (just three rooms I think) where I’m staying is set in a lovely location by a mountain brook, which seems to be unpolluted enough to allow fishing. The guest house itself is quite smart and tidy. There’s a nice hammock on the balcony outside my room and below the balcony there’s a big ugly pile of garbage, in fact a couple of piles, which aren’t exactly piles – it looks as if they just kind of empty the garbage over the side, and maybe eventually burn it, as they so often do in India, though I don’t see any signs of previous burning.

This reminds of one time when I was on one of those lovely Greek islands in the Cyclades, when I walked out of the charming little white village along the island roads, and sauntered into the island dumping ground.

But whether garbage, particularly plastic waste is seen or unseen, there isn’t a very successful way of handling it. Lately we’ve all been waking up to the fact that most of our plastics are actually non-recycleable*. They are either shipped off to remote parts of Africa or South East Asia, or they become part of landfills. In some parts of India they are beginning to restrict the availability of one time use plastics. Mumbai has banned them completely. But as a traveler it’s a bit hard to avoid buying items like plastic bottles. I have a Lifestraw water bottle, but I’m still a bit afraid of the tap water here. I’ve begun to favor unpackaged food items, like cakes from a bakery instead of items that come nicely packaged.

*”Where does your plastic go? Global investigation reveals America’s dirty secret” (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/17/recycled-plastic-america-global-crisis)

Destroyed libraries

For a depressing read, Wikipedia has an article on the great destroyed libraries of the world, from 206 BCE to 2015 CE. There seems to be no indication that libraries are any more immune to destruction in modern times, and it isn’t just Nazis or religious fanatics doing the burning. The British burned down the Library of Congress in 1812 and towards the end of the 19th century burned down the royal library in Burma. Leftists and anarchists burned many libraries in Spain in 1931. In Canada, in 2013 "scientific records and research created at a taxpayer cost of tens of millions of dollars was dumped, burned, and given away," under the government of Stephen Harper.

Alphabets

All the South Asian scripts owe their origins to the old Brahmi script which, like Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, etc. and most other alphabets is supposed to have come originally from proto-sinaitic inscriptions of which were discovered in 1904 in the Sinai peninsula. According to that theory, most alphabets have the same origin. "Many scholars link the origin of Brahmi to Semitic script models, particularly Aramaic.[25] The explanation of how this might have happened, the particular Semitic script and the chronology have been the subject of much debate. ”

The north Indian scripts are fairly similar to one another, but the scripts in which the southern Indian, Sri Lankan, Burmese and south east Asian languages are written differ quite a bit, so I wanted to compare them. Omniglot.com is a fantastic resource for this. I was surprised how easy it is to differentiate between the different scripts. Each has particular characteristics.

Kannada, spoken in Karnataka

Telugu, spoken in Andhra Pradesh

Khmer, used in Cambodia

Malayalam, used in Kerala

Thai script

Tamil, used in Tamil Nadu

Sinhala script, used in Sri Lanka

Burmese script

Nature Walk

I found a Swiss couple today willing to split the cost of a guided nature walk in the forest. This was very enjoyable and interesting. After donning special anti-leech socks, we went in, accompanied by Ajesh, from the Manan tribe.

All of the forest guides are recruited from the tribal peoples who have traditionally lived in the area of the park area, as they know the terrain and the wildlife intimately. He was able to give the English or Latin names for everything we asked about. Wild animals are shy, so you don’t often see them. Now the rains have started, all the wild animals move away from the area we were in towards the lake. Elephants need to consume about 350 kilograms of vegetation each per day, so they go where the food is. There had been a tiger sighting a month ago in the area we were in. There are leopards and rarely, black panthers. The tiger may have been coming for the gaur, a kind of bison that is the largest in Asia, weighing up to 1500 kg.

Or maybe he was coming for deer, of which there are three kinds in the park, sambar deer, barking deer and mouse deer. The latter is a tiny creature, among the smallest of the deer family.

We saw frogs and toads (which disguise themselves as leaves), and lots of Nilgiri languirs – a large ape with a long tail, a black face, and a grey beard, as well as frogs and toads, which cleverly disguise themselves as leaves.

The park is full of interesting trees, many of them quite ancient. Bamboo (which is a grass, rather than a tree. Among fruits there are mangoes, jackfruit, and a fruit that resembles a kind of sour grape. There are 20 species of figs, including one called the strangler fig, which has an interesting life story. Birds eat the fruit, leading to the seeds being dropped into trees. During the rainy season, the seeds sprout roots high up in the tree, in any hollow with moisture they can find. These are aerial roots, that then surround the tree.

Years later they spread down into the ground. For a long time the fig will live in intimate embrace with its host tree, till starving it of carbon dioxide and eventually killing it – a process that can take hundreds of years.

Another fig is a spiny but hard creeper, thicker than one’s arm, that you can see shooting upwards to impossible heights.

The largest tree that we saw was the tetrameles – a specimen that was at least several hundred years old. It secures itself with flying buttresses that look like they have been constructed out of concrete, and the girth of its base is simply enormous. Apparently there’s a famous one at Angkor Wat, but the one we saw was in its league.

There are also lots of sandal wood trees, which need to be guarded night and day – dozens of rangers are scattered through the park. A kilo of its wood, said our guide, can fetch 20,000 rupees. Other valuable trees are the rudraksha, with its brain-like seeds and lots of huge old teak trees. Our guide says that there is no problem of deforestation in this area, and the park is well guarded against any kind of poaching (thanks to the budget from our entrance fees). However, climate change is still a problem. In his childhood Ajesh says that he remembers cool winters, and that the streams and brooks would flow with water the whole year, rather than just a few weeks, as is the case today. Tourism and strict government control are mixed blessings; providing organized work for the tribal people through the park foundation; obviating informal guiding of tourists, and raising the prices of basic goods.

Ajesh said that in a high season, he would do the walk we did up to three times a day, but the demand is mostly from foreign tourists. Indian tourists are lazy – they mostly like jeep tours or boat trips. When families come they immediately expect to see wild animals, as if the 350 square kilometer park was just a large zoo. But he said that in recent years there had been a slight change and Indian tourists were beginning to hit some of the trails in the park.

When we came out of the park we pulled off those anti-leech socks that had protected us well, though in the process a couple of leeches still managed to hitch a ride on my exposed skin. You don’t feel any kind of bite, and the leeches are not harmful, but they suck out copious amounts of blood. Afterwards while I was enjoying breakfast in a nearby cafe, one of them was making a meal of me – I looked down to find my foot bloodied as if after a serious injury.

Wadi Haifa / Overland Travel

By a curious coincidence I have come across the name of Wadi Haifa twice in the same day. It’s a town in northern Sudan on the shores of Lake Nasser. I first read of it this morning, while researching the possibility of sea travel from the port of Haifa* in Israel, and then again when reading W. G. Sebald’s novel “The Emigrants”. He mentions a cafe in Manchester under that name.

It used to be possible to travel to Israel/Palestine by sea, but now the only practical way, since overland connections are dodgy, and impossible for Israelis themselves, is to get there by air.

Here in India I met a Swiss couple the other day who had reached here overland, as I did the first time I came to this country. But they had come on a long route that took them through Russia, China and South East Asia. They had been traveling for one year. Whereas I had come (more than 40 years ago) by a much shorter route that took me through Turkey, Iran and Pakistan. I’m not sure how easy that is today.

Quiet time in Kerala

For meals I’m kind of under house arrest, in this rainy and remote location. They bring them to my “cell” twice a day. In the morning it was idli (fermented rice cakes) and vegetable curry; and in the evening I just had a chapatti and a fiery dhal (bean or lentil dish). Admittedly there would be chicken or perhaps fish, if I weren’t vegetarian. I saw the son of the household with a fishing line this morning.

At midday, on my walk, I bought coffee and a cake from a stall on the road. It was a beautiful walk, by the river, passing tea and coffee plantations, waterfalls, in the lush Kerala hill country.

The mosques are the biggest noise makers, in this particular place ( sometimes it’s the temples), blasting out their call to prayer, in a language no one here understands, now at 4:45 a.m. But sometimes I already sleep through it. So many centuries of reminding people, at all hours of the day and night, of their duties and responsibilities, and still there are beggars in the streets, corrupt governments, filth, either visible or unseen, wars, the destruction of the earth. Bas, bikafi, I’ll go back to sleep.

Kids

I always like interactions with kids in India. Met Ameer and Anvar, a couple of boys, probably around 8 years old, on their way to school, , who were so talkative and fluent in English. One of them, in this small Kerala town, is into Spiderman, so he has a Spiderman school bag, shoes and umbrella, “everything Spiderman”. A motorbike passed us, so they commented that wow, that’s a high powered racing bike: “modified”, they said. They go to a tribal government school where they learn Malayalam, Tamil and English. I don’t think they mentioned Hindi, though Modi and the BJP are trying to press schools in every state into teaching it.