Articles by Deepa Mohan

We have several group for senior citizens in our city, but today (16 Jan,2019) I attended a meet of senior citizens...the common factor between them being that their children are living in Portland, Oregon, in the western seaboard of the USA! The group, all of whom are on WhatsApp, is called "PDX BLR Friends", and is an offshoot of "PDX Seniors" in the city of Portland. The venue chosen for the morning meet was another "senior" of Basavanagudi, Vidyarthi Bhavan, which has existed since 1943. I spoke to Sri Venkatesh Rao, who had used the Metro to arrive at the…

It's always a tug-of-war on the second Sunday of every month. I have learnt a lot on the Lalbagh walks, but since I am generally committed to the 3rd and 4th Sunday walks, I do like to go to other birding spots with my friends. Well, on the 13th of January, the tug was decided by the fact that the Asian Waterfowl Census, or AWC ) is on, and we could contribute data and pretend to be very scientific, while following the experts around and getting to see a lot of birds! So off we went to Hoskote kere, after…

The new IRCTC website should make booking easy, right? Wrong! I booked for a train, and then decided to advance the date of travel. I knew this was possible, but could not find out any way to do it on the site. So I googled, and finally called 139 to ask how to do it. The reply: advancement ("preponement") or postponement cannot be done on e-tickets, they can only be done on tickets booked at the railway counters! You think that's funny? Wait. I tried to book two tickets. One is confirmed, and the other one is RAC1. The site…

A Mushroom... (or toadstool) is the fleshy, spore-bearing fruiting body of a fungus, typically produced above ground on soil or on its food source. In this post, I'd like to share the variety of mushrooms I've been seeing in the monsoon season, in and around the city!   The terms "mushroom" and "toadstool" go back centuries and were never precisely defined, nor was there consensus on application. Between 1400 and 1600 AD, the terms mushrom, mushrum, muscheron, mousheroms, mussheron, or musserouns were used. Puffball Mushroom Black Puffball Many species of mushrooms seemingly appear overnight, growing or expanding rapidly. This phenomenon is the…

Bannerghatta Road is already a mess, as one-third of the road is blocked for the work on the Metro. There is no transparency on how long the work will take, and no timeline for completion, though a vague time of 2020 AD has been given. Meanwhile, residences and hospitals as well as malls and offices bear the brunt of the noise, often unbearable at night. Pedestrians, who were finding the road hard enough to cross after the grade separation, are now finding it impossible to do so. No thought has been given to the hapless people-who-walk; they fight for their…

Birds know no borders; the ones that we go to see in Karnataka fly off and can be seen once we cross over into Kerala! So when the birders of Kasargod announced the second Kidoor Bird Fest, to celebrate both the first sighting of the Orange-breasted Green Pigeon Photo credit: Sarala Jeevanthi Gamage and the birthday of Dr Salim Ali, the noted ornithologist, it was clear that this would be a productive birding weekend. The participants and the organizers. The festival was a bigger event than it was in 2017, because this time, birders from all over Karnataka (see featured…

Sometimes the shadow is just as interesting as the substance. I was privileged to peep in on a shadow puppet workshop that Michael and Wendy Dacre conducted at Kathalaya, BTM Layout, Bangalore, on 23rd November 2018. Nikhil from the Hindu interviews Michael and Wendy, while Geeta looks on. Shadow puppet theatre has long been a part of the traditional arts of many cultures,but when Wendy first got interested in it, she found that there was no tradition of it at all, in the United Kingdom. She built up her shadow puppets, and the shadow puppet theatre, from scratch, using any…

I was about to write something about this event for my blog, and realized my official report for the Karnataka Forest Dept would do just as well! The founder-members of Bangalore Butterfly Club (BBC), from Nagraj's slide presentation: The Karwar Swift, not very common. The second Butterfly Festival at Doresanipalya Forest Research Station, celebrated on 17th November, 2018, was very successful. These ladies, making the rangoli, brought as much of colour as the butterflies did, to the event. Though limitations on the space available at the venue, in terms of the hall for presentations, resulted in the event not being…

It says a lot for the wondrous variety of vehicles on our roads, that a silver chariot of the sun, drawn by seven horses (and, presumably a little more horsepower), with regulation headlights, does not make heads turn!

While walking home from my daughter's, I caught the sunlight, slanting in beams in the dusty morning air: Ironic that it's the pollution in our air which shows up the shafts of sunlight! The scene also illustrates why traffic problems in our city, and country, are rather more complicated than elsewhere. There is such a variety of vehicles, motorized and non-motorized; two-, three- and four-wheelers jostling for the road, and amidst all the chaos, the hapless pedestrians, making their way too. I wish I'd been able to capture the bullock-cart that went past just before I clicked! For all the…