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Footpaths and Trails: How We Own Them and Miss Them in Our Hearts

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Photo source: geograph.org.uk   When do you go for a walk? To welcome a new morning and inhale its charming minutiae, to clear your mind, or to stroll down avenues of calm and buzz with your friends, chatting lightly about you, them, and life? What is the one constant in all the above? The footpath.   Footpaths have a fascinating way of reminding us who we are. So many have come before us and walked the same paths. Their footfall created the physicality of those natural footpaths, the trails we walk. I know this is a stereotyped metaphor - walking the paths of our predecessors and ancients. This brief note anyway does not mean to have any such philosophical gravitas. This is just about the footpaths.   Yet, footpaths, especially the naturally evolved ones, always summon up thoughts of the very many people who would have walked the same path. A heavy pedestrian flow is mirrored in the wear and tear of these narrow lanes. Unlike tarred or concrete roads, they are mostly att...
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Paraman, The Street Violinist: Memory of a Man

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  (The folk violin of Pulluvas; image source:  Kannanshanmugam,shanmugamstudio, Kollam , Wikipedia) The Village Visitors  Those were times when things were less complex than they now are. We lived in a bucolic countryside where everyone knew everyone else. The only outsiders who frequented the place were visiting relatives, a bunch of regularly appearing street vendors, the postman, the Gurkha (a man from Nepal who would be paid Rs 10 per month by each family for keeping vigil in the village during nights*), and our very own exclusive beggars. We knew them as they made rounds on almost expected dates and times. Paraman’s Song Paraman, the street violinist, had positioned himself between an artist and a beggar. In our culture, the members of the Pulluva community, who made exquisite music using two delightful musical instruments- a single-string local fiddle and a round mud pot with a tight wire wound across it- were the official local musicians. They would come to sing in...
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Travel Plan: A Trip to Understand The Bermuda Triangle

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  (Image source: grammidistoria.wordpress.com Hi Traveler,  You are a fan of mystery, the inexplicable, and you would love to go probing the geographies, home to such mysteries. For someone like you, the Bermuda Triangle is now not an intangible puzzle. You can visit this region of the sea by entering it from three land masses, which form the three endpoints to the triangle.  The Bermuda Triangle: Basic History and Facts An imaginary triangle drawn connecting Florida, the Bermuda Islands, and Puerto Rico in the North Atlantic Ocean will give you the Bermuda Triangle. The area of this sea stretch is around 1.3 to 3.9 million square kilometres. The exact boundaries of the triangle are not demarcated. Different people at different times set vague definitions of the area under the triangle.    In December 1945, five Navy training aeroplanes navigating the sky above the Bermuda Triangle in the Atlantic Ocean, with 14 men on board, disappeared. A rescue mission was la...
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