Broken Bangles: Travel, Stories, Thoughts

  Writing a dictionary can seem humanly impossible if one looks at the size, volume and information that goes into one. However, a few men dedicated their entire lives to this work. James Murray: Author: Oxford English Dictionary James Murray, a Scottish school teacher wrote the first Oxford English Dictionary. The work began in 1879 and at that time, the dictionary was named, New English Dictionary. Five years into the task, Murray to his desperation realized he was still circling the alphabet ‘a’ and had only reached up to the word, 'ant'. He had a dedicated team of assistants to help him in the work. Murray also made a public call of assistance for volunteers to send him quotes that would help identify rare words and their usage. He received great help from many known and unknown volunteers who set themselves to this work. The volume of mail that went to Murray and his team and back was so huge that the local post office set up a special mailbox near his working shed, which ...

The story they told me begins with a shipwreck on the coast of Kochi. The ship was full of slaves from Africa brought to labour in the naval yard of the Dutch-controlled port. They were starving, battered by dysentery and skin diseases from the long voyage, crammed inside the ship’s basement, and close to death’s door when they arrived. The shipwreck was near the shore and many passengers swam and survived. They were all scattered and one young black slave was rescued by an old fisherman living alone, a couple of miles away from the port.   The fisherman knew he was a slave but kept it a secret. He had an idea of what travails awaited a slave on these shores and the kind and innocent eyes of the slave roused a fatherly affection in him. His remote house was isolated and he had little connection with the community. He nurtured the boy back to health and taught him his language and his ways. A few months went by. The boy knew that desertion would bring severe punishment to him. ...

Naeema Mea'bed, a Palestinian woman in Gaza, opened Gaza’s first cat cafe , "MEOW Cat Cafe", in August 2023. Reuters cited her telling their reporter that she wanted to bring joy and pet awareness to the people constrained to the open prison of Gaza.  The cafe was fully cat-themed. Offering fourteen resident cats’ company, cat posters on the walls, cat perches, cat swings, a children’s play area, and more; this cafe was a complete feline experience for families, especially children. The breeds in the cafe included Persian cats, Turkish angoras, and hybrids.  The cafe charged $1.30 per hour for the feline experience. On Sundays, long queues waited in front. Naeema Mea'bed told the press covering the story that she had a passion for cats from childhood. Naeema used to say that cats were natural anti-depressants.  Since the Israel-Gaza war had started only two months after the cafe was opened, in October 2023, nothing was heard of Naeema Mea'bed and her cats on the n...

  A World Hidden Inside the Woods Mayan and Inca civilizations of the South and North Americas always evoke a mysterious charm, which also keeps hidden beneath it, the colonization and genocide that the native people of the Amazonia had to undergo through centuries. Both these civilizations emerged in their full glory around the 1400s and 1500s, but the sun set over them too soon, when the Europeans arrived on the shores of the Americas.  According to ‘The Handbook of South American Indians’, written in the late 1940s by J.H. Steward, the South American indigenous people can be broadly categorized into four groups- the nomadic hunter-gatherers, small farmers who lived in the farming villages inside the Amazon forest, irrigated cultivators of the Central Andes region, and the local chiefdoms of the Caribbean area. Steward was an anthropologist who concentrated his studies on the subsistence of people. He introduced to the world, the concept of cultural ecology. Indigenous tribe...

  Reminiscences of a Morning A shadow of a man floats into my mind occasionally, a mere apparition and a few vivid glimpses accompanying it. He was my grandfather. He reminds me of how people fade from the world without leaving any visible mark, no matter how much interesting a life they have led.  He was a middle-income land-owning farmer in South India, in the early 1900s, having about five acres of land where he cultivated rice, coconut, Areca nut, bananas, and cashews. He was 72 when he died in 1977 and I was just a three and a half years old child.  I never got to know him except through his diaries, in which he journaled his income and expenses, and through his curious collection of porcupine spines, sands of different colours, red and white sandalwood pieces, conches of many sizes, a deer horn, and a pouch of ‘ponpanam’, the half gram gold coins in circulation when he was young. In this collection, he also had British coins from when India was a British colony....