A lifer! The brown bird chirped intermittently as it flitted through the base of reeds. Our boatman poled the skiff as quickly as he could to keep up. It was a clamorous reed warbler, recognizable by the white supercilium and round-head, a bird with the wonderful binomial Acrocephalus stentoreus. Looking at the distribution of this bird, also known as the Great Indian reed warbler, I’m puzzled. It is reported from a lot of disconnected patches across the world: as far west as the banks of the Nile, in the north Kazhak plains, southwards around the Java Sea, and eastwards in the Philippines. The thickest sightings are in India and the Philippines. Why is it so patchily distributed? Does that mean that the wetlands where it lives are drying up?
There aren’t many places on WordPress where bird watchers can share posts. If you post any photos of birds this week (starting today and up to next Monday), it would be great if you could leave a link in the comments, or a pingback, for others to follow. There is no compulsion to post a recent photo, but it would help others to know when and where you saw the bird.You might consider using the tag “Bird of the Week” in case people search for old posts using it.I hope you’ve had the time to look at what others have added this week and in the previous weeks.
The best way to find food in the city is to consult someone who grew up there. The Family called up a friend to ask for her advice on all things Cuttack. A bit that stuck in my mind was the street food to look out for. If you are in Cuttack just ask for the local dahi vada stall. This is the only town in India where you get dahi vada served up with aloo dum! The Family remarked that the dahi vada was also very different from the variety we get in Mumbai: it was extremely soft, and the dahi was really watered down.
We found two business partners selling out one cart. It’s only after we came to the cart that I realized that across the town there were people selling this: they all had these multiple large pots lined up, two with dahi vada, one with a dal, another with aloo dum. We got six reasonable sized vadas in each serving. Amazing food, and amazing value. The Family called our friend back to say how much we enjoyed it. She wanted photos of course. She was missing home.
A major road in the middle of Cuttack, formerly the capital of Odisha, named in Hindi? Naya Sadak may have been new in the 19th century, but must have certainly been renamed more than a century later. We wandered along the road, The Family looking at the jewellery shops and silver filigree that the town is famous for. I kept an eye on the big houses lining the street. The decorative facades with a medley of themes, dragons, peacocks, zig-zag lines, rippling curves, picked out in mortar, marked them as mid to late 19th century constructions. These would have been the homes of the upper crust, the merchants and jewellers. The first support for political self-determination, within the legal framework of the British empire, would have come from here.
The dilapidated state of the two houses that were the most grand told me that the family that built them probably sold the properties piecemeal, perhaps first the shops on the ground floor, and then, one by one, the flats that the upper floors would have been converted into as the joint family disintegrated. In the shadowed verandahs of an upper floor I could see a row of pillars with wonderful segmental arches between them. Some of the arches contained riotous decorations in mortar and plaster, echoing the ornamentation of the capitals of the pillars. Others had large fanlights. It looked like the whole building had changed function; it seemed unlikely that anyone lived there.
I wondered what these rich merchants thought when the political movements they supported turned against the empire and started demanding independence. The fieriest opponent of the empire was born five lanes away, in an area where the lawyers and doctors had made their (less) grand mansions. Subhash Chandra Bose was a divisive figure who disagreed with the tool of non-violence and raised an army to fight the empire. From the mass of documents from that time, diaries, letters, government dispatches, and memoirs, it is clear that the merchant families were divided. On one extreme, some retreated even from their earlier timid demands, and some at the other extreme, covertly supporting the armed movement.
Another grand mansion stood across the road. I had a little difficulty taking its photos because I was shooting against the light. Where did the dragon finials come from? They could be saying that this family’s money, now clearly vanished, came from the opium trade with China. It was quite as devastating for India as it was for China, since rice and wheat farmers were forced to grow opium by the agents of the East India Company. Famines and mass addiction followed, but merchants who dealt in the drug grew rich. It is quite remarkable how much moral ambiguity can be discovered in the wrack line of the world left as the tide of the first capitalist empires ebbed.
Snipers are assassins who sit still in one place and pick off their targets when they make an appearance. The word comes from the habits a bird hunter had to adopt in order to “bag” one of these game birds which were once considered a delicacy. The skulking habits of the common snipe (Gallinago gallinago) make them hard to see when you are on land. That’s one of the advantages of birding in Mangalajodi. These birds are not equally wary when you approach them from water. These two stayed in place, feeding, even as our skiff drifted close. The spectacular markings on their back are camouflage when they are in the reeds, but here, at the water’s edge, they are as visible as a tiger’s stripes.
There aren’t many places on WordPress where bird watchers can share posts. If you post any photos of birds this week (starting today and up to next Monday), it would be great if you could leave a link in the comments, or a pingback, for others to follow. There is no compulsion to post a recent photo, but it would help others to know when and where you saw the bird.You might consider using the tag “Bird of the Week” in case people search for old posts using it.I hope you’ve had the time to look at what others have added this week and in the previous weeks.
Please bear with my delays in responding to your comments this week. I’m still travelling outside my usual time zone, and things remain somewhat topsy turvy.
A clear view of the western horizon might have shown me Jupiter and Mercury before they set. Venus and Mars would be higher in the sky, on either side of the moon. It would be a spectacular sight.Since I was not in a city I could walk out to a place where the horizon was uncluttered. Unfortunately, the glorious view that I had of the sky was nothing to do with distant planets; it was our atmosphere that set up the fantastic light show that you see here.
March had been unseasonally hot this year, and in the last week of the month it got worse. A constant cloud cover allowed the humidity to build up to levels where the air felt about five degrees warmer than it actually was. On this evening, my last away from Mumbai, a storm set in as I went out for my walk. I didn’t dare to take my camera with me just in case the thunderstorm brought a huge downpour.
But the camera was not needed, since the sky remained overcast.spectacular light show My phone was enough to catch the spectacular light show in the sky that day. I missed the line up of four planets (the fifth, Uranus, was not going to be visible to the naked eye) but I got some photos. Was it a fair trade? Who knows?
Ananta Vāsudeva is not only the second most important temple to Krishna in Odisha but also the home of Bhubaneswar’s best cooks. We didn’t know this when we planned our visit, otherwise we would have gone a couple of hours later. My first clue came when I saw two men sleeping in the shady space between two of the shrines. I took their photo and walked a few paces to the right and came to an unmistakable bustle.
On the other side of the temple was a line of busy kitchens. I saw a cook adding masālā to a large earthenware pot filled with chopped vegetables before lifting the pot with a grunt and carrying it into the kitchen. The pots on the chulhās told me that the cooking was done in these earthenware pots. This is, of course, the traditional and sanctified way to cook. It stood to reason that all the food being cooked in the temple would follow these rules.
From the kitchens the hot food is carried into the temple where it is offered to the threefold deities, Krishna, his brother Balarām, and his sister Subhadrā. After that this the prasād is carried into a separate enclosure. The pots had to be extremely heavy, and, as I later found, rather hot. In retrospect I’m really amazed by the physical fitness of these traditional cooks and their helpers.
The enclosed courtyard across the wall was lined with rows of shops selling prasād to anyone. I suddenly realized that this was the origin of the once-famous brāhmin cooks of Odishā. I was staring at the core of Odishā’s wonderful culinary tradition. What did they have in these pots?
I didn’t have to search far for the answer: rice, dāls, two different kinds of vegetables, and rice kheer. I asked The Family, “Do you want an early lunch?” She hesitated. We’d had a late breakfast, a heavy one, less than an hour ago. “Do you think you can eat? I can’t”, she said. We settled for one serving of the kheer. It was given to us in one of the smaller pots that you can see behind the seller in one of the photos. It’s a large helping. We could pay cash or by scanning at QR code! The kheer was piping hot. We sat in the courtyard and ate it slowly. We decided that we have to come back here to taste the food the next time we are in Odishā.
Every city is like an iceberg: most of it invisible to the tourist. Our one day trip to iceberg called Cuttack took us to its tip, literally. The core of the city surrounds the ancient military fort, Barabati, built on an island in the middle of the Mahanadi river. Towards the end of the day we decided to go the extreme upstream end where the island narrows to a point. I had no idea what it would look like. Since the city has not yet got the superficial glitter of many other small cities across India, I suspected that it would not have become a tourist trap as yet.
In fact, the place was extremely pleasant. We drove along the northern edge of the island, and soon were out of the densely built up areas. Trees shaded the road, and the traffic dropped off. Then we rounded a curve and the road came to an end. In front of us was a barrage across the river, and, closer, a small sandy strip. The patch of golden sand was inviting. The place had only young people, and the gray-haired pair of us looked incongruous as we took the steps from the road down to the sand. It was a calm place, with a few couples, some groups of men smoking and talking quietly. Now and then a scooter would arrive or leave. The Mahanadi is immense here, as the river slows down for a southward turn. Historically it was a major geographical barrier which stopped armies. There was a little training ground for the National Disaster Rescue Force here: some lanes marked out for swimming, some boats for practicing in-water rescue. We walked out as far as we could: I went to the end of the beach, and The Family found a causeway along which she could walk out to the middle of the river.
After a quiet time watching the western horizon rising to greet the sun, we decided to get back. We were planning to stop for sweets in Pahala before sunset. As we walked up we realized from the smell that the strangler fig growing in circle in the middle of the road was full of bats. They were quite silent and invisible as we got into the car and left.
Bindu Sagar is the focus of most of the religious activity in Old Bhubaneswar. This rectangular spring fed tank is perhaps the oldest existing structure in the vicinity, predating the current form of the Lingaraj Temple with which it is associated. I’m pretty certain that keeping the water clean would be a big job, although going by the number of people swimming and taking a bath in it, the water is safe enough for an occasional dip.
The temple in the center was the first thing that I noticed. I’ve heard it called the Brahma temple, but it is more properly called Jagati. Every May the images of Lingaraja, Parvati, Rukmini and Basudeva are taken to this temple every day in a ritual called the Chandan Yatra. Going by the sweltering heat of late March when we visited, the crowds here in May would be rather unbearable. The photos that I’ve seen are so colourful that I’m still inclined to do the trip one year.
After exiting the Ananta Basudeva temple I stood near the tank and looked around the tank. The embankments and steps were made of dressed blocks of the local laterite, bound in dry mortar. People were sitting in the shade around the tank, or going up and down the steps to take a dip. There was a constant stream of activity around the tank.
I heard some chants from nearby. Looking over the parapet I saw a small ritual going on. A priest (with his back to the camera) was performing some puja for the man in front of him. Their voices, when they spoke, was a murmur, and I could not figure out what the rituals were.
We walked around to the Mohini temple on the southern bank of the tank. From there The Family took the photo that you see above of the place we had come from. You can see some of the deuls (spires) of the Ananta Basudeva temple in this photo. It was still too early to go back there and eat the prasad that we’d seen being cooked in the kitchens of the temple. I was pretty sure that the food would be wonderful.
In my dreams of retirement I sit by a fish-filled pond watching bronze-winged jacanas (Metopidius indicus) stepping daintily over lily pads to peck at insects, sloppily enough to add vegetable fiber to their diets. These dreams are broken only by memories of mosquitoes and other biting insects. Unmistakable in appearance, these are birds that you can see them from west of the Thar desert in India down south-east Asia to Vietnam and Malayasia, till the open waters stop them. Interestingly, the females are polyandrous, but the males are territorial. I watched this one forage in Mangalajodi, and got a photo as it had one leg in the air. You can see the adaptation of its toes: very long, to enable it to step on lotus leaves without capsizing.
There aren’t many places on WordPress where bird watchers can share posts. If you post any photos of birds this week (starting today and up to next Monday), it would be great if you could leave a link in the comments, or a pingback, for others to follow. There is no compulsion to post a recent photo, but it would help others to know when and where you saw the bird.You might consider using the tag “Bird of the Week” in case people search for old posts using it.I hope you’ve had the time to look at what others have added this week and in the previous weeks.
Please bear with my delays in responding to your comments this week. I’m travelling outside my usual time zone, and things are a little topsy turvy.
Are you as lost as me in a fish market? I love to cook and eat fish, but when faced with the variety and number of produce in a typical fish market, I’m lost. On my last weekend of my retreat in Odisha, I went to the local fish market for a dose of bewilderment. I don’t know what the small fish in the photo are called, but I’ve eaten them two ways. Deep fried, they are great accompaniment to a cold beer. Another way I like it is in a thin curry flavoured with ginger or galangal, and coriander leaves.
And these? Are they some variety of catfish I suppose, going by the long whiskers. But they were a little larger than the catfish I’d eaten, and more silvery in colour. Of course much of the fish in this market was the morning’s catch from nearby Chilika lake. The rest were equally fresh catch from the nearby Daya river. It is possible that this catfish is a local variety.
This fish was misleading in appearance. I thought it was a black pomfret, but when I asked the vendor, he said “No. Chand.” The word chand means silver, of course, and refers to a fish I’ve heard of spoken as a special delicacy. But from the descriptions I’d come to the conclusion that it was a variety of pomfret. I was now confused. It looks like a pomfret, but it isn’t.
And then there was this striped fish. Never saw it before. I was about to take some of these, when I saw a pile of large tiger prawns nearby. The ones with blue claws are said to be the tastier river prawns. They had blue claws. I got myself a dozen of them, enough to last the week.
Don't hold your breath 