Shashi - Shashikiran Mullur

Dharmaraj, a role model to planters in the Indian coffee belt

With Modi in My Dreams, Getting Real About Coffee

Birds, peafowl, hare, fox, boar. Trees, plants, and vines. Every rich shade of green. Who in his senses will argue you have caused damage here?

Coffee Planter's Diary

Because Coffee and Pepper and Cardamom Must Live

Even as they demand the best coffee, buyers want to be assured that God’s creatures are teeming on your property. We have good news for them.

Coffee Planter's Diary

You Sow What You Reap. Really?

The gods decide if a bean will make it to somebody’s gut or if it will merely rot in the soil that sprouted it.

Bangalore

Bruno, Our Beagle (Now Renamed Luca)

The yard was full of beagles of varying age; the seniormost was nine months old. The youngest had seen but 40 days. We’d gone there for him.

Bangalore

Starbucks On 80-Feet Road

Sitting at Starbucks, looking out, I'm pondering the limits and the durability of power.

Musing

Maradona, Mortality, and the Crow and the Cat

The cat only wishes to perpetuate her species, immortalise it — wants this planet to ever have a cat in it.

Musing

A Temple for Kamala Harris?

Kamala Harris would need to meet expectations. The actor Khushboo’s temple was torn down by her own fans who’d built the thing only a few years before.

Coffee Planter's Diary

Peacock Proliferation, Elephants, Butterflies, and Coffee

The peafowl has proliferated, the number of snakes has diminished, the toads are flourishing — all because the foxes have disappeared.

Bangalore

Experiencing Wabi-Sabi at The Oberoi, Bangalore

I wanted to ask her, looking into her ever-happy face and her gleaming eyes and at her sari, if she found me wabi-sabi after all these years.

Coffee Planter's Diary

The Mandala Snake

"Why this particular fear of the mandala"? I asked him. "The cobra is poisonous, and they're here in greater numbers. You never mention a cobra sighting."

Coffee Planter's Diary

The Truths About Corona Are Fake And That Is The Truth

"We've hardly any corona," they said. "A fellow goes to the hospital with a fever. They throw him in a ward. They send him home in a few days. It's a scam."

State of the Union

Independence Day, 2020

Even when I was five, it was a man that we celebrated on Independence Day. His name was Gandhi, we called him Bapu. He’s not so much in fashion anymore.

Indian Journeys

The Lakshmi Narasimha Hoysala Temple at Nuggehalli

It is over 750 years old, with sculpture done by the two celebrated Hoysala craftsmen of the thirteenth century — Mallitamma and Baichoja.

Bangalore

To BBMP of Bangalore, a Word of Appreciation

I’ve been visualising coming down with Covid as being in extremis, but — with these four, at least — that’s not the case.

Musing

Will They Lockdown, Won't They Lockdown?

This points to unbridled free speech in the Chief Minister's cabinet—a healthy democratic exercise, maybe, but workers are fleeing the city all over again.

Musing

Too Great a Sacrifice

Colonel Santosh Babu was 37 on June 15. Captain Mahendra Nath Mulla was 45 on December 9, 1971.

Travel

Why Should I Travel?

There's a part of me asking, in defiance of Montaigne, "Should I travel at all? Should I leave my home, really?" I'm pitting the Maharshi against Michel de Montaigne.

Not Feeling Pain for the Corona Victims

The daily figures of those fallen to corona look like scores in cricket — a game I understand but don't follow. I read the statistics without emotion.

Coffee Planter's Diary

Locked Down Plantation, Elephants, Sandalwood Smugglers

It's a blue-topped bright-green world now during June, and more avians than ever in the twelve years I've known the place have flown into the plantation.

Musing

Ramachandra Guha’s Gandhi

Gandhi's time in India ended differently than in Africa. Even before the bullets came for him, Gandhiji had begun to wonder if it wasn't time he left.

Bangalore

Lockdown: Mask to Taste, Damn the Distance

These actions are not going to erase the wrongs being done to people that deserve gratitude, not this pain. There's going to be a price to pay. It'll hurt.

Bangalore

Businesses Might Open, With None to Man Them

The migrants might come back to Bangalore, because one needs to make a living, but it would be interesting to see how we will regard one another in future.

Bangalore

Some Fresh Wind In My Sail

In fifty years, the Guardian says, temperatures in India would rank with Saharan Africa. My son would be eighty then. My grandson would be fifty-five.

Bangalore

What's in a Name?

As regards Zuriberg, they say the owner used to be a doctor in Switzerland. And Maple up the street belongs to an elder who taught physics in North America.

Bangalore

Lockdown Diary: Cures and Other Responses

He has a course of preventive medicine for COVID 19, to be taken twice a day, for five days. Did she pick it up? Absolutely. Are we taking it? You bet.