Our kitchen garden

Our garden is full of fruit trees and colourful birds, butterflies and of course, flowers. Here are a few random snaps of some of them.

This is a bou-kotha-kao bird on our "amrapali" (a very sweet species of mango with tiny pits) mango tree.

Here are some snaps from my mom's kitchen garden. Look at these peppers!

There are plenty of birds in the garden. These are a pair of judgement birds. They always fight and are very noisy. If one bird in the flock does something wrong, all the other birds punish it. I guess, that is why they are called judgement birds.
Here is a bulbul, eating a papaya underneath a papaya tree.

This is an eggplant flower.

A yellow butterfly on a yellow marygold looks as if it is a part of the flower itself!

My trip to India Nov 2006

Here are some pictures from my recent trip to India. This is a serene village in Bengal named Gopalpur. In search of some green and village scenes I biked to this place.

Here is another one: This picture was also taken in the same area. River Kunti (Koon-tee) runs through the village. Along the river, people use boats to commute: farmers bring their produce to the markets, milkmen bring milk from their farms, kids go to schools. The river is like a highway. It might be a little slower than your I-95 or Highway 1, but more economical and eco-friendly for sure. I took this picture from a rickety wooden bridge where I had to pay a toll tax of 50 paisa (little less than 1 cent) for my bicycle. Please note that no motor-vehicles are allowed on the bridge.

October-November is the harvest season. The rice-fields are bare now. The grains and the hays are stacked, and loaded on boats to the market...

..and these two boats look like a pair of slippers to me. Won't you agree?

Have you ever seen a glow-worm? Have you ever seen it from REALLY close? I found a swarm of them in a village. They feed on leaves. Here is a picture. I had to push the limits of the macro mode of my camera to get this shot.

B goes blogging

I did not exist so far. Because, once some blog clown gave a philosophical insight to the existance of human lives and said, "I blog. Therefore I exist." Poor me never blogged. Therefore I did not exist. I overheard the word 'blog' in subways, buses, parties but did not have the slightest idea of what people were talking about. I thought it was just another one of those things that I did not need to pay attention to. Then with time the word started hitting me more often. Newspapers started talking about celebrity blogs. Still I was oblivious to those 'blogs thingies'. The first time I paid attention to the word was when I heard that some ivy-league school professor's plagiarism with science was flashed in some blog posts. In my mind I envisioned a series of wooden posts with hand-written posters on them where the dishonest professor's evil deeds were exposed. Way to go, I thought. Just to make sure that I was right, I pulled out the extra heavy Webster's dictionary, cleaned the dust off the cover and checked for the word "blog". There was no such word. I looked around for those wooden posts around the school. Alas, I could only find some hand written posters for moving-sales and math-tutors. Since the first and last refuge of a modern man (a modern old-school-man as well) is the internet, I carefully typed the word in google and was soon enlightened. Almost immediately I felt the craving desire to create my own blog in order to exist. And finally...I have stated to exist! I feel alive now. This is my blog. WELCOME, ladies and gent'lmen. Enjoy.