There has been a rising trend of tribal people from other states being brought into Tamil Nadu and forced to labour for long hours and low wages in work such as sugarcane harvesting. The Tamil Nadu government has been urged to act against bonded labour and provide proper facilities to the...
The Oscar award for The Elephant Whisperers, a documentary short film, is a global tribute to the tribal people living in harmony with nature and wildlife in the Nilgiris. The film tells the life story of the couple Bomman and Bellie of the Kattunayakan tribe, who work at an elephant care...
In recognition of Tamil Nadu’s indigenous varieties of brinjal and chillies, the thorny brinjal of Vellore and the rotund chilli of Ramanathapuram have been given the geographical indication or GI tag. ‘Mullu kaththarikaai’ (thorny brinjal) is endemic to Vellore district. It is different from...
Every year the annual bird census is undertaken after the end of the northeast monsoon in Tamil Nadu. Usually it happens around Pongal. This year, more volunteers and students have come forward to take part in the Forest Department’s bird survey, as interest in studying birds has gone up....
Vadivel Gopal and Masi Sadaiyan were going about their routine work in Karur, catching snakes, when they heard the news that they had been awarded the fourth-highest civilian award of the country, the Padma Shri. The duo from one of the most marginalised and oppressed communities, the Irulars,...
The Pongal festival ingrained in the popular imagination conjures up images of cooking rice in an open fire, buffaloes and cows being decorated and celebrated and people meticulously arranging sugarcane, turmeric leaves, flowers and other paraphernalia. In tribal villages of the Western Ghats,...
What’s recorded alone is not history; in fact, there are several great lives that have sunk into oblivion unnoticed and unrecorded. Life, after all, is no bed of roses; thorns too have been woven into it. Only those understanding this have survived the shocks and startling hurdles that life...
Brinjal (‘kathari’ in Tamil) is a vegetable that is great tasting by itself or mixed in with other veggies or even meat in various cuisines. It finds a key place in ‘aviyal’ (a mixture of stewed veggies) and is also a sought-after side-dish of biryani. Brinjal preparations have a pride of place...
Dreams are something that have defied man’s intellect since time immemorial. Right from 1899 when Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis, took the world by storm with his ground-breaking work, Interpretation of Dreams, lots of light has been shed on the mysterious and mesmerising Borgesian...
Once consumed by people on the lowest rung of society to satiate hunger in times of food scarcity and drought, mushrooms now figure prominently on glossy menus of five-star hotels in the country. The transition of a mushroom’s character from proletariat to elite is quite amazing, as is its...
