Broken Bangles: Putting Together Life and the World

  Scents affect us deeply and more than we think they do. The scents we experience in our childhood leave an indelible mark in our minds. What is in a Scent? The season's first rain gushes down. The Earth emits the lovely fragrance of wet soil. We are enamoured and find ourselves longing for all things good. A long-forgotten scent suddenly evokes a memory of a place or someone. An exquisitely rare yet familiar scent makes us realise that a milky pine has bloomed. How many times a day does a scent evoke an emotion in us? Remember how aromas deeply stimulate memories and emotions. The Scents and Our Lives Unlike other sensory organs, the nose provides a highly nuanced experience that cannot be easily recorded, defined, or deciphered. Of course, we can always write down those experiences but could end up missing the essence. Scents surround us all the time but we cannot record them for posterity. Hence, we make perfumes, scented candles, and potpourri to capture and re-exper...

  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, with 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 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-year-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.  ...