This beautiful flowering tree is quintessential to Bangalore’s nostalgic spring and summer months. The delicate bell shaped flower blooming in clusters and framed against the blue sky is an enchanting sight. Last year 👉 POTD: Jacaranda 💜 Learning a little about it’s history, the tree was introduced in India during the British Raj from Brazil;…
Category: Musings
A speck of blue in the Morpankhi 🪴
It is a planted presence in almost every garden; we have rows of them in our apartment complex. They are eye-catching for their peculiar foliage; the pine like leaves grow in a single plane outwards giving it a fan like appearance. But it’s spring and they too are in bloom, tiny yellow flowers; the fruits…
Revisiting favourites 🍝
It’s the weekend before Valentine’s Day; some shop windows display red balloons and heart shaped cut outs to mark the occasion; for him and her 🎈. We ventured to Church Street to see if we can sell some old books at the second hand bookshop. Their quoted price was very low and no cash offered;…
City Hues 💖
The changing seasons bring about a kaleidoscope of colours in the sky; in Feb, the cloudy grey early mornings give way to a cover of myriad shades of blue with fluffy white cumulus clouds orchestrated to hijack our thoughts (for a moment at least), by forming vaguely familiar but mostly mysterious patterns; floating to elsewhere but…
POTD: Spider Lily 🕸
Second month into the year; the days are getting hotter while the nights are still cool in Bangalore. The cyclical changes that happen year round have become familiar and hence we can look forward to the days with happy expectations. And when we look out for the familiar we begin to notice the new things…
Colour for the season 🌼
5 Feb is Basant Panchmi, the festival to mark the transition from winter into the spring season 🌼 which culminates with the Holi celebrations exactly 40 days from this day ie on 17 March (a holiday! 😌). The traditional colour for Basant Panchmi is yellow and the flower for the festivities has to be the…
Perspectives 🌅
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” Anais Nin, writer 31 Jan 2022, my maternal grandmother passed away; she was ninety six. She is safe with God. Among the many fond memories and qualities of my grandparents that I admire and cherish, their unpretentious and simple lifestyle stands out….
Framing a new scene 🪟
My apartment has sliding aluminium frames for the windows; and here I wake up to wooden window frames that open to the outside and are latched in place so that the wind doesn’t bang them shut. The scenery outside is different and so is the frame 🪟; I am at my parents home in Kerala…
Home is where the heart is…💖
“What is a Porpoise ?” asks my seven year old nephew. “Maybe it’s something like the tortoise; lives on land and in water !?” I make a guess and reply (I was so wrong 😬; I should have googled it!). The kid too soon realised that my answer was wrong 😅 “If they lived on…
Under the tamarind tree 🌳
A story in Ruskin Bond’s book the Kashmiri Storyteller goes like this… A man sees a walnut tree and a creeping gourd plant and exclaims 🤔 “Oh, Allah!” he said. “How strange are Your ways. You have given such small nuts to such a large tree, while the creeping gourd plant bears a fruit out…
Tree-spotting 🌴
We were inside the Brookfield Ecoworld complex on the Outer Ring Road in Sarjapur, Bangalore; the palm fringed roads looked spectacular ! The tall stately looking palms were standing in perfect attention, their green canopy swaying in the wind, greeting the commuters. The trunk of this particular palm variety looked perfectly smooth and grey like…
January: Reset and relish 🧁
It’s almost all dried fruits and nuts and less cake; it’s sweet, rich and the last of our plum cake from Anns Bakery, Kottayam, Kerala for this year 🍰. Their Christmas cakes comes in a pretty round tin box with five layers of wrapping – the outermost is a coloured (blue/green) cellophane cover you unwrap,…
To new Beginnings 🥂
“Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.” Carl Sandburg, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and author My planner has a quote for each day; they are cliches but still…
Hedge hunting 💮
Our apartment complex in Bangalore is composed of a single tower with eight flats on each floor. And like all planned apartment gardens, we too have hedges circumambulating the outside perimeter of this fourteen storey tower. These hedges are composed of a variety of flowering plants and a few variegated shrubs but always manicured to…
Almond canopy🍃🍂
There’s always something that catches the eye and sparks a curiosity; for this tree, it was it’s big broad shapely red leaves. On sunny days, the tree drew attention as it filtered the sunlight through its crimson and green canopy, while on the cold windy days, the burnt orange and brown hues exuded an autumn…
Yellow splendour 🌳💛
No one told this tree that it was winter in Bangalore; it’s yellow flowers are in full bloom and together with the green canopy, it stands dressed in green and gold 🌳💛, ready for the wedding season ! It’s called Gaudichaudi or the Chestnutleaf trumpet bush; the flowers shaped like golden yellow trumpets and clustered…
Potted rubber 🪴
It is the the long, slender red buds, standing upright amidst the big dark green leaves that I noticed first. The striking red buds of this small tree seem to be reaching out to the sun but I had no idea what plant it was !? The buds should be blooming into large flowers I…
Tinsel time 🎄☃️
It’s December 🔔 finally !! A month long looked forward to and now that we are finally here, everyone is approaching the coming holidays with trepidation – to travel or stay put !? 😊….in light of the new virus variant. Decisions, decisions ! For us one decision has already been made, no new Christmas decorations…
Cake Day (26 Nov) 🍰
Such a namesake day did not even exist for me until now. Now I am looking out for an occasion to bake (….practice) 😌 Starting with the very easy and basic cakes; the first is a chocolate sponge cake and the second a vanilla sponge cake 🍰 No frosting or decorations for the time being….baby…
Stumbling into Baking (Choosing an oven) 🍰
I bought a heart shaped cake tin from Le Creuset. It looked very cute and they were having a discount sale (a perfect example of an impulse purchase 😛). It is 26 cm lengthwise and now to put that to use, I needed to buy an oven. Till date I have not owned an oven…
Miles and smiles 
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