Two rupees

What can you get for two rupees? A banana; a candy bar; a paracetamol; sometimes one drumstick and what else? Read on.

Yesterday I got into a BMTC bus and when the conductor approached, I gave him 10 Rs not knowing how much the ticket would cost. Those who have lived here can agree to this - one can never know how many different kinds of city buses we have here and cost of ticket . Anyway, the conductor gave me 6 rupees back and moved on. First, I was surprised because I had never seen bus fare being this low and more so because the bus looked one of the new kinds (where the tickets are higher for no particular reason than that they look new and colorfully painted) And second he forgot (it's called benefit of the doubt) to give me the ticket.

So, I waited for him to return and mentioned that he forgot to issue me the ticket. He looked at me with disdain(!) and asked me (again) where I wanted to go, to which I replied. Guess what he did next? He snatched the 6 rupees from my half-clenched fist, put that in his bag, thrust 4 rupees in my hand and before I could blink, thrust a 6 rupees ticket in my hand. Now everything became clear to me.

It was an offer. Or to be precise - a deal. Integrity and conscience for 2 rupees. That one is hard to resist, no?

Make green while the sun shines

When we moved in to our own house in Hosur early last year, I and my wife were very excited for many reasons. One of the reasons was to be able to have a garden. Well, why wouldn't you be, when you have more than 250 sq ft just for this. So much was the excitement that we somehow wanted to stuff in three coconut trees, a pomegranate tree, a gooseberry, a sita tree (sugar apple/custard apple) along with two hibiscus and other vegetable plants like tomato, ridge gourd, finger (okra) etc..

Soon we found ourselves working in our future garden. To begin with, we had to remove all the stones, that were laid in the garden each weighing over 50 kilograms. We soon found that what lay beneath the stones was just sand with lot of building debris like broken bricks, concrete blocks, stones etc. We wouldn't have proper fertile soil before digging out the top one foot. Even though this slowed down our progress, it didn't deter us from going to the nursery and buying plants and seeds that we thought could have in our garden. To boost the growth, we added organic fertilizer and also compost in some pockets.

By the time we got rid of the paved stones, enough space and made the soil ready, there came the rainy season. And along with it came a period of 4-6 months where our new garden won't get sun light. Sounds weird? Well, this garden is adjacent to our two storied house on the northern side. And this means, the sun will be behind the house (wrt to the garden) for a good portion of the year. We realized we had a serious problem on our hand.

What shall we do? Obviously, we can't move the garden or the house. And of course, not the Sun. We thought of trying plants which don't need much sunlight, like radish. But that didn't work either. Then I came up with a brilliant idea - to mount a big convex mirror that will reflect sun light on to our garden. Of course this will have rotate as the sun goes about his path. Unfortunately, like most (of my) brilliant ideas, many questions were raised and soon it was left as impractical. But I still get tempted to steal one of those mirrors they have in parking lots when I have an opportunity.

Now, we are in March and the Sun God has finally turned his one eye on us; Or on our garden, to be more precise. Nowadays, the sun is right above the head, which means we are direct sun light on a considerable portion of the garden. The roses and Hibiscus are blooming and few baby tomatoes are gleaming. The goose berry is racing ahead (vertically, I mean) and the coconut tree is not far behind. And guess what - we get few visitors too - butterflies!

And so, we will make some green while the sun shines on us.