Blog + Listicle = Blisticle?

Learning a bit of this and that every day:


1. Millet, a gluten-free grain grown in many varieties, is having its organic moment in Chennai (and other cities as far as I can tell.) Local restaurants such as Food Karma and Green Cafe feature South Indian staples including chapatis, porridge, dosa, pongal (a kind of sweet pudding) and even idli - traditionally made with fermented rice- prepared with pearl, foxtail and finger millets. Not long ago, Mahamudra, a vegetarian restaurant in Mylapore, even hosted a millet festival.

2. Several temples in Chennai now recycle tons of the garlanded flowers offered by devotees to shrines of Shiva, Vishnu, and other deities.  At least one temple has a tumbler on site for composting decayed and wilted blooms.  Others rely on enormous bins like those below:

Garland recycling  

3. I attended a program devoted to craft in India where a cotton cloth scholar named Uzramma lamented the "fatal sympathy" of those who seek to preserve handloom textile work as an artifact rather than as a living, evolving art form. In another talk that Google turned up, she takes this idea further: "I want to suggest to you that we should look at the handloom not as an outmoded relic of the past but as a low-carbon production technology for the energy-stressed future." Uzramma is behind an endeavor called "Malkha," a cotton collective owned by its producers, the farmers, the ginners, the spinners, the dyers and the weavers.

Malkha hand-woven duppata  

4. The chances of getting struck by a meteorite are infinitesimal. But the chances of a meteorite striking an engineering school in India are better, given the country's countless engineering schools. So maybe it's not that unlikely that a bus driver, washing up outside an engineering school, could be struck dead by meteorite debris, as is alleged to have happened in Tamil Nadu. Here's the headline:

Tamil Nadu: Suspected Meteorite Caused Death of Man in Indian State, Chief Minister Says

Then again, there's this NYT headline:

That Wasn’t a Meteorite That Killed a Man in India, NASA Says

"Meteorite" crater

5. The wet grinder is the official kitchen appliance of Tamil Nadu. Used to grind grains for dosas, idli and other every-day delicacies, electric wet grinders hold pride of place in South Indian kitchens. What's more, the wet grinder is said to have been invented in 1955 by a man from Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu, which is why, says Wiki, "the label 'Coimbatore Wet Grinder' is a registered geographical indication for Tamil Nadu."

Amma freebie table-top wet grinder