For the greater "commons" good
I am in Mangalore as I write this. It’s a beautiful early summer morning. The air is light, the light is soft and the twin brothers of heat and humidity are yet to sink in. I write this from the balcony of my friend’s 10 th storey apartment. When I look east wards, I see a series of rolling valleys one after the other, the ridges punctuating these. The development on the ridges stand out – a motley of independent homes and some very tall apartments. Tall apartments are more common here than in other places in the state probably because of the non-availability of relatively flat land and the higher costs of going horizontal in a highly contoured topography. The valleys are more interesting – the sign of developments here are typically Mangalore tiled roofs nicely camouflaged by the greenery with the odd wood fire smoke wafting out that always reminds me of my own ancestral home in Kerala. Now it is the valleys that interest me. To an untrained eye with a tilt towards understanding ...