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KERALA: A PARADISE IN SOUTH

Kerala, according to" National Geographic Traveler", is one of the 50 must see destinations of a lifetime. It is one of the 10 paradises of the World. Kerala is a good example of how a place with great attributes, has come to be perceived as a great place to visit. Among other destinations in India Kerala has become pocket-vibes of world destinations with stunning backwaters, hill stations, impossible greenery, and a range of Ayurvedic massages, great beaches, food and culture
With the monsoons making a grand entry into Kerala, tourist resorts and Ayurvedic spas are all ready with rejuvenating health packages. The rainy season, experts say, is the best time for Ayurvedic treatment. Although Ayurvedic evolved centuries ago in India, it has only in recent years that it has become a huge selling point for Kerala’s tourism industry, especially in the months June-August. According to ayurveda specialists, the monsoon season is the best time for treatments as the atmosphere remains dust-free and cool, which helps open the pores of the body to the maximum.
This makes the body more receptive to herbal oils and other ayurveda medicines. Ayurveda believes in the treatment of not just the affected part, but also the individual as a whole. It is considered a natural way to refresh oneself by eliminating all toxic imbalances from the body and thus regain good health.

Tourists, who come especially for treatment and not just for sightseeing, are catered here. For those who have a time constraint, their medical files are called early and study their problems in detail even before they arrive. So the treatment protocols are ready when they come here.
Ayurveda offers excellent treatments for skin problems, ailments related to stress and joint pains.
The numerous resorts in the state have drawn out specific plans ranging from a few days to even three weeks. For skin problems, generally patients are asked to stay back for 28 days. And for people who don’t have so much time at their disposal, medicines are given to them so that they can carry with them and a constant interaction is kept with them. And for those who are on a short holiday, a general oil massage is sure to put the spring back in your step.

Five years back, the ayurveda tourism industry in Kerala saw a mere five percent occupancy during the monsoons but in most resorts, it is expected to cross 70 per cent occupancy this season.

Almost all resorts, whether big or small, now boast of an ayurveda spa. And they all have separate vegetarian kitchens, as vegetarian food is considered a must during the treatment period.
Other than that Kerala is know for its wild life. Peppara Wildlife Sanctuary 50 Km from Thiruvananthapuram, Neyyar wildlife Sanctuary, 30 Km from Thiruvananthapuram. Here main attractions are Elephants, gaurs, sloth bears, Nilgiri tahrs, lion safari park. Shenduruni Wildlife Sanctuary, 66 Km from Kollam town, where main attractions are Elephants, tigers, leopards, bears, lion tailed macaques. 

Kumarakom Bird Sanctuary, 16 Km from Kottayam town. Local birds like the water fowl, cuckoo, owl, egret, herons and water duck, as well as the migratory Siberian duck are the main attractions. Chinnar Wildlife Sanctuary, lying in Devicolam Taluk of Idukki district, chinnar was declared as a wildlife sanctuary in 1984. It is located in the rain shadow region of the Western Ghats. It is the second habitat for the endangered Giant Grizzled Squirrel in India. With an area of 90.422 sq kms, Chinnar is a unique thorny scrub forest.

The undulated terrain with rocky patches increases the scenic splendour of the sanctuary. As the altitude varies from 500 to 2400 metres within a few kilometre radius, there is a drastic variation in the climate and vegetation. The highest peaks are Kottakombumalai (2144 metre), Vellaikal Malai (1863m) and Viriyoottu Malai (1845 metre). Unlike in most forests of Kerala, Chinnar gets only about 48 rainy days in a year during October - November (North - East Monsoons). The forest types comprise thorny scrub forests, dry deciduous forests, high sholas and wet grasslands

As for the Cuisine of Kerala, it is mildly flavored, gently cooked and has a certain genteel delicacy on the stomach. An example is the rich biriyanis of the northern parts of Kerala. The Malabar Biriyanis.
Pulaos, pilaffs and biriyanis are meats spices and onions slowly steam cooked in boiled rice. Malabar biriyani was brought across the Indian Ocean by Arab Seafarers. It should be eaten hot with crispy, crunchy pappads.  A favourite breakfast dish is Pootu. Rice flour dough is lagered with gated coconut and steamed in hollow bamboo cylinder. It is eaten sprinkled with sugar or with mashed bananas or with a spicy curry made of channa or chic peas.
Iddlis or fluffy white steamed cakes and dosas which are thin golden pancakes are popular in Kerala. They are made up of yeasty rice and lentil batter. They are not strictly Malayali Cuisine. They came across from the vegetarian kitchens next door in the State of Tamil Nadu.  Kerala does have its own well developed vegetarian cuisine. If you visit the State during post harvest Onam season lunch with thoran or kaalan or pachadi or olen.

Thorans are gravy-less dishes of finely chopped boiled vegetables and possibly meet and sea food. The mustard seed used in thorans gives them a pleasantly assertive flavour, while the lightly fried grated coconut adds the church.
Avial, on the other hand, is mixed vegetable gravy dish thickened with coconut and yoghurt. Drumsticks, jack fruit seeds and slices of mango are often used. Olen is also a very gravy dish made of ash gourd and drum beans where the predominant flavour is that of coconut milk. It is a fairly thick liquid squeezed out from the white flesh of a fresh coconut.
Bananas are very popular in Kerala Cuisine. Sliced finely and deep fried as chips, they are chewy snacks. Cut into bits, fried and dipped in jaggerey or sugar syrup, they are sweets. Cooked in thick yoghurt and seasoned with chilly, turmeric cumin seed and curry leaves, they become Kaalan accompaniment to the main meal.  Malayalee Pachadi is a fairly thick sauce made of sugar, yoghurt, grated coconut, mustard seed and a wide spectrum range of spices including green and red chillies.
Sambar is a cross between a sauce and a broth. It contains smashed lentils, cooked vegetables and apices including the exotic and edible resin asafoetida. For desert, there is the Pradhman or Payasam, porridge like sweets with vermicelli of rice base, cooked in milk and sugar or jaggery. A favourite dish of Syrian Christians residing at Kottayam is stew. Chicken and potatoes are simmered gently in a creamy white sauce flavoured with black pepper, cinnamon, cloves, green chillies, lime juice, shallots and coconut milk.
The stew is eaten with Appams. Appams Kallappams or Vellayappams are rice flour pancakes which have soft, thick white spongy centres and thin golden crip lace like edge. Meen vevichathu or fish in fiery red chilly sauce is also another favourite item. Besides the chicken and fish there is also red meat, erachi orlarthiathu.
Kerala is an enchantingly beautiful, emerald green land, flanked by the Western Ghats on
one side, the Arabian Sea on the other, and strewn with rivers, lagoons, backwaters and rich vegetation in between.

For tourist, Kerala offers Nature on a platter. Sandy beaches of Kovalam, blue Lagoons at Veli, Hill stations at Ponmudi and Munnar, backwaters of Kollam and Alappuzha, greenland plantations in the high ranges, wildlife, high mountain peaks, picturesque valleys, magnificent forts and intricately decorated temples - Whatever one can ask for.
What’s more, every one of these charming destinations is only maximum a two-hour drive from the other. A singular advantage, which no other destination offers.

The New Year celebrations are continuing in the stock markets with bench mark sensex scaling a new high of 20465.3 points at closing level on the Bombay stock exchange. Led by blue chip stocks HDFC, Tata Motors and Reliance Energy the 30 share BSE barometer added 164.59 points today over its previous close of 20300.71 points to set the new closing level record.  

The index touched the day’s high of 20529.48 points and a low of 20077.4 points. The Sensex also hit an all time intra trade high of 20529.48. The broader S&P CNX Nifty of the National Stock Exchange (NSE) also jumped 35.05 points to close at a new life-time high of 6179.4 from previous close of 6144.35. 

The market surged in the late afternoon trade on sustained across the board value buying from investors after showing some pressure due to weakness in Asian markets, which were down in the range of about 1.0 to 2.3 percent at close.  The market breadth was strong following widespread gains in the small cap and the mid cap shares.

However, analysts said the market has reached the 20,500 resistance level and is expected to correct downwards. Crediting the upsurge to technical factors, brokers said there was shortage of scripts while liquidity remained comfortable in the market. 

Today’s rally was led by banks and realty sector with their indices moving up by 3.13 percent and 2.93 per cent respectively. Stocks of the country’s largest private sector lender ICICI bank surged by 2.88%. BSE Bankex rose to 11, 870.49while the realty index was up at 13,419.67 points.  

At the same time, market regulator SEBI today ruled out relaxing norms on independent directors for public sector companies, saying corporate governance norms help boost confidence of investors in India Inc.

Contesting the views of ONGC chairman R.S. Sharma that the norms, as contained in the Clause 49 of the listing agreement, come in the way of level-playing field between PSUs and private players, SEBI chairman M. Damodaran said they are same for all companies.Under Clause 49, it is binding upon the listed companies to fill 50 per cent of their boards with independent directors in case they have executive chairman and one-third in case they have non-executive chairman. 

“The solution suggested that corporate governance requirement should be less for PSUs is something I cannot persuade myself to agree with,” Damodaran said.

Notwithstanding the difficulties that PSUs face, solution must be found somewhere else and not in diluting corporate governance norms. The ONGC chairman said the oil navratna was unable to comply with Clause 49 as it requires government approval, which takes a long time.

Overall, the results show that the size of the world economy measured in PPP terms is smaller than previously estimated. Asia’s economies are one-third smaller than previously thought, largely because of the downgrades to China and India, while Africa’s are one-fourth smaller. The report has no bearing on the actual size of these economies, but rather looks at them with a different measuring tool. Many of these countries want the International Monetary Fund to take PPP into consideration when allocating voting s rights.

When measured by market exchange rates instead of PPP, China’s share of world GDP is just 5%, and India’s is less than 2% - about half of their size using PPP. That explains why the report may have political ramifications as fast-growing emerging markets fight for more say at the IMF. Emerging markets argue that the big industrialised countries have too much influence over the fund, in part because voting rights do not take into account PPP - something they hope will change in the IMF’s revised quota system.

The data shows that the world economy produced goods and services worth almost $55 trillion in 2005 and that almost 40 per cent of the world’s output came from developing economies. Carried out with the World Bank and other partners, the preliminary global report provides estimates of internationally comparable price levels and the relative purchasing power of currencies for 146 economies.

The estimates are based on purchasing power parities (PPPs) benchmarked to the year 2005. PPPs are used instead of exchange rates to convert national economic measures such as gross domestic products into a common currency. By taking into account price differences between countries, PPPs allow comparisons of market size, the structure of economies, and what money can buy.

Analysts believe that the findings of the report could have political ramifications in the influential voting system largely determined by buying power of economies, of multi-lateral funding agencies, including the International Monetary Fund.The GDP of high-income economies accounts for 61 per cent of the world economy, received by only 16% of the world’s population. Compared with previous estimates, the relative size of developing economies has decreased by 7 percentage points or one-sixth. 

THE WORLD GDP 1 

It would be a long time before the generation that went to college in the early mid-1970s began to take popular Indian cinema seriously, something like 20 years, in fact. In the last decade of the last century, some of the young film buffs who had spent their under graduate years watching Wajda and Fassbinder and Herzog and Tarkovsky returned to Indian popular cinema via the film studies route and began to illumine this intellectual area of darkness with both encyclopaedic and monographic work. And then, around the beginning of the new millennium, mainstream Hindi cinema, rebranded as Bollywood, became au courant in the West as some of the more famous names in the entertainment industry there acknowledged the appeal of Hindi film masala, the song and dance routines that define our cinema.

Some of this interest could be put down to novelty or fashion, but there was some evidence that the characteristic qualities of the Hindi film were finding admirers outside its traditional audiences. Bollywood Dreams, Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Hindi movie musical, was one straw in the wind, and Baz Luhrmann, the director of Moulin Rouge, acknowledged that the extravagant, over-the-top song-and dance routines in that musical were inspired by the ‘picturisation’ of Hindi film song sequences.

Because film critics, film directors and festival organisers seem to have developed an interest in the methods of Hindi films, this is a good time for us, as consumers of popular Indian cinema, to help them understand just how different our cinema is from theirs. The fundamental difference between their films and ours is that in Hollywood, it’s all right for both heroes and heroines to be good-looking. Not so in Hindi films. It is a rule in Hindi cinema, in particular, and Indian cinema, in general, that the heroine will be both good-looking and sexy, but the hero will be neither.

The best way of illustrating the truth of this is by citing examples. As you read the lists that follow, try and conjure up the faces attached to those names. Let’s start with the heroines: Gauhar Jan, Naseem Bano, Shobhana Samarth, Kanan Bala, Durga Khote, Fearless Nadia, Madhubala, Geeta Bali, Nargis, Suraiya, Meena Kumari, Waheeda Rahman, Sadhana, Sharmila Tagore, Hema Malini, Nutan, Saira Bano, Raakhee, Rekha, Zeenat Amman, Shabana Azmi, Dimple Kapadia, Madhuri Dixit, Aishwarya Rai, Tabu, Karisma Kapoor, Vidya Balan… this is a list at random in no particular order and I could go on. I don’t myself think that all these leading ladies were stunners, but most sane moviegoers would allow that, personal preferences apart, these were attractive and personable women.

Now consider the men: Prem Adib, Kundan Lal Saigal, Pradeep Kumar, Ashok Kumar, Premnath, Kishore Kumar, Raj Kapoor, Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand, Bharat Bhushan, Guru Dutt, Biswajeet, , Joy Mukherjee, Rajendra Kumar, Jeetendra, Shammi Kapoor, Shashi Kapoor, Dharmendra, Raaj Kumar, Shatrughan Sinha, Rajesh Khanna, Amitabh Bachchan, Ajay Devgan, Govinda, Naseeruddin Shah, Mithun Chakraborty, Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan, Hrithik Roshan, Anil Kapoor, Sunny Deol, Salman Khan, Govinda, Sunjay Dutt, Sunil Shetty, and so on. Now the extraordinary thing about this list is that with a few exceptions (Dilip Kumar was a persuasively broody lover, Dharmendra was an old-fashioned hunk, Shashi Kapoor was the pretty boy par excellence, and Aamir and Shah Rukh have some claim to cuteness), the men who figure in it are, by most standards of male beauty; aggressively unbeautiful.Ashok Kumar was a charming man, but he had the physical presence of a cupboard wearing a dressing gown. Kundan Lal Saigal was possibly the ugliest leading man in the history of world cinema. Rajesh Khanna, the first superstar, looked upholstered for most of his career, like a bolster wearing a guru shirt. Rajendra Kumar… well, what can you say? And yet, these men were serious stars.And it isn’t just the Hindi cinema. If you look south, the contrast is even more startling. Fat, lipsticked men with pencil moustaches - the one thin one I can think of, Prabhu Deva, has all the sex appeal of a stick insect. Sivaji Ganesan, Gemini Ganesan, Nageshwara Rao, M.G. Ramachandran, N.T. Rama Rao, Prabhu Deva, Kamal Haasan… after making every allowance for regional differences in popular notions of male beauty, you still have to explain why Rekha, Vyjayanthimala, Hema Malini, Padmini, Aishwarya Rai, Shilpa Shetty - South Indians al- need no allowances made for their looks.Historically, heroines have successfully moved between cinemas in different languages. From Padmini and Vyjayanthimala to Aishwarya Rai and Shilpa Shetty, girls from the South have been successful leading ladies in Hindi films. Reciprocally, North Indian heroines have starred in Tamil and Telegu films. But the reverse isn’t true. Heroes travel very badly. No South Indian, however big, has ever made it in Hindi cinema. Rajnikant, who is contemporary Tamil cinema’s greatest star, has made no impression on the box office in Hindi cinema. Nor has any Bengali actor been successful in Hindi films, not even the extraordinary Uttam Kumar: Amanush was a resounding flop.Why does Indian cinema deal in beautiful women and ugly men? It could be that since the audience for popular cinema is disproportionately made up of young, desperate, thwarted men, the heroine’s looks and sex appeal matter rather more than those of the hero. This sounds plausible, but as an explanation it just doesn’t work. It is an axiom in the film trade that the ‘initial’ of nearly all films, that is, the houses a film gets in the first few days after its opening, depends on the charisma of the hero. Thus, Amitabh Bachchan, Rajesh Khanna, Shah Rukh Khan, even Ajay Devgan and Govinda can (or could) ‘open’ a film on the strength of their names and guarantee full houses for days or weeks, but very few heroines have been able to do that. That’s why heroes are routinely paid more than heroines. This leads us to the bizarre conclusion that mainly male audiences buy tickets to adore indifferent-looking men.This is absurd, but true. The truth of this insight, however, depends upon the truth of a larger generalisation: Indian cinema favours good-looking women and bad-looking men because its audiences consist of good-looking women and bad-looking men. It’s rude to say this but the first thing that strikes the eye gazing upon India is that the men can be nearly as ugly as sin. The contrast between them and Indian women is striking: how delicate and vivid Indian women are, and how coarse, dull, and squab-like the men. You don’t have to take my word for it: cast your eye over mixed gatherings in classrooms, offices, weddings, literary festivals, protest marches. Indian women are routinely and radically better-looking than Indian men.

Indian heroes look the way they do because those desperate male audiences pay money to watch men like themselves succeed with beautiful women. And ticket-buying women? Think about it: what choice do they have? In nearly every arranged marriage in North India, you will hear an older woman say reassuringly: ‘Ladkon ki seerat dekhi jaati hai, soorat nahin’, which, roughly translated, reads: you look at a boy’s qualities, not his looks. Which, given Indian men, is just  as well. Hindi cinema is unfairly dismissed as escapism. It is, in fact, a great reality machine designed to remind Indian men of their good fortune and to reconcile Indian women to their fate. That’s why all Hindi films are musicals: without songs and ensemble dancing, the mandatory union of a succession of beautiful women with an endless supply of beastly men would be unbearable. Despite Moulin Rouge and Bollywood Dreams, the tricks of Hindi cinema are essentially unexportable. For the formula to work, you need quantities of ugly Indian men: both on the screen and in front of it.