Bird of the Day: Wilson’s Plover (Las Coloradas, Mexico)

Documentaries : Black Out by Eva Weber, children searching for the light

Short electricity cuts punctuate the day here in Kerala. As if to remind us, for a few seconds in our daily life, that the electricity fairy can play hard to get. Generators always kick in in an instant though, and that is it. Elsewhere, in Guinea for instance, generators are not there to save the day. 

Only about a fifth of Guinea’s people have access to electricity. With few families able to afford generators, school children have had to get creative to find a place to read, do their homework and study for exams. So every day during exam season, as the sun sets over Conakry, hundreds of children begin a nightly pilgrimage to the  G’bessia International Airport, to petrol stations and parks in wealthier areas of the city, searching for light.

Dispatch From Everest

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India Ink has a story about a group of young Indians collaborating in the upper reaches of the region’s mountains, at a time when many are celebrating the six decades-old historic accomplishment in the same region:

KHUMBU GLACIER —It was nearly 60 years ago this month that Tenzing Norgay, the Sherpa guide, and Sir Edmund Hillary from New Zealand scaled the highest peak in the world, Mount Everest.

Best of Salim E.I.: The Harvest Dance

In India Kerala is famous for its Tribal folk dances. There are more than fifty well-known popular folk dances in the state which are mostly performed for religious influences, during harvesting, sowing of seeds, festivals etc. Tribal dances are often accompanied by songs & instruments.

Bird of the Day – Changeable Hawk-Eagle (Tadoba Tiger Reserve, Maharashtra)

The logistics dilemma: double passenger scooter or double-decker lorry ?

My friends and I had been looking for one around town for an aftenoon, and finally I found it a week later driving away towards another town: a coir mat, the ideal support to make my salutations to the sun on. The small motorbike was actually part of a ‘caravan’ carrying people and mats from the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu.  So loaded it was uncanny, this one had either the most efficient engine or the best pilot because it made it to the top of the hill first and stopped there to wait for the others.

Barefoot College

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This organization and its founder came to our attention recently in a by-now familiar manner: our go-to podcast for interesting and inspiring stories of entrepreneurs, From Scratch, featuring Bunker Roy. Read about Barefoot College here and then click through their site to see more about their accomplishments:

In the late 60’s, a very small group of determined individuals in India, coming out of a sound educational system, felt it necessary to look for alternative ways of living, thinking and looking for rural solutions.