Life & Style

“When you sit with an organic farmer in the Nilgiris, understand the labour behind each ingredient, and then taste a dish created by a celebrated chef from the country, something shifts internally,” says Ramya Reddy, founding donor and festival director of The Nilgiris Earth Festival (TNEF) 2025. The TNEF returns for its fourth edition from December 18 to 21 in the heart of the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve across Udhagamandalam, Coonoor, and Kotagiri with over a dozen experiences rooted in food, culture, and ecology.

A guided tour of native native shola-grassland species of the Nilgiri Plateau is part of the festival
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

The Chef’s Table, Bengal to Nilgiris, will partner with Sienna Calcutta, one of India’s most celebrated restaurants, whose team, led by chef Avinandan Kundu, will craft a meal that brings Bengal’s culinary artistry into dialogue with the Nilgiris produce. “A huge highlight this year is Sienna Calcutta. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience for our guests,” adds Ramya. Each course draws on produce from local farmers and cooperatives, including TOHFA (The Nilgiris Organic Horticulture Farmers’ Association), a weekly market for organic produce of small farmers in the Nilgiris, and Aadhimalai, a collective of local indigenous producers.

Chef Avinandan Kundu
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

Since 2022, the festival has brought together thought leaders, writers, artists, chefs, farmers, ecologists, residents, indigenous communities, well-wishers, and travellers to talk about shared stewardship. Writer and educator Afshan Mariam from Sky Islands will lead Edible Memories, a sensory workshop on food as a living archive of migration and belonging. Archaeologist Suresh Sethuraman, in collaboration with Vanavarayar Foundation, will present Stories in Stone, a guided walk tracing Ooty’s layered heritage. Suresh Belliraj and the women of his family will host Ammana Hittu: From a Badaga Mother’s Kitchen at Odae, Aravenu, a Badaga kitchen gathering that celebrates community and cuisine.

Soft shell crab
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

Ecologist Vasanth Bosco opens his nursery-garden for guided tours where visitors will step into a sanctuary where more than 150 native shola-grassland species of the Nilgiri Plateau, plants once nearly erased from much of the landscape, are being tenderly grown back into existence. “Our ecology walks are immersive. When you walk into a native grass nursery and hear directly from an ecologist, the connection becomes real,” explains Ramya adding that all the events are intentionally small-format with very gentle footprints, many can’t even hold 15 people. “This is not a scale-driven festival. It’s a sensitive region, so we keep experiences intimate and meaningful. We also want to raise awareness about conscious travel, another reason everything is small and controlled.” The Heritage Table, Food and Fun Fete co-created by Inside43, will bring together settler cuisines, storytelling, and local music. There will also be a Ginko Solstice Walk, a haiku-led landscape walk with poet Shobhana Kumar at Cairn Hill, Udhagamandalam.

Listening to the Forest (curated especially for donors and friends of TNEF) is a guided immersion by Rohan Mathias, associate producer of Nilgiris: A Shared Wilderness, which combines nature walks, a film conversation, night listening in the jungle, and a morning birding session, all of which are crucial reflections on eco-conscious travel. At Tranquilitea, fourth-generation planter Sandeep Subramani will host an estate visit and a tasting of organic, high-grown, fine Nilgiri teas, followed by a short session in making hand-rolled tea and a special tea menu.

One of the sessions is on tasting of organic, high-grown, fine Nilgiri teas
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

This year, they have expanded the ecology segment significantly and The Habba 2025 at the Keystone Foundation, Kotagiri, a full, vibrant day of indigenous food, music, and conversation has grown bigger. “We are also hosting the official screening of Wild Tamil Nadu, directed by Kalyan Varma, a celebrated, Emmy award-nominated filmmaker followed by a conversation with Supriya Sahu IAS, Guest of Honour, Principal Secretary (Environment, Climate Change and Forests), Government of Tamil Nadu, and Kalyan Varma.” Supriya Sahu will present the TNEF Award 2025 honourin grassroots leadership in conservation, and culture in the Nilgiris. Guest speakers will be Madhu Chandan of Organic Mandya and Divya Mudappa and TR Shankar Raman of Nature Conservation Foundation, who will share grounded perspectives on conservation and sustainable food systems.

From one of the previous sessions at the Habba
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

At the Habba, over 15 communities from across the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve will share their foods and crafts, with a free indigenous lunch open to all. Says Ramya, “The festival is a conduit. We want people to come, experience the place deeply, and then support the ongoing conservation projects. It is more than a gathering, a bridge that connects the Nilgiris with the sensitive projects under the Nilgiris Forever movement, with donors and supporters who care deeply about this landscape. The larger goal is bringing stewardship to the Nilgiris.”

From December 18 to 21 at locations across Udhagamandalam, Coonoor, and Kotagiri. To register, visit tnef.thenilgirisfoundation.org/

Published – November 28, 2025 11:54 am IST

On a warm afternoon, we were sitting in Phuphee’s kitchen toasting makkai (corn) to make soatt (ground corn). Phuphee would make large batches of makkai saott around late August when the last of the corn is harvested. We were chatting, when someone ran in shouting. It was a lady from the village and she begged Phuphee to come straight away as someone’s noashe (daughter-in-law) had been possessed by a jinn.

Phuphee grabbed her keep (top part of the Kashmiri burqa) and the three of us ran into the village where everyone was gathered around Dar Sahab’s house. Even from a distance we could see the youngest daughter-in-law looking wild, her hair flying around her. She kept screaming at her mother-in-law who looked visibly scared.

As soon as the mother-in-law saw Phuphee, she started weeping and asking her to cure the girl of the jinn. The daughter-in-law, whose name was Shama, continued screaming, repeating the same thing over and over again: ‘Baeti ches insaan [I am also human].’

Phuphee went over to Shama and held her hands in her own until she started to calm down. Phuphee then took off her keep and wrapped it around Shama and led her into the house. She asked the mother-in-law to make a cup of nun chai with a dollop of ghee. From her pocket, she handed her a small packet with makkai soatt and instructed her to put it in the tea. Phuphee and Shama went upstairs and an hour later, Phuphee emerged on her own.

‘She is sleeping now. Do not disturb her. Let her rest,’ Phuphee instructed them.

She took the mother-in-law into the kitchen. Ten minutes later she came out, and we left. As we walked back home, I asked Phuphee what had happened to Shama.

She motioned for us to sit under a chinar tree. She took a couple of cigarettes from her pheran pocket and lit them. After she had smoked for a couple of minutes, she said, ‘Shama has a very serious illness. She has to have treatment for a long time. The treatment is long and difficult, and the cure isn’t guaranteed. She is unable to do anything at home now. She cannot look after the house or the children or even herself for that matter.’

Phuphee went quiet and smoked her cigarettes. It seemed like she was trying to solve something in her mind. When she had finished, we got up and went home. Once she got back, she asked one of the helpers to bring us nun chai and soatt. I asked her if she had given the mother-in-law a taaveez for Shama. She smiled as she mixed spoonfuls of soatt into the nun chai for me.

‘When I mix the soatt with the tea, it seems to disappear, but it is still there. It is the same with words,’ she said.

Phuphee explained that Shama’s mother-in-law had two sons. Both were married. Shama was the eldest daughter-in-law. When the younger son got married, his wife had become very unwell for a number of years. Though she had recovered and lived a normal life, she was constantly reminded of the time when she had been riddled with illnesses. Now, Shama had become unwell. And it had transpired that the mother-in-law went around telling everyone about how ‘goednyeth aes laktyis sakhti, waen che baedyis [first the youngest son had a difficult life and now the eldest]’.

Someone in the village had relayed this information to Shama. Upon hearing these words, Shama had felt a fire take hold of her heart. What had particularly angered her was that her mother-in-law had made no comments about how awful it was for Shama to be in this situation. Shama had asked Phuphee, ‘Why when I am the one who is ill, is my discomfort secondary to everyone else’s? How has it become about the discomfort of others?’

‘What did you say?’ I asked Phuphee.

‘I said nothing. Shama already knows the answers,’ Phuphee replied.

I sat there wondering what she already knew.

‘But did you give them a taaveez?’ I asked impatiently.

Phuphee sighed.

‘Yes I did, but it was not for Shama. I told her the jinn had not possessed Shama. It had possessed her [mother-in-law] and the only way to kill it was through abstinence of speech. She must limit what she says to the absolute minimum and she must never speak more than two words in front of Shama because that would especially strengthen the jinn,’ Phuphee said.

She then got up, gave me a kiss on my forehead, and said, ‘Never, forget this. There is a special place in hell for women who deprive other women of their autonomy. Men make the shackles, but it is often other women who throw away the key.’ And she walked out to grind the rest of the corn.

I sat there, overwhelmed. Many years later, I understood why she had shut the mother-in-law’s mouth. It was an act that seemed insignificant, but it gave Shama a little space. In a world designed by men and propagated by many women, a world where women have no ownership over anything, not even their pain or discomfort in illness, Phuphee had managed to lift the mother-in-law’s foot off Shama’s neck long enough for her to breathe.

Saba Mahjoor, a Kashmiri living in England, spends her scant free time contemplating life’s vagaries.

Published – November 28, 2025 11:48 am IST

Late evening at Bengaluru’s Sankey Tank is a spectacular visual experience, dusk-kissed skies turning the lake’s water molten while the park’s other regulars — amblers, brisk walkers, couples in love, runners, cormorants, ducks and red slider turtles (pets-turned-invaders) — slowly recede into the darkness. It is also when flying foxes, who have been roosting on the trees bordering this man-made lake, named after the man who built it in 1882 to meet the city’s water supply needs, wake up. 

Roundglass Sustain’s recently-released film Batman and the Baavali, a documentary that showcases the nocturnal world of bats with bat conservationist Rohit Chakravarty, captures this stunning moment: swathes of these fruit bats flying across the park at dusk, silhouetted against the darkening skies, some even dipping down to skim the surface of the lake to hydrate themselves.

“They go down to the water…make a splash with their chest…head off to the nearest tree…and drink water from the wet fur,” explains Rohit, in the film. “And all of this is happening bang in the middle of a city.”

Rohit, whose work with bats often take him to remote, far-flung places, says spotting these flying foxes in the heart of the city was one of his most satisfying moments. “While I would have expected bats to be there, I didn’t go looking for them,” he says, pointing out that almost every city in India has bats, but we simply do not notice them. “Bats are in places where you would least expect them, and there are many such places in Bengaluru.” 

Making the film

Bats are often found in the heart of our cities
| Photo Credit:
Roundglass Sustain

Batman and the Baavali, whose soundtrack has been created by sound artist Nikhil Narendra with bat echolocation calls, introduces viewers to some of these places. These include the canopies of the many Singapore Cherry trees that dot the city, an abandoned building, the IISc campus and even the Parsi Tower of Silence.

The film follows Rohit, bat-detector in hand, trawling through the city, looking for and identifying bats in the various nooks and crannies as well as amidst the tree cover. Dheeraj Aithal who co-directed this film with Pradeep Hegde, says,“ We were quite sure we wanted it to be a journey because both Pradeep and I were curious about where these bats went.”

They would often see bats flying out in the evening or flying in at dawn, but never really knew where they roosted, so “that was something on our minds, and we thought that through this journey, we might get the answer to this question.” 

According to Samreen Farooqui, the head of films at Roundglass Sustain, the genesis of the film stretches back several years. “We started Roundglass Sustain five or six years ago with the mindset that the wild is far away. But slowly we realised that the wild was right here; you just have to open your eyes to see it.”

This, in turn, led to a series of films, set in different cities in India, focussing on how urban centres too support diverse plants and animals. When she wanted to do a series on the urban wildlife of Bengaluru, in 2022 or so, she reached out to Pradeep and Dheeraj, and they “started to brainstorm on what we can bring in, when it comes to Bengaluru.”

Bats, she says, came up early in that conversation. “I live very close to the Bellandur lake, and there is a reserve forest there,” says Samreen, who would often see the bats roosting there in the evenings. “So they were anyway on my mind.” And, so, when Pradeep and Dheeraj got involved and proposed this idea of following Rohit as he tried to find bats in Bengaluru, “the project took wings,” she says. 

Bats and the city

Bats at Sankey Tank
| Photo Credit:
Roundglass Sustain

Bats, of which there are around 1,500 species worldwide, are the second most common group of mammals after rodents and the only one capable of true flight. Around 135 of them live in India alone, “with something like 10-15 species in Bengaluru,” says Rohit.

Though humans have coexisted with bats for hundreds of thousands of years there is often a negative perception about them. Not only does folklore and literature often associate bats with death and darkness, but now, humans fear them more because they are known to serve as natural reservoirs of many viruses. 

However, bats also offer vital ecosystem services:  “They feed on a lot of insects; even a small bat of about 5 grams can eat up to 25% of its body-weight, something like a 1,000 mosquito-sized insects a night,” he says.

Given that they are some of the few animals that prey on mosquitoes and there are so many bats all around us, it adds up to a lot of insects. Moreover, bats are among the most prolific dispersers of seeds and “in a forested environment, they are one of the major pollinators,” says Rohit, who believes that the best way to conserve bats is simply to leave them alone.

Pradeep hopes that the film succeeds in giving out “the right information about bats, given that there is so much misinformation about them,” he says, pointing out that people simply do not know enough about bats. “Ever since college, I’ve heard people speak of bats flying over roofs or across the cityscape in the evening, but they did not always know what they were,” he says. Many people imagined them to be birds, instead of the flying mammals that they are, “so we thought that this was an important story to tell.”  

Filming these bats took longer than they expected, “because we underestimated the number of permits we needed from different departments, given that we were shooting in places like Sankey Tank and Bugle Rock,” says Pradeep.

However, the process also made them realise something important: “A lot of places where these bats roost are mostly government properties, essentially places which have not changed much,” notes Dheeraj.

It is the presence of these untouched pockets, as well as the deep concern that many people have in protecting the city’s environment, which allow urban fauna like bats or lorises to thrive in Bengaluru, believes Samreen. “For me, it was an affirmation that Bengaluru has a great civil society that cares about its environment, and I’m happy that we are documenting it, in whatever small way possible,” she says. 

Rapper MC Couper’s new track ‘Dayumm’ is about identity—a spirited celebration of the self. “I am confident about who I am now and the track is a reflection of that,” he says. ‘Dayumm’, which dropped three weeks ago, has a playful vibe with funky kuthu beats backing Couper’s characteristic flow. “I usually let the song do its thing, but here, a lot of thought has gone into the video, as well,” he says.

The video was shot at his apartment and features him “in his space”, being himself and gaming. “In this day and age, your visual game has to be top notch. I try to keep the visual aspect of my videos more in sync with who I am,” he says.

Though much of his writing now is spontaneous, he does go into self-imposed writing camps, something he used to do in his initial years. These camps are when he experiments with linguistic texture and lyricism. ‘Dayumm’ was born out of one such camp, says Couper. “It came together in a matter of hours. The ‘ratatata’ in the song is the pen going off,” he explains.

Couper like to detail his verses; keeping it real, reflecting on life, identity, social realities and personal choices. Powerful lyrics don’t always have to stem from a place of anger, he says. “Most of us (rappers) start out angry. The stress, the frustration… and hip-hop is a powerful tool for self expression,” says Couper, “but I think I have moved on from there. For me, it has been about personal growth. I am comfortable in my skin. Now, my art is often about the people that I really love in my life. Hip-hop is a locally-rooted art form. It is about owning your identity.” 

MC Couper
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

Couper was among the earliest artistes to break into the hip-hop scene in Kerala with his 2019 debut release ‘Nerchapaattu’,which was more of an experiment, says Couper. He built his repertoire, word by word. Fast, powerpacked verses that made people take note. Always inclined to languages, Couper was more fluent in English. ‘Nerchapaattu’ was spontaneous and it made him realise he was as felicitous with Malayalam.

He was inspired by American rappers Eminem, Mac Miller and J Cole. “Artistes such as Mac Miller and J Cole taught me that one can rap about feelings, create emotionally resonant verses. That was a turning point in my writing,” says Couper.

He soon created his own space in Kerala’s nascent hip-hop scene. ‘Ayyayyo’, a track featuring him, with Thirumali, Hanumankind and Parimal Shais in 2023, broke the internet and everyone was talking about the “Malabar boys from the south side.” 

The tryst with films helped. Having written and performed for Aavesham, Romancham, Purusha Pretham, Naradan, Nadikar – he co-wrote ‘Mathapithakkale’ from Aavesham and sang it too, along with Malayali Monkeys and sang ‘Thalatherichavar’ in Romancham along with Zia Ul Haq, both of which became instant hits. “That is the thing about films. It opens up an entire world,” says Couper.

MC Couper
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

He was in the eye of a controversy recently when a few people from the crowd gathered for a show in Kannur, started hurling abuses at the performing artistes. Couper reacted and videos of the incident went viral. “We did not expect this kind of intolerance. A junior artiste was performing and it really shook him. Hip-hop is a community thing. You need to stand up for your people and that was what I did,” he says.

“Every gig is a challenge; you are in a very vulnerable space while on the stage. Over the years, I have gained confidence. At the end of the day, it is about connecting with people,” says Couper.

He has an entire list of tracks coming up — ‘Chaappa Kurishu’ with producer Akash Shravan, ‘Mannira’ with songwriter and producer Loozmathai, ‘Atta‘ with music producer Hrishi. So, when does he take a break? “Life and work coincide. I don’t really take a break, except to play Xbox,” he says.