Category: Journal
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The cricket bat: a block of willow, a rulebook and one argument about Kashmir
By Rafe Calder The rulebook is short on the subject of how a bat plays and long on how big it may be. That is the useful thing to know before buying, borrowing or admiring one. The laws set a ceiling. They do not set a standard of quality. What the law fixes The Marylebone…
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Two plants called cardamom, and the hills where one of them is picked in October
By Ines Keane The word covers two different plants. They share a name, a pod and a place on the spice shelf, and little else. Sorting them out is the first job, and the sources are clear about it. Green and black Wikipedia says green, or true, cardamom comes from Elettaria cardamomum, native to India’s…
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The lunch box that finds its own desk: how Mumbai’s dabbawalas sort 200,000 meals a day
By Porter Lang A lunch box leaves a kitchen in the suburbs in the late morning and is on a desk in a south Mumbai office by lunchtime. Nobody scans it. It carries no label that a stranger could read. It carries marks, and the marks are the system. This piece is about how that…
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Muga silk: one moth, one valley, a lot of rain
By Rafe Calder The facts about muga silk are short, and most of them fit in one sentence. It is made by the larvae of one moth, Antheraea assamensis, in one river valley, the Brahmaputra’s, in the Indian state of Assam. Wikipedia says so. Everything else is detail, and some of the detail does not…
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Gur country: what happens in a jaggery unit between November and February
By Porter Lang Start with the kit. A crusher. A furnace fed with dried cane waste. A wide pan. A rotating wheel to stir. A square pit, cemented, about 9.5 feet on a side. Then cloth-lined moulds. That is the equipment list given by Upper Crust, an Indian food magazine, for a gurhal, the local…
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Pattachitra: a painting that starts as a pile of cloth
By Ines Keane The first step is not a brush. It is a seed. Soak tamarind seeds in water for three days, grind them to a paste, and you have the glue that turns two layers of cotton into a painting surface. So says Sarmaya, a South Asian arts portal, and the other sources we…
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A mandarin that is named after a city and grown in seventeen districts
By Rafe Calder The fruit is called a Nagpur orange. It is not an orange. According to Wikipedia, it is a mandarin, Citrus reticulata, grown in Nagpur, Maharashtra, with a pockmarked exterior and sweet, juicy pulp. The name on paper Wikipedia says a Geographical Indication took effect in April 2014. Down To Earth, an environment…
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Small flowers, pale cloth, a block pressed by hand
By Isla Quinn Look closely. Not at the colour. At the edges. A real hand-block print has tiny slips where one stamp meets the next. Where it comes from Sanganer sits about 16 km south of Jaipur, says Outlook Traveller, a travel magazine. The magazine says its craft traditions predate the Pink City and that…
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Reading a tin of Kashmir saffron before you open it
By Porter Lang Treat saffron like any gear: check the spec first. The spec is short. A colour number, a grade, a place name and a harvest year. The rest is packaging. Why October matters Saffron is the dried stigma of a crocus. Wikipedia says each flower has a three-pronged style, each prong ending in…
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Weighing a sheer cloth
By Rafe Calder Chanderi is a cloth known for being light. That is the claim every source makes first, and the sources disagree about almost everything after it: how old the weave is, who brought it, what the warp is made of, and when it received its geographical indication. Where and what Chanderi is a…