GREEN DOT

Kayaloram Heritage Lake Resort - a customer speaks.....

noreply@blogger.com (GREEN DOT) — Wed, 26 Jun 2013 02:29:00 +0000

“Had a very relaxing time in the resort. The management is very helpful. They will take care of Houseboat booking, the taxi, ayurveda massage. The food is delicious. The huts are made in the traditional style. A taste of the green concept making use of sunlight as much as possible. The location is in the lap of nature. One thing was missing was Internet in rooms but it is available at reception.” –Rajat Shukla

PEOPLE POWER SAVES A LAKE - together, we can do it.

noreply@blogger.com (GREEN DOT) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 10:07:00 +0000

It feels like a carnival at Ukkadam, home to the Periyakulam Lake. It is the final Sunday of volunteering, as the monsoons are expected any time now. School children are shrill with excitement, college students jump out of buses laughing and shouting out greetings; picnic umbrellas dot the area. The CRPF, the police and people from the Armed Forces work together in precision, as if performing a drill. Three hundred NCC cadets take up position. A large group of employees from a cement factory talk animatedly, while nearby, the entire team from a Tamil daily has shown up. “Instead of being only the observers who write about events, we unanimously decided to pitch in with volunteer work,” says one of them.
More cars and buses turn into the site, entire families on two-wheelers drive in. Several senior citizens take charge and direct people to the various areas from where they will begin digging. Bhanumati mamileans into a microphone and belts out a popular film song: Anne anne sippai anne; namba ooru nalla ooru, ippo romba kettu poche anne. The song is greeted with whistles, applause and requests for more songs. Mrs. Pandian, retired Botany teacher, sits on a bench taking down the names and contact details of those who have volunteered. Cousins S. Athmika and V.P. Shivani have been dragged out of bed on a Sunday morning by their grandfather. Someone from Krishnagiri offers to give a demo on how to bathe in one and a half litres of water.
Mud is shovelled into shallow metal and plastic basins (in blue, green and red) and passed from hand to hand. Snatches of IPL talk and loud instructions fill the air. Musicians join the fun. The murasu, melamand thapattam set the pace, and as they vary their pace, from slow to brisk, the tempo of work also increases. There is clapping and dancing. When they are not digging, people are taking pictures on their smart phones. Tempo travellers carrying tea, coffee, biscuits and buttermilk serve free food to the volunteers. Coimbatore’s famous Annapoorna has sponsored upma, khichdi and sweets for everyone.
Periyakulam used to be one of Coimbatore’s biggest lakes – spanning 320 acres, with a catchment area of 63 sq km — but it was gradually asphyxiated by water hyacinth, raw sewage and garbage till it became mere shimmers of water in a sprawling, muddy area, with orange specks interrupting the brown expanse. Last year, Siruthuli, the NGO dealing with water bodies in Coimbatore, took up the matter with the Government. The permit to work on the lake came through at the end of April and on May 1, the de-silting operations began under the direction of Coimbatore Corporation, Siruthuli, Residents Awareness Association of Coimbatore (RAAC) and the Vijayalakshmi Charitable Trust. Corporates have also pitched in. And the people of Coimbatore have showed up every Sunday to lend a hand.
In a little over a month the landscape has changed. Where there was once just garbage and undergrowth, there is now clean and scrub-free ground. Round-the-clock work has cleared the humongous mess and made way for bunds. Five Poclain earth movers swing, dip, scoop and dump vast quantities of soil from one place to another. More than 8000 volunteers pour onto the bed of the lake and imitate those actions. Forming a human chain, they bend, scoop, pass and throw pots filled with soil on to a growing mound that is part of a 20-ft wide, six-and-a-half kilometre long bund around the lake. Four islands have been painstakingly created at the centre of the dry lake. Saplings will be planted on them and along the bund. Seventy per cent of the work is complete.
“When I was a kid, I used to think Periyakulam was an ocean,” says 60-year-old A.R. Basheer Ahmed, who has always lived near the lake. “It was huge. Karuvelam trees grew in the middle of the lake and I remember the birds singing.” He and his friends played around the lake. Basheer is just one of the 700 others residents of Ukkadam who have come to help. “We want our lake to regain its lost beauty. At a time when divisive forces are at work, we need to join hands for more such causes,” he says. He hopes there will be a walking track created around the lake, just like old times.
Why do they do it? “I know machines can do the same job we are doing and more efficiently, but the personal satisfaction we get is unmatched,” says N. Thulasidas, vice-president of the Indian National Cement Worker’s Federation, who has come with a 52-strong team. “We came prepared for more than just two hours of work. When people come together for a cause such as this, it will definitely succeed. We hope we will soon be able to boat on this lake.”
Lalit Mahesh, who has just graduated from school, has come here with friends from Pollachi. He says, “People can do what earthmovers cannot. They can inspire. To see the work happening firsthand is very satisfying.” Lalit is well aware of the water situation in Tamil Nadu and the world. “Tamil Nadu faces an 11 per cent water deficit,” he says. “By 2045, that deficit will increase dramatically. Already, one person out of three in the world has no access to potable water.”
For 51-year-old B. Ganesh, the lake represents livelihood. It provided his daily catch for 18 years. But it became progressively difficult for him and his fellow fishermen to eke out a living. “The lake used to be so beautiful in the mornings when I set out with my friends for my daily catch. We used to enjoy drinking the fresh water that was available in plenty even a decade ago.” The fishermen have volunteered with clean-up efforts in the past, and they welcome this drive wholeheartedly as well.
M. Lukman, a fruit vendor, has spent all his life near the lake. “It teemed with birds, and the greenery and water made it look like something out of an English travel channel,” he says. He hopes this initiative will improve the plight of other wetlands as well, as the livelihood of several fishermen has been severely affected. “Plenty more needs to be done, but I have faith that the lake will be restored to its original glory.”
Many people share this belief. What is happening at Periyakulam is more than just physicalshramdaan, or donation of labour, as R. Raveendran of RAAC says. “When the lake comes alive, we will know we had something to do with it. This ownership will ensure that we will never let it come to such a pass again.”
- courtesy THE HINDU

Anaimudi - the tallest peak in South India.

noreply@blogger.com (GREEN DOT) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 09:40:00 +0000

noreply@blogger.com (GREEN DOT) — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 05:25:00 +0000

SAVE OUR PLANET, SAVE OURSELVES.

noreply@blogger.com (GREEN DOT) — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 04:35:00 +0000

Yet another dose of irreverence from the folks at MAD.

noreply@blogger.com (GREEN DOT) — Tue, 14 May 2013 07:30:00 +0000

TWITTER TRIVIA- holiday moods

noreply@blogger.com (GREEN DOT) — Thu, 02 May 2013 00:03:00 +0000

People’s tweets get significantly more positive in mood the greater the distance they are from home.
Feeling low? Over-worked, anxious, bored with life? A holiday will do your mood a world of good, there’s scientific proof. This is the latest dispatch from an emerging discipline in which social-networking media are mined to gauge people’s moods and opinions. Twitter is one of the most fertile sources of information for this kind of study, partly because comments are less guarded and self-conscious than responses to questionnaires (the social scientist’s traditional means of sampling opinion) but also because huge amounts of data are available, with automatically searchable content. What’s more, Twitter feeds sometimes come accompanied with useful information such as the tweeter’s profile and location.

Previous studies in the field of “twitterology” have, for example, monitored the spread of news, the demographics of different languages, and the correlations between obesity and expressions of hunger in particular populations. Since changes in public mood like brewing social unrest will show up on Twitter and other social media, governments, police forces and security organisations are showing an increasing interest in mining networks, raising questions about the right balance between privacy and security. Meanwhile, spotting the emergence and propagation of trends are a gift to marketing departments.

The new study of the link between happiness and geographical location takes advantage of the “garden hose” public-access feed for Twitter, which makes freely available a random 10% of all messages posted. This provided the researchers with four billion tweets from the year 2011 to analyse.

The researchers were interested in how the mood expressed in the messages correlated with the location from which they were sent, they sifted through this immense data set to pick out those tweets that were accompanied by the precise latitude and longitude of the sender’s mobile phone – a facility optionally available for tweets, which uses the Global Positioning System (GPS) to locate the message’s origin within a 10m (32ft) radius. About 1% of the messages included this information, giving a data set of 37 million messages sent by more than 180,000 individuals from all over the planet.

However, identifying where the sender is situated doesn’t in itself reveal what the researchers wanted to know. They were interested in how the message content varied with distance from home. But how could they know where “home” was?

It turns out that positional information disclosed by our mobile phones reveals this pretty clearly. In 2008 a team of researchers in the US used the locations of mobile phones – recorded by phone companies whenever calls are made – to track the trajectories of 100,000 (anonymised) individuals. They found that, as we might imagine, we tend to return over and over again to certain places, especially our homes and workplaces, and only rarely venture very far from these locations.
In much the same way, researchers could figure out the most common locations for each individual in their survey, and how widely the person tended to roam from those places. They found that people generally have two such preferred locations, just a short distance apart, which they attributed to the home and workplace.

How, then, do the messages differ when individuals are at home, at work, or further away? To assess the “happiness” of a tweet, the team of scientists developed what they call a ‘hedonometer’: an algorithm that searches the text for words implying a positive or enjoyable context (such as “new”, “great”, “coffee” and “lunch”) or a negative one (“no”, “not”, “hate”, “damn”, “bored”). On this basis the ‘hedonometer’ assigns each message a happiness score.
The findings report that the average happiness score first declines slightly for distances of around 1 km (0.62 miles) – the kind of distance expected for a short commute to work – and then rises steadily with increasing distances of up to several thousand kilometers. What’s more, individuals with a larger typical roaming radius use happy words more often – a result that probably reflects the higher socioeconomic status of such jet-setting types.

So it seems we’re least happy at work and most happy when we are farthest from home. At least, that’s the case for the roughly 15% of American adults who use Twitter, or to be even more cautious, for the English-speaking subset of those who chose to ‘geotag’ their tweets. One key question is whether this sample is representative of the population as a whole – Twitter is less used among older people, for example. It’s also an open question whether expressions of happiness in tweets are a true indicator of one’s state of mind – are you less likely to tweet about your holiday when the weather is awful and the family is fractious? But such quibbles aside, you might want to consider that costly flight to Bermuda or Kathmandu after all.

noreply@blogger.com (GREEN DOT) — Wed, 01 May 2013 12:59:00 +0000

DAMNED! The curse of the Vembanad.

noreply@blogger.com (GREEN DOT) — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 06:43:00 +0000

India's band-tailed (Palla's) fish eagle, a relative of the bald eagle is threatened by a number of anthropogenic factors and is listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List (2012). In India, home to one of three major breeding populations for this bird of prey, the species is in great jeopardy from an invasive species. The introduction and spread of water hyacinth in the backwaters of Kerala has challenged the ability of this raptor to fish. Water hyacinth---a free-floating perennial aquatic plant native to South America has spread over all the lakes in the backwater making the finding of prey difficult. Despite its widespread distribution this bird is rarely seen in some range countries with breeding populations. (J. Schaul)

CATCH FISH, EAT FISH...very very fishy.

noreply@blogger.com (GREEN DOT) — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 06:05:00 +0000

BOOK NOW. CALL 0484 2364480/2360970/ +91 9846661397

BAR HEADED GOOSE -The world's highest flying migratory bird

noreply@blogger.com (GREEN DOT) — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 05:55:00 +0000

India's bar-headed goose is the world's highest flying migratory bird. They don't just fly by Mt. Everest on their way to breeding grounds---they fly over it along with other high peaks that comprise the Himalayan range. They breed in Central Asia and winter in South Asia (Jordan S.)

Weekend lunch beside the backwaters of Alleppey?

noreply@blogger.com (GREEN DOT) — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 05:59:00 +0000

Feel the love. Greetings from Kerala.

noreply@blogger.com (GREEN DOT) — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 03:00:00 +0000

A journey home? Traveling with a sense of responsibility.

noreply@blogger.com (GREEN DOT) — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 08:25:00 +0000

Afternoon Vembanad Lake - note the floating beer bottle . Please travel responsibly, this environment is fragile. As is our planet.

Country boat rides - Kayaloram Lake Resort

noreply@blogger.com (GREEN DOT) — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 12:19:00 +0000

A group of women travel in a country boat on the Vembanad Lake

Travel is.........

noreply@blogger.com (GREEN DOT) — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 12:11:00 +0000

Picnic on Pathiramanal island when you stay at Kayaloram Lake Resort.

noreply@blogger.com (GREEN DOT) — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 11:04:00 +0000

Eravikulam National Park to close

noreply@blogger.com (GREEN DOT) — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 04:51:00 +0000

The Eravikulam National Park, abode of the highly endangered , (Nilgiritragus hylocrius), will remain closed to visitors till April 4. Chief Wildlife Warden V. Gopinathan said the two-month closure was an annual affair during the calving season of the tahrs.

The closure was ordered on the basis of a report submitted by K.V. Subramanian, Field Director (Project Tiger), that the calving season of these mountain goats had begun at the park. Mr. Subramanian told The Hindu that kids were seen from the later part of January. Many of the female tahrs were heavily pregnant.

The mating season of the tahrs is between June and August and the gestation period is nearly six months. Females give birth to a single calf, though occasionally a mother with two kids has been observed. Births peak during February, and the kids are instinctively wary of human presence.

Mr. Subramanian said the newly born calves were very vulnerable to disturbances and diseases. The kids followed their mothers for the first two months and were weaned in six months. He said the calves accompanied their mothers to the Rajamala tourism zone of the 97 sq km park. But the large number of visitors to the tourism zone made the calves vulnerable to contracting diseases.

Mr. Subramanian said the tahr population at the park was stable at around 800. An estimate taken in 2010 showed the population as 776; in 2011 it was 831, and in 2012, 789. The number of kids during the calving season was estimated at 70. Wild dogs, leopards, and even tigers are the main predators of the Nilgiri Tahr. Disease and accidents also claim some of them.

The adult males are called saddlebacks since they develop a light grey area on their backs. The Nilgiri tahrs are the only species of Caprine ungulates found south of the Himalayas. The tahr, the State animal of Tamil Nadu, which was driven to the brink of extinction during the second half of the 19th century made a spectacular comeback mainly owing to the early interventions of the Nilgiri Game Association and the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972. There are now plans to reintroduce the tahr in its original habitats of Glenmorgan Mountains in the Nilgiris and the Thirukurungudi mountain ranges of the Kalakad-Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve in Tamil Nadu from where it disappeared years ago.

-Courtesy The Hindu

VERDURE,WILD,WAYANAD. EXPLORE!

noreply@blogger.com (GREEN DOT) — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 05:28:00 +0000

noreply@blogger.com (GREEN DOT) — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 04:29:00 +0000

GREEN DOT: Authentic Ayurveda Packages

noreply@blogger.com (GREEN DOT) — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 01:34:00 +0000

GREEN DOT: Authentic Ayurveda Packages

Speak to Soju Soman at +91 9846661397

Mir Resorts Wishes You A Merry Christmas.

noreply@blogger.com (GREEN DOT) — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 02:47:00 +0000

Broccoli, Walnut and Mushroom

noreply@blogger.com (GREEN DOT) — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 09:52:00 +0000

lake fishing packages- the sun is out and the fish will bite

noreply@blogger.com (GREEN DOT) — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 14:33:00 +0000

Lake Symphony - backwater boutique resort

noreply@blogger.com (GREEN DOT) — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 14:27:00 +0000

Standard rooms

Lake front deluxe room

dining area

Dawn breaks over the backwater. View from lake front rooms.

lake front suite

View of Lake Symphony from the water

Sunrise over the backwater. View from lake front rooms

Overview
Set beside the placid Kaithapuzha backwater in suburban Kochi, the Lake Symphony Resort is a delightful little eco friendly boutique resort set in stunningly beautiful surroundings. Lake Symphony offers a suite and deluxe cottage facing the backwater and a set of deluxe rooms set away from the waterline, all equipped with modern amenities. Private sit outs in all the rooms look out at a row of Chinese fishing nets, a vast spread of backwater beyond and the Kochi skyline on the western horizon. A small pool set on the lawn between the lake facing cottages is fringed by rows of pretty flowers and stunted palms. Further on, beside the water’s edge in a clearing beneath a clump of trees, tables and chairs set beneath palm thatched umbrellas that serves as the resorts dining area.
Look out from the expansive ceiling to floor windows, past the row of Chinese fishing nets; a dawn with a marmalade sunrise, bloated by early morning haze. Stirred by a gentle breeze, the water ripples and gurgles, fishermen go about the day’s business, canoes float past serenely, fishing nets dip ponderously into the lake; make friends and you could get a part of the days catch for lunch. Numerous birds call out across the humid air elevating the soul. Slowly, life’s little secrets come to life, made profound. Drawing the day to an end, fluffy pink cotton candy clouds float into view riding a gentle evening breeze, slowly spreading across the western horizon.

Accommodation
Built of eco friendly mud plastered walls that breathe freely and keep the interiors insulated from the heat outside, the cottages and rooms consists of a bedroom, a tastefully furnished living area, a fully equipped bathroom and a sit out that looks out at a row of Chinese fishing nets and a spread of backwater beyond. All the rooms are equipped with the state of the art in amenities.

Dining
The kitchen serves a limited menu of South Indian cuisine and beverages. Dining area with tables set under palm leaf thatch roofs and views of the backwater and in room dining.

Activities
A backwater cruise on a traditional houseboat equipped with all modern amenities is an absolute must-do. If you desire the resident chef will cook the days catch in the traditional way. Traditional canoes with a boatman are also available to explore the waterways. Yacht on request, heritage area tour in Kochi, lake fishing, indoor board games and badminton.

Facilities
Air port and railway station transfers, doctor on call, guided tour to destinations, campfire facilities, Wi-fi, Ayurvedic massages and treatments on request.