Monthly Archives: February 2016

Milk and honey flow at Kulamavu

Each member in this Kudumbasree team has four cows and the unit sells 300 bottles of milk daily — in an autorickshaw.

IdukkiKERALA28feb2016

They were just homemakers and their husbands were small-scale farmers. But now their lives have changed. Each member of the 11-member team of the Thanima Kudumbasree unit at Kulamavu is now making a monthly income of Rs.20,000 by selling milk.

The Ksheera Sagaram Scheme of the Kudumbasree district mission supported by the Agriculture Technology Management Agency (ATMA) gave them an opportunity to buy cows and locally distribute milk on the model of the Nature Fresh project implemented at Edavetti grama panchayat in the district.

Thanima members locally distribute the milk in bottles and the remaining milk is given to the dairy cooperative society at Arakulam.

“Each woman member has four cows and it is possible for the consumers to identify the milk supplied by each member through the number affixed to the bottles,” said Ancy Vinod, a member.

Fresh produce

They carry the milk in an autorickshaw to homes, tea shops, and hotels. “Fresh milk is locally made available in the morning and afternoon,” she said.

The self-help group president Thressiamma said they sell 300 bottles of milk every day at Kulamavu. The aim is to make available quality and fresh milk on the doorsteps, she said adding that they sell milk in 650- millilitre bottles at Rs.31 and 375-millilitre bottles at Rs.17.

They have no plans to increase the price. Instead, they want to make more value-added products available in the market. The team is also planning to buy more cows.

Expert advice

They follow scientific methods in growing the cows and took the advice of experts for building cow sheds.

The members were trained under the experts in the Government Veterinary College, Mannuthy.

The Agriculture Department also takes them for study tours to learn about model dairy farms outside the district.

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> National> Kerala / by Giji K. Raman / Idukki – February 28th, 2016

Her telling sketches

Prabha Mallya. Photo: Thulasi Kakkat / The Hindu
Prabha Mallya. Photo: Thulasi Kakkat / The Hindu

The animal kingdom is celebrated in the works of Prabha Mallya, illustrator of popular books related to the field

Lola would creep tenaciously into the drawings of Prabha Mallya. The orange coloured office cat, naughty and doted upon, invariably entered the works until she evolved into a pert little side character. “She walked in and out of my drawings,” recollects the young illustrator witha proclivity for birds and animals. The feline’s conspicuous omnipresence, caught in her different moods, was noticed and led to Prabha’s first major assignment – illustrating Nilanjana Roy’sThe Wildings, a story on urban wild life. This was followed by another work, related to the wild, for popular writer Vikram Seth’s Beastly Tales From Here and There and then the sequel to Roy’s work. It established Prabha as a graphic illustrator in an evolving field of graphic story telling. The artist, writer was in the city to conduct a sketching workshop at Studio Kokaachi in Panampilly Nagar.

LeopardKERALA22feb2016

Prabha’s world of drawings is peopled by creatures from the animal kingdom, her main aim currently veering toward animal activism. She believes that such visibility will help the cause of wildlife conservation and the rescue of unlucky animals who stray into human habitation. Stray cats, dogs and leopards caught in the crossfire of urbanisation are sketched by her. Her Jungle Book illustrations are on wolves.

“I find it fascinating that such a large animal, like the leopard, lives alongside human habitation; it observes us quietly,” she says on her series Found Lepard, where her leopards get spotted and are found. Her fascination for the wild originates in spending a childhood, growing up singly, near a forest in Goa.

Free time then was about observing the wild, writing stories on it and illustrating the creatures that inhabited therein. She did so along with her cousin. The Nancy Drew type thrillers were illustrated and retold. A course in Mechanical Engineering from BITS Pilani too did not relegate her passion for drawing. It persisted much like Lola in her works. A few internships in art, along with her graduation, and Prabha decided that a corporate job was not for her. Her calling was art, drawing, sculptures and writing. “I felt I could do art for a living rather than be an engineer,” she says.

The Wildings came about because of the cats. The motivating part of illustrating the books was that the writing appealed to me, the verse and the stories were great. If the writing is inspirational the drawings reflect that,” she says. Currently based in Stanford, Prabha freelances as an illustrator and is at an exciting professional juncture with the graphic novel in India establishing itself. She finds it to be an interesting time for illustrators, a time to experiment.

Her choice of using the pencil as tool for expression and the straight line as the medium was made early when she felt that the line and monochrome were best suited for her narrative. Introducing and familiarising graphic narrative to youngsters, she believes is nudging children to observe illustrations, “it is about communicating an idea through a medium. It takes a bit of thinking visually and to be able to draw. It’s is like playing Pictionary,” she says.

Her current works are with a publisher in France for a colouring book and illustrating a book with Kokaachi for their series Twelve. She has illustrated for The Small Picture and recently done a comic. A graphic novel is on the cards.

An illustration should – show not tell, she says about the balance a graphic drawing needs to achieve in contrast with cartoon, caricature, animation and comic, the different forms of visual art.

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Features> MetroPlus / by Priyadershini S / Kochi – February 18th, 2016