An accidental discovery

I wanted to make an ultra-healthy cupcake for the kids.

So I used this recipe.

Except, since we don't have eggs on hand, I used yogurt. Didn't even have whole milk yogurt, so had to use low-fat. 

The batter was too watery. So the cupcakes oozed out of their little pots and spread like brown lava all the way along the rims of the pan and downwards. 

But guess what came out of it?

Chips! The best chocolate/ vanilla crunchy chips ever!

You just had to chip away at the ooze, after it baked, and crunch it up. 

So. Note to self: Must try to recreate this so that my accidental recipe becomes a real one. And next time, I need to make this on a sheet, and not a cupcake pan.

One more sunbird

Purple-rumped sunbird (Leptocoma zeylonica). What a minute beauty! Look at that delicate yellow breast and the glossy back! It's about 1/2 to 3/4ths the size of a sparrow and, like its relatives described in the previous post, quite loud.

Observed at St.John's Hospital, Bangalore, high up on a tree at around 3pm. We spotted two males. Ram also spotted a female, but I only caught a fleeting glimpse and cannot describe her.

Male purple-rumped sunbird

This is what the female is supposed to look like:

Check out that white eyebrow and that eye that looks like it's been kohl-lined. This is one stylish lady! One thing I realize, browsing through these pictures, is that the female purple-rumped sunbird is awfully like the female purple sunbird in appearance. One distinguishing feature might be the eyes. The purple-rumped females have a darker band, or the kohl-lined appearance, that the purple females don't.

So the two types of sunbirds are similar in size, appearance and overall general behavior. However, their habitats appear to be different: the purple-rumped sunbird is found at greater heights than the purple ones. Is that a one-off observation or a general principle? This requires further investigation.

New birds!

I saw a pair of purple sunbirds (Cinnyris asiaticus), a male and a female, on the branches of some flowering trees behind the Center for Human Genetics, Electronic City Ph 1, Bangalore on December 4th, at around 4pm in the evening.

Male

Female:

Until I identified the male as a purple sunbird, I had been thinking that the female was a little spider hunter, which looks like this:

See the similarities?

Male Little Spiderhunter

Female purple sunbird

But the fact that the male purple sunbird is undoubtedly that, and nothing else, and that the two birds were chirruping and foraging together on the same tree convinces me that the grey-yellow bird has to be the female sunbird and not the spider hunter. Plus, I am not sure if the female's beak was quite as long as the spider hunter's. 

Both the birds were smaller than a sparrow, tiny, fast and loud. Exquisite little creatures.

My munna Ani

We had taken the kids to the SVYM centers in Mysore and Sargur. Durgoose, while perfectly happy to keep running around, had forgotten her shoes in Bangalore (okay fine. I forgot her shoes in Bangalore), which meant that I had to keep carrying her over any patch that wasn't cool concrete. Also she kept snoozing off once in a while, another reason for the near-perpetual hoist.

We saw a whole ton of things at these places. And I was exhausted. Meeting people is fun only when one isn't taking care of kids at the same time. So after some time, I excused myself from the hospital tour and took the kids and went outside to sit in the shade of some trees. Durg went off to amuse herself with plucking leaves and flowers. Ani and I  sat on a bench and I said , "My back is hurting from carrying that little girl all over the world, bunny. I'm so tired".
Ani said, "You can lie down here on the bench, mummy", and then he scooted over to a  corner of the bench, folded his legs, patted his lap and said, "Here, put your head on my lap".

So I did. I stretched out on the bench with my head pillowed on Ani's lap and we both stared at some trees for some time. What bliss!

It didn't last for too long because Ani found out that he could tickle me much easier this way, and Durgoose decided she had to come and sit on my tummy and try to put her fingers into my nostrils and ears, but the whole episode was relaxing and fun and I felt so loved.

My munna Ani is growing up fast! But I hope and pray that he stays just as loving and kind as he was today.

Swami Vivekananda Youth Movement

We spent the entire day today exploring the SVYM institution in and around Mysore. SVYM is a center started by a group of young medical students to improve tribal health around Mysore.

They began, in the 80's, by offering lifts to the hospitals in Mysore to tribal folk who needed to get there but were unable to. From these modest beginnings, they have built a tremendously inspiring institution which caters to the health care, community health, educational and community development needs of not only the tribal society around them, but also the whole district, surrounding districts, and Karnataka state. Many of the ideas for HIV care and ART management adopted by the Indian government as standard policy for the country were first developed by them. They have developed innovative practices for community treatment of diarrhea, anemia, mental health and more recently, palliative care for cancer patients, for whole-family counseling about death and resumption of normalcy in a family after the death of a family member. But they also have the sophistication and skills to work with the government to scale-up these practices so that they may be disseminated to the general public. 

I was blown away by the people, the work, the vision, the achievements and the institution as a whole. When we think about health care systems in Bangalore, large corporate hospitals like Fortis or Apollo come to mind. But these practices are not ethical, neither are they particular patient-oriented (see this, this and this). But when an average person thinks of a doctor, or the ideal of a doctor, they think of someone who is caring, trustworthy, who uplifts not just the sick individual but also the whole family and the whole community. We shrug and say, well, that's not the way things work these days, but I felt, for the first time, that in SVYM, that ideal may be present and thriving. 

Today, we visited their main office in Mysore city as well as their hospital in a small village called Sargur. They also have a healthcare center within the forests for the tribal population at a place called Hosahalli, as well as mobile hospitals that set forth from Sargur 5 days a week. At Mysore, the focus seems to be on training and research. Their training programs are vast and varied: they have an HIV fellowship for doctors; they conduct courses on counseling for people working with HIV+ or high risk populations; they have a center ("V-Lead") for training  NGOs on leadership and how to work with the government as well as with motivated individuals to embark on developmental activities in rural areas ; their institute ("Graam") focuses on grassroots public policy and advocacy. 

Sargur, which is about an hour away from Mysore, has this hospital:

Looks like any other hospital, right? Wrong. This deceptively simple building is a monument to brilliance. 

Firstly, they practice ethical medicine here: compassionate, low-cost, value-driven, appropriate. This is a place where true community medicine is practiced. For example, somebody presents to a doctor with a problem of diarrhea. What is the usual practice? The doctor treats the diarrhea, perhaps offers some counseling on safe drinking water and that's that, right? What if this patient has no access to safe drinking water? What if he has no access to proper cooked food? Then what's the point of all the counseling in the world? This place goes many steps further. They visit the patient's home, they find out about the patient's access to nutritious food and clean drinking water, they test the water, they offer water-purification services. One of the engineers in this hospital has designed multiple low-cost desalination and purification plants, which has improved the water quality in the whole region. They are strong advocates for organic farming and in addition to having their own farms, partner with neighboring farms. The guiding philosophy here is not that the hospital has to make money, but that it offers the best quality of care possible.

Nearby, they have started a CBSE residential school only for kids of tribal folk, and a day school for anybody who wants it. The school is another inspiring place. It teaches about 500 kids from nursery to 10th standard. It has the kind of atmosphere and space that only the most elite and exclusive schools in Bangalore can think of. They have two teachers per class, the classrooms are spacious and well-lit, they have playgrounds etc. But the best thing about the school is that it is actually also a science park. Have you ever visited a science center or a planetarium in India, or a children's museum in the US? You know how they have various entertaining things that all have a deeper scientific basis- compound pendulums, sympathetic swings, a water turn-wheel, one of those maze-like things that contain a ball going up and down in various ways that's supposed to be depicting potential-kinetic energy conversions? This school has all that! It is the first of its kind in the whole state, and possibly the whole country! They have a guy from IIT Madras, who lives there and who keeps thinking up of all these ideas to teach scientific concepts to kids! They use innovative techniques to teach Maths- I saw small-group discussions in a classroom, on maths. Who in the world ever discussed maths in school? We just ratta-marofied some tables, and went gada-gada-gada down a memorized protocol of steps. This school costs about Rs1000 a month and the kids who go here are not just the kids of the doctors and nursing staff at the hospital but are also from within a 25km radius from this village.

The hospital has a radio program every evening and morning, where they talk about health issues and concerns, announce which doctors are available at the hospital on that day and their specialities, which markets have fresh produce and so on. 

There are quarters for the staff from the hospital and schools to live in, just a two-minute walk away. Big quarters, with gardens in front of them.

This is why I said this hospital is like a monument to brilliance. Just see what these folk, with some vision, have built: an idyllic lifestyle, noble, worthwhile, where the hospital is like a living creature, constantly expanding and altering. Their driving philosophy, expounded by Swami Vivekananda, is an expansive and inclusive one. They live in a scenic, unpolluted area, with no commute to work; they have great schools for their kids; they try out their own desalination, water purification, organic farming and all that great stuff, and best of all, they are actively building and uplifting the community as a whole. 

This is an organization I HAVE to be part of.

We couldn't go to see their actual tribal care centers in Hosahalli, unfortunately. That's a trip for another time.