There's a nest in the woodrose vine outside the drawing room window, just above my eye level. It's inhabited by a small bird which I believe to be a red-vented bulbul - it has a black head and beak, a black tail with white at the tip, a brownish-gray variegated breast, and a bright red patch under its tail. It just fits into the deep nest, so that I see its beak sticking out of one side, and its cocked-up tail from the other. According to my bird book, bulbuls are pugnacious, and are still used as contestants in bulbul fights. It doesn't look pugnacious at all.
(This picture is from Birds seen in IIT Bombay/Mumbai.)
I looked around for something about bulbul fighting, and found this, in Lucknow: The Last Phase of an Oriental Culture, which describes the culture of Lucknow (in northern India, near New Delhi) before 1857. I assume from the description that the guldum is a bulbul:
Guldum-fighting
...the bird in question is called guldum, Rose-Tail, because it has red feathers like a rose beneath its tail. Villagers and lower-class people often make them fight but better-class people have never taken much interest in the sport.
Guldum-fighting is not unattractive to watch. During training the birds fight over grain sprinkled on the ground. When they fight, both birds fly into the air as they close with each other, become enmeshed and then descend still entangled.
There's an article in The Hindu about the rare South Indian talipot tree. They really are odd looking - dead palm trees with Christmas trees stuck on top. I've only seen a couple of them:
My grocery store is not exactly nature -- in fact, as in American grocery stores, you hardly see any food when you walk into it. This is different from the not-so-old days when you saw sacks of dals and rice, and piles of different coloured spices, and when you could buy one egg. Okay, this kind of store does still exist, but I shop at Food World... Anyway, these are the varieties of mango which were on display in the fruit section yesterday:
Banganapalli
Rumani
Mallika
Lalbagh
Jawahar pasand
Thota puri
Neelam
Sirri
Badami