Semmozhi Poonga

While Bengaluru (Bangalore) has the reputation of being a garden city and is known for its beautiful gardens and trees Chennai, though not known for its tree cover, is also surprisingly green. Many of its roads and streets are lined with trees offering a lot of shade. But unfortunately these trees are not well kept. Chennai is also an extremely pedestrian-unfriendly city and therefore although the streets are shaded, the people out on the streets cannot enjoy a leisurely walk at any time of the day.

Chennai also has between 250 and 350 parks which are supposed to be maintained by Chennai Corporation. In fact many of them are not at all maintained, but this is something that is improving of late. The three largest parks in the city are the Guindy National Park, Semmozhi Poonga, and Tholkappia Poonga. The last two are recent additions to Chennai's park-list although both were already large open lung spaces of the city.

My sketching group from PencilJammers visited Semmozhi Poonga several times in the space of a few months. I was with them on only one of these visits and I found it to be a very pleasant place to visit. But my wife who had been there about a year earlier was very critical of the poor upkeep and felt that the place was being allowed to go to seed. Hopefully the people in charge will realise that they owe it to the public to preserve such spaces in pristine condition.

At Semmozhi Poonga I started my first sketch sitting at a shady spot, but unfortunately I had not taken the sun path into consideration. I soon found myself out of the shade and sitting directly under the hot sun. Fortunately I had already completed the skeleton of the sketch. I therefore packed up and completed that sketch at home. 

Meanwhile the others in my sketching group had selected a spot in the park that offered multiple sketching options and were engaged in a discussion on different approaches to sketching. I joined them and decided to experiment with a loose and quick gestural sketch based on suggestions from my friend Ganapathy Subramaniam (GS). Though new to this way of approaching a sketch I was quite pleased with result.

My Second Blog

I am very glad to say that from the day I decided to do it (towards the end of May 2012)  I have been quite regular with my "30 minute" sketches. In fact so far, on the days when I have not had the time to sketch during my lunch break, I have come home and managed to do one to keep going at almost a sketch a day. And I have been posting these sketches in my second blog to track my progress.

 I am hoping to achieve two things through this exercise: 1. To improve my quick sketching skills. My aim is to be able to sketch fast without sacrificing details (or at least the illusion of details) and to do that with a refined technique, and 2. To develop my watercolour painting skills.


Last Saturday I kept to my resolve to paint every weekend and did one small watercolour sketch - a landscape in monocolour. This one took me about 30 minutes but, when it comes to painting, I have decided not to impose time restrictions on myself since I will only be doing it at home and probably only on weekends.

 I had actually planned to do another one on Sunday but wasn't able to do that. Hopefully I will manage a cople of watercolours this weekend. Let me see...

I propose to share some (but not all) of these quick sketches on this blog too on a weekly basis. If you would like to see the rest of these quick sketches, or if you would like to know anything about the sketches that you see here, you could check out my second blog, Racing Against The Clock.

Coconut Lagoon, the eco-resort

After a blissful 24 hour stay aboard a houseboat we were dropped off at Coconut Lagoon, a beautiful eco-resort near Kumarakom. This resort is just a few miles outside Kottayam, but can be reached only by boat. Normally the guests are picked up from one of two jetties (piers) and brought by boat right up to the hotel's reception block. But, since our houseboat was too large for the channel leading into the hotel we had to alight a short distance away.

We were received with sandal paste and flowers by a young & pretty lady dressed in traditional Kerala style. She was accompanied by a musician playing a welcome tune on a flute. We discovered later that the musician, when not engaged in receiving guests, was on hand to give the guests free lessons on how to play some of the instruments.

The buildings in Coconut Lagoon are all over a century old, and some even date back to the 18th century. They have all been dismantled from their original locations from all over Kerala and painstakingly reassembled at this resort.

The reception block for example, is a "nalukettu" design with a central four-cornered open courtyard. It was originally built in 1860 and located at a place called Vaikom. It was purchased by Coconut Lagoon in 1993 and was re-assembled at its current location with the help of a master craftsman.

The dining block is a larger and more imposing structure. It is an "ettukattu" design, and has two courtyards. This is the oldest building on the site.

Most of the buildings at Coconut Lagoon are representative of several types of traditional Kerala architecture and have all been reassembled conforming to the "thachu shastra" style of carpentry. All these buildings are very tastefully located amidst coconut groves and a network of irrigation canals.

The houseboat experience

Our houseboat had two air-conditioned, bath attached cabins for the guests, and a covered viewing deck equipped with comfortable lounge chairs, a dining table & chairs, a flat tv, and a ceiling fan. In addition to this was the kitchen and crew area. The crew consisted of three persons - two to take turns at the helm and the cook. They were efficient, courteous, and very eager to ensure that we enjoyed our stay.

 The entire houseboat experience was extremely enjoyable. I am now convinced that travelling for pleasure should be done only at such a sedate pace. It was extremely relaxing to sit on the deck and watch the beautiful countryside slide by.

 We were told that the tourist traffic this year was poor on account of the global recession. It did not seem that way to us. The waterways had plenty of houseboat traffic as the photographs that I am posting will confirm. Of course, in addition to the houseboats, these waterways see a lot of everyday activity just like any busy street in a city.

 While going down the canals of Kuttanad I was amazed to learn that the waterways in this region are actually several feet above the level of the adjoining land. The water is saline for several months, and is suitable for cultivation after the monsoons. Paddy is cultivated in these fields when the water loses its salinity.

 If you would like to , you can read more about it here.

Surprise....a holiday over water

Kottayam is located on the edge of the Vembanad lake, a large waterbody which connects with the Arabian Sea and is therefore in some ways a backwater. The South Indian state of Kerala has many such waterbodies, most of them connected to one another. There are also very many manmade canals. All these are used extensively to transport people and goods.

After resting at the club for a few hours we got ourselves dropped at a boat jetty. My wife was relieved to learn that we would not be holidaying at the club, and quite excited that we would be travelling over water to our holiday destination (wherever that was :-)).

On the way to the jetty we saw that while many of the houses that have direct access to the water have their own private piers and boats or canoes, some of the ones that were not located next to the waterbody had cut canals and brought the water right up to their doorsteps.

My wife expected that we would be catching a ferry or some such means of transport. Imagine her surprise when she saw a houseboat pulling up at the jetty. I had arranged for us to spend the first 24 hours of our actual holiday on this houseboat.

Until the early 90s these boats or barges were used primarily for transportation, and that too mainly to move goods. They were powered by wind (sails) and manpower (oars or poles). About 15 to 20 years ago Kerala realised that it had tremendous potential as a tourist destination and that is when a large number of hotels and holiday resorts sprang up. Somebody came up with the very enterprising idea of converting these barges into houseboats and the idea has really caught on since then.