Gulf News Foreign Editor Neena Gopal is in India covering the state elections.
In this web-only diary, Neena breaks away from the politicians and the soundbites to take an alternative look at the polls, and to find out what's really happening on the ground.
Best kept secret
It's the kind of hotel that you cannot believe exists in a bustling, noisy market town like Tellicherry. But Ayesha Manzil built by Murdoch Brown, a British tea-planter some 150 years ago, is Tellicherry's best kept secret. It sits on top of a hill above the Judge's Court, and is a delight to the senses. The flowering rain tree, the frangipani and the hibiscus are in full bloom in the extensive gardens, which even has a swimming pool.
The food - authentic Moplah cuisine is courtesy Faiza, daughter-in-law of the man who bought the property from Brown, who with her husband Mossa own the five room hotel, Faiza says she runs five day cooking course if I want to learn to make pathiri, the melt in the mouth rice bread that is my personal favourite. But I have to stay at Ayesha Manzil for five days!
So I make do - with dinner served on the wide verandah, cooled by the sea breeze and a breakfast of idlis and spicy chutney on the promontory that juts out into the ocean to the distant sound of seagulls, and waves breaking on the rocks in the distance. The food is hot, hot, hot. Faiza says the chilli quotient comes from green and red chilis not the ubiquitous Tellicherry pepper that brought the world's traders to its doorstep. With my tongue on fire and tears running down my eyes, I really didn't care.
Mall madness
Tellicherrians who come back from the Gulf needn't feel left out. There's a Tellicherry City Centre, all gleaming glass and chrome, inspired by the blue glass constructions that dot Deira and Shaikh Zayed road. A young German research student working on the influence of Arab traders in Tellicherry who had hitched a ride to the internet café - except it doesn?t have an internet café as yet - said "the spaceship has landed." To which I nearly said ET go home. It's that bizarre!
Rooting for their son
It's the talk among the Marxists that Pinarayi Vijayan's new house is the reason he's been kept out.
Indians at home still frown on displays of wealth.
So I decided we should swing by the road that hugs a 13 acre property where Vijayan's mother worked the fields, and where the man who could still be chief minister if the Marxists are voted to power, grew up.
Apart from the few old ancestral homes of the landed Nairs, the rest were once simple homes here in Pinarayi, in north Kerala. Today, money from the Gulf is pouring in. There are homes with interlocking tiled driveways, brand new Malabar tiled roofs, and walls.
Boundary walls where once the countryside, dotted with palms and green paddy fields breathed.
Vijayan has a tenuous Gulf connection. His son worked or rather studied in Abu Dhabi for three months before going to Birmingham university to study on a scholarship his mother tells me.
Its almost eleven pm as we drive up the approach road to the Vijayan home. His wife is walking outside.
"It's too hot indoors," she says. With me is Shankaran Maashe, a teacher whom most people in the village know. She unlocks the gates and lets us in when she sees him. Clearly, the home's been renovated and looks brand new. But Maashe says, it's the kind of makeover most homes are getting these days. "She's a teacher, the son had a job until recently, the daughter works, Pinarayi Vijayan gets a pension. They can afford it."
It's a sentiment echoed by others like Balan Maashe, whose father is the reason Vijayan even went to school. The old man, Chandran was asked by Vijayan's mother to find a job for the eight year old as she couldn't afford to send him to school, the son tells me as we talk about the Pinarayi of old.
Chandran wouldn't stand for it, even paying for Vijayan's school, says Balan.
Vijayan hasn't forgotten. He often mentions Chandran as the man who's responsible for what he is today. Says Balan "We'll be overjoyed if such a man is made the chief minister. All that stuff about his home and corruption is pure humbug."
Pinarayi village still roots for her son.
