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And so the monsoon has come back. It is truly the most beautiful and sublime act of nature if we ignore its capacity for destruction. If in mood for destruction, it doesn’t leave anything or anyone. Disintegrates city life, with flooded roads, railway tracks and drains, mudslide and what not. Not only cities it creates havoc on mountains with heavy landslides, road blockages and the plains with unwanted floods.
But but but. Who regrets its arrival ? Not me. The farmers are happy; the birds start singing, peacock dancing and kids have whale of a time. The monsoon is widely welcomed and appreciated by city-dwellers as well, for it provides relief from the climax of summer in June.

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Not many people would plan a trip to a place called ‘Lakhimpur’ which is more popularly known as ‘Lakhimpur Khiri’ so when an opportunity came, I started scouting for information on what can be done there besides the main business, the one for which you get paid to visit such a place. Well, it was not hard to discover that Lakhimpur is the town connection to U.P.’s only National Park, called ‘Dudhwa Tiger Reserve’. The rest was routine, getting maps, asking people for a decent hotel, requesting a friend to get us a booking at a forest rest house and so on.

I know by now I am sounding very very drab, as someone who only gets to travel for business and fill this website of the accidental sojourns he is able to do. Whether it was ‘Getting Lost in Sambhar’ or ‘By the Lanes of Aminabad’, infact some of the alert and regular readers would have probably guessed it since I wrote a road review about a week back. While the bets are being won on this, let me take you to the journey which we undertook in the last week of May.
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Palakkad is an important Rubber growing district of Kerala. Karimba a village in Palakkad is famous for Rubber Nursery Last year, when I was at Karimba village of Palakkad, I visited a Co-operative Rubber processing and marketing society there. I am giving a detailed note as known to me as to how rubber is produced and processed for marketing. Some photos are also included to understand the process better.

History
Joseph Priestley, in 1770 in England, observed that a piece of the material from the tree was extremely good for rubbing out pencil marks on paper, hence the name “rubber”.
Many plants species produce natural rubber. But most plants are not economically viable to collect its latex. Source of natural rubber is limited to one species, namely Hevea brasiliensis.
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Let me give you a brief about Ashtvinayak (8 Ganeshas). It is a pilgrimage of 8 temples in Maharashtra, each temple having its own history. Some of these idols are Swayambhu (self-existent) which means they were not created, but discovered in that form.

This trip was pending since long and when we started we just had a rough idea of the route ( courtesy a sketch of a map pulled from the net). Now let us get going and let me take you along on this trip.
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