Is golf a call of nature?

Early morning is a good time. Doesn't matter if you're in bed or out, it is still a good time. Have known that for a long time, but laziness beats knowledge any day...

...until golf happened. A couple of months ago. And Sriram has been the drill sergeant, making sure that I wake up at 5, so that we arrive at the range well in time to take our places at the head of the queue that builds up until the factories in Sriperumbudur blow their first shift sirens.

And it has been good, largely. Sleep deprivation hasn't happened. Hands and shoulders are now pretty friendly with the general ache. The back has held up. And these days, every shot seems to have 'Hole-in-One' written on it when it starts off; most end up in the general direction they were intended to go. The others - well, let's just say I'd have been proud of them on a cricket ground.

Sriram (yes, that's him with the hot-dog sock puppet) says I need to pay more attention to the coach. Maybe, but when the morning is fresh, there're many other things creeping or peeping through the white-sheet grass that I can't help looking at them. Like this Giant African Snail: many years ago I'd seen such snails in Palakkad. Someone had brought a couple over, as pets and they’d multiplied like – rabbits? They were all over the place, huge guys, much bigger than this little fellow here, getting people all worked up over them. When I saw this chappie, I realized that it has been years since I've seen his friends. Where did they all go to? Hope they haven’t got on to any conservation red alert.

The snail was one of the larger distractions on the range. Check out the spider, just beginning to weave its web under a flower. Ah, there you have me. We call it a dandelion, my son and I, because of the way its seeds fly out when the flower dries up. But I haven’t been able to find out what its common name is. I do not know the spider’s antecedents, either. That doesn’t matter; such delicate engineering effort was worth pausing for. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the spot again, so my ‘start-middle-end spider web’ series stops where it started.



But I ended up finding a patch of some other flowers, which were just waking up. And so, the two pictures, as the flower opens out and preens itself in the baby sunlight of the morning. Never been introduced to this flower either, so I just nod at it and walk away, feeling abashed at not being able to find a name for it!


More active was this black and white beetle – what’s it, a ladybird in disguise? This was the best picture I could get, but I’m glad I got this one at least! Amazing speed on the ground and with the sun just coming up, the beetle was looking for the shadiest spots around. Managed to catch it just as it crawled into a hole in the ground – leaving me far away from any of the other holes on the range! No wonder my golf game sucks.

Finally, here’s the shy one. A rare sighting too, I can’t remember when I had last seen touch-me-nots in the city. They were always a summer vacation special and brought back a holiday season feel to the day. There were two patches on the range the day I took the photograph, but a couple of days later, one of them had been crushed by a road to bring in building material for the new ITC Hotel. The other, for now, survives.