Reasearch Article on Tea with sugar
(PhysOrg.com) — An animal study at Purdue University has shown that adding ascorbic acid and sugar to green tea can help the body absorb helpful compounds and also demonstrates the effectiveness of a model that could reduce the number of animals needed for these types of studies. Continue Reading
Cheerful women carrying long jute woven straps across their forehead laden in a colorful cloth with a bamboo basket ‘doko’ hanging down their back, an umbrella and lunch box tugged in- is the typical tea picker of Darjeeling.
Six days a week, at the same time (usually 7a.m), the pickers gather at a location prescribed by the manager to the ‘kamdari’ the supervisor. The section of the plantation to be picked on that day. The pickers are divided into decks which usually hold 35-50 pickers and supervising staff of two or three.
It is not the manager but the kamdaris’ that the tea pickers have to follow and please. Some share their lunch and some bestow him with gifts from the small livestock they keep, mostly poultry. This ritual of keeping the supervisor happy is for the daily roll call he makes at the start of the day and the kind of ‘melo’ row of tea bushes he assigns the picker. Tea plantations in Darjeeling being planted in rows and columns has to be picked according to a prior estimate. The supervisor needs to have the special know how on what the bushes can deliver from a particular section or season. Sometimes, he also has to decide on the spot how the picking should be carried out (hard or liberal), as to the demand of his next assignment. Continue Reading
This weekend I made a trip to a village called Dabaipani (Mineral Springs). It is 30 minutes drive from Darjeeling town, but I had to spend few days there to find what I was looking for.
This village consists of 14 hamlets widely spread across 1200 acres of hills. They are a part of the erstwhile Harrison’s and Mineral Springs Tea Estate, which closed down sometime in 1950.
Post 1950 the people survived selling: tea leaves to neighboring gardens, firewood, timber and charcoal from the garden reserve forest, which comprised about 600 acres of land. Post 1960 with the hope of the garden opening receding and the reserve forest depleting rapidly, the people started grabbing the land and started cultivating traditional food grains. The land grabbing was based on might so the people own anything from ½ acre to 12 acres of land. Continue Reading
