From Napa To Sula

      Here in the Northeast of America, we are facing a cold winter. How cold? Well, on bad days it is a low 0f 6 and high of 16. On good days it is a low of 18 and high of 19   The landscape is permanently white with snow (see below). In the midst of these cold and white thoughts, I have an interesting story to tell you. No, its not from my book, but it is balmy and comes in lovely shades of green.

Snow in the NE

      Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. First let me tell you about fiction. If you watch ‘Sex and the City‘ regularly, you might remember an episode, in which, Carrie, the protagonist of the series accidently finds out that her ‘on again, off again’ boyfriend, Mr.Big is moving to Napa. So she asks “Why?” He replies, ” Because I am tired.” And then she says with disgust, ” If you are tired you take a nap. You don’t move to Napa!”

      Now let me unravel the story, which is stranger than the fiction mentioned above. Its about discovering Napa in Nasik. I had read about Sula vineyards in New York Times and The Times of India. But when I read about it in mid-air, in a glossy travel magazine’s must – see section, it was time to check it out personally.

      So here is the gist of the story. Indian man named Mr.Rajeev Samant, goes to study at Stanford. Graduates. Works at Oracle. Comes back to India and creates Sula vineyards , covering 27 acres in Nasik and 350 acres in Dindori. I thought may be like Mr.Big, he too got tired of it all, and hence created Napa in Nasik. But I definitely find it stranger than fiction. Remember my article titled, Sapoot & Kapoot ? To me Mr.Samant has created a whole new variation, by mixing these two concepts, in refreshingly new ways. Stanford and Oracle are the Kapoot in his personality. But returning to his homeland i.e. reverse geographic migration and then working in a field unrelated to his studies implies disciplinary migration. This is reinventing self , beyond imagination. It fascinates me.  As an artist when I mix colors and discover new shades of a color, it is thrilling. Similarly it is fascinating to observe the different variations of sapoot and kapoot e.g. one, two, three and now four. This is the definite mind stretch that I experienced by going to Sula. As for the lovely shades of green, they are as follows:

• Green as in environmentally safe.
• Green as in the growing exports and revenues and
• Green as in the color of the leaves and grapes ( see below)

  An overview

      As for the actual trip to this place, we took a conducted tour of the vineyards and tasted six samples of wine (10 ml each) for a nominal charge of Rs.150 (about $3).  Among the visitors on that day, we were the only ones taking photos of the environment. The leaves are so beautiful. Its almost as if God decided to take a circle template and round off all the vertices unlike the pointed vertices of leaves found in North America.  Now I know what I am going to paint next. As this story takes you from Napa to Sula and tranforms the mind from cold and white to balmy and green, let me wrap up this post with a saying in Marathi (the local language in Nasik), which suits Mr.Samant perfectly.

Maticha sone kela (made gold out of mud) 

Ratna

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FYI: Last year on this blog, around this time you read ‘ Threads of Commonality – 1 ‘