Had a great weekend (as I hope you did, I am such a polite person) between barcamp, a grihapravEsham, and a very good play….but on Friday, I went to visit ATREE , and on the way, got this great snap of…A TREE…. which explains why the Cannonball Tree is so called….

You can see one flower near the top left-hand-side of the snap, but the wiki entry that you get when you click on the tree name gives good photographs of the lovely flowers of this tree, which we call the nAgalinga tree. The flowers have such a lovely, faint, delicate scent….

But I couldn’t help also ..er…noticing the notice behind the tree…. the word “curio” in English means, objets d’art, small artefacts that are not of particular use, but beautiful in and of themselves. So of course, we keep confusing the word, and this particular shop-owner has become quite honest and decided to call them “curious items”, not “curios”!

Or does he mean that those wares in his shop will be very curious about finding things about us when we enter and ask us a lot of nosy,prying questions…? (Imagine a ghastly “glass Taj Mahal” asking me, the minute I enter, “Why have you come in if you don’t like me? Do you think you can get anything cheap here, apart from the quality of the items here? And why do you want to buy a cheap gift? Why can’t you be generous?”)

Though I must say, the curious thing about some of the items I see in shops is, why on earth anyone would want to pay good money for them….