Plantations

Kerala has seacoast and lowlands on her Western border, but going further we meet highlands and hills that for me who comes from Poznań in the middle of flat Wielkopolska – those hills are real mountains. On this hills/mountains originates tea – the product that we can find in (I am almost sure) every Polish home. Before we discovered that we can drink it, tea was growing much higher than today, now it is ‘adjusted’ to the height of people picking its leaves. It is hard to believe when you stand in the middle of such plantation that one day ‘all of these’ will end up in a teapot.

Big plantations, and ‘big’ planters, honestly to me, do not fit in the socialistic picture of Kerala, even when they make only one percent of the population of this region; they have thousands of hectares what puts the system of that place called “Socialism” in a weird “limbo.” It seems that the Socialists of Kerala skipped the chapter on ‘de-kulakization’ in constructing their Socialism, keeping plantations as the exception that brings large profits. Plantations are not all about tea, but also give natural rubber, pine apples, pepper, and other products – sold to other parts of the world for much higher prize. (On the picture you can see below is a man cleaning the melioration ditches and women coming back from picking up tea leaves).

Lukasz W. Niparko