May 2024 India and Nepal
Earlier this year in May we reconnected with our friends at Meena Supreme in Bangalore India. I've known Padmanbai, his brothers and family business for more than 20 years. In 2002 I was given a gray box of Meena Supreme incense in Hampi, India. (A future blog post will tell this story)
Landing in Chennai, we started the drive through the southeastern state of Tamil Nadu. We stopped halfway in Tiruvanamalai, a city with rich history, and home to one of the largest temples in India, the Arunachalesvara Shiva Temple dating back to the 7th century.
There are some puja/incense shops around here including the famous B.G. Puja shop, known for a few of their in-house blends such as Nag Champa, Flora Bathi, and Natural. I stocked up and had chai while I waited for my orders to be packed.
The next day we stopped off in Pondicherry and Auroville to check on our friends at Cottage Industries where we source our Sri Aurobindo Ashram incense line, including the Sandalwood, Jasmine, and many others.
We continued our journey, Arriving in Bangalore, in the state of Karnataka. Padmanbai from Meena picked me up on his electric scooter and we drove through Bangalore to his shop. We drove past the famous factory that makes the the red and blue box Nag Champa, Satya Sai Baba Sugandhi. He explains to me how his father once worked for the founder of Satya, before starting Meena in 1968.
We eventually get to Magadi Road and then Meena Mansion. It's election time in India, the workers are back in their home villages for a few weeks, and production has stopped for the time being. He shows me around the factory, their current stock, and samples of 20 different scents, some I'm familiar with and some are new. We drink lots of chai over the next few days. He invites me to his home in the evenings and his mother cooks us amazing food. We eat with his wife and 2 sons, and I feel right at home.
Shipping from India is difficult, especially for commercial goods. One of the reasons I was there is because a few months earlier we lost around 60kg of incense to customs due to some shipping logistics. Over the next few days, through trial and error with UPS, FedEx, DHL, and a few others, we managed to figure out a plan to get the incense to California. Over 100kg of Meena incense has been shipped since, and we are now the main Importer/Exporter for Meena Supreme in North America.
From Bangalore, we had planned to stop in Mysore for the famous Devaraja Market. As well as Mumbai and Pune, but it was the month of May. The subcontinent was boiling and day time highs were hovering around 108 degrees Fahrenheit. We decided to postpone the rest of the India trip till next winter, and planned our onward travels to the cooler temperatures of Kathmandu, Nepal and the Himalayas.
Next blog post will explain our time in Nepal and the work we did there
