The roadside billboard pictured above is in the foothills of the Nilgiri Hills.
It hopes to lure travellers into what is in fact merely yet another of the world’s millions of franchised purveyors of junk “food”, “soft” drinks, and lousy coffee.
What’s actually on offer is drearily “global”, but the billboard-hyperbole has an unmistakably Indian flavour.
Where else would a brand name even attempt to associate its burgers, pizzas, sandwiches and fizzy drinks with drug “trips” and rock music’s first “supergroup”?
A few days later, still in southern India, we drove into and out of Nagarhole Tiger Reserve, twice-daily, over several successive days.
Vehicles are only “let in” just before sunrise, and they must be “out again” before darkness falls.
Accordingly, the sealed access road gets busy, briefly, twice-daily, as visitors head to the Reserve’s various dirt roads, or scurry back onto the bitumen in order to get out of the Reserve in time.
If one takes this sign’s headline at its word, whenever one is on the sealed road one must not engage in a common form of underground mining!
Stoping is the process of extracting the desired ore or other mineral from an underground mine, leaving behind an open space known as a stope
(Definition courtesy of Wikipedia; its entry on stoping is pretty good)