Travel Idea
‘Will to preserve heritage,’ he read on the menu-card, and then added, ‘an interesting name for a cocktail.’ A nod in the affirmative and he was soon ready to join the group with a glass in his hands. The conversation seemed to be floating on a sea of terms that sounded as intriguing as a...
Lufthansa in Malgudi
‘Who’re you?’ I asked. This kid had appeared suddenly from nowhere and was smiling impishly. He said, ‘Swami. My grandmother calls me Sami.’ ‘Hey! Aren’t you pretending to be that character from Malgudi Days?’ I ask, suddenly remembering that book I had read decades ago, ‘And if you really are that Swami, you’d know where...
Finding stories in airports
Most of the time one doesn’t even have to make an effort to find stories inside airports. They are there all the time for anyone caring to look up from the kindle that one isn’t anyway reading… or if one just stops pretending to look busy or important or appropriately hassled or even thinking. Airports...
The creative writer and kayaking
I’m not new to kayaking. The first time I stepped into a kayak was on the River Denva in Madhya Pradesh in tiger territory. This was two years back and I was participating in the NDTV-Volvo Adventure Challenge then and our task was to kayak to a location about a couple of hours distance to...
On Travel
Travel is all about the music and poetry of exploration… every time you move out of home and navigate safely through strange countries and stranger cities, you experience an uplifting peppy feeling that refreshes you. This is the sort of feeling that I had when I keyed in these short two-line rhymes that had travel...
A revolution in your pocket
There have always been a few who have favoured the written word over a photograph and there have existed masses who have discovered a thousand words in every picture. The eye stumbles upon Nietzsche in a photograph… the mind hikes with Mark Twain as it scans a picture… and the smile that one click evokes...
Dubai – thirst for more!
There are more people who claim to know Dubai from their impressions in the transit lounge of the airport than those who finally exit it to enter this city of souks, burjs, and a lot of happening stuff found along the creek and in the surrounding sand. Generally a lot of people visit Dubai and...
What do you see?
Two kettles? Just two kettles? Is that all that you see? You don’t see two generations looking in different directions? Don’t you see rural life and an urban perspective? Or the tussle between machine-made and man-made? Don’t you see a story trying to come out? Or a poem simmering inside? Or maybe just the excitement...
Re-shaped, Re-formed, and Re-aligned to travel
“The world is being re-shaped by the convergence of social, mobile, cloud, big data, community and other powerful forces. The combination of these technologies unlocks an incredible opportunity to connect everything together in a new way and is dramatically transforming the way we live and work,” writes Marc Benioff and most of us will agree...
Be the storyteller of Wayanad
About ‘travelling’, Ibn Battuta reportedly said that ‘it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.’ I guess this is true of every place on earth… and I can vouch for this as I have travelled to many places both within and outside India and have been building my treasure of stories slowly and...
Alphonso on a mountain trail
I was standing on a mountain trail that was around 7300 feet above sea level and was surrounded by deodar, oak, pine, rhododendron and lots of spiny bushes. The trail had become faint and Specky, my wife, had a doubtful expression on her face. ‘Are you sure this trail is going to lead somewhere?’ she...
Lofoten Islands in Norway
“A journey to watch Aurora Borealis or the Polar lights… to wonder how fast-moving, electrically charged particles of light stage a virtual battle with the Earth’s magnetic field & then sigh, be joyous, despondent, arrogant, & even miserable by producing different colours & hues. They do this emotional drama by interacting with different gases in...
