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...
It’s always about imagination
Imagination rules… Imagination scores… and imagination wins every time, without exception. You see, creation is a result of imagination… and so whenever I see a new gadget, device or even a car all I try to see is how well imagination has been used. Is it unusual? Are there elements of the unexpected? Let me...
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...
Best isn’t necessarily pricey
Well, let me admit here that I’ve been to a lot of countries and obviously I have nearly always stayed in hotels. So from Paris to Seoul, from Amsterdam to Bangkok, from London to Sydney, or from Barcelona to Kuala Lumpur… I’ve always sought the best hotel deal. And believe me the right research always...
Eat your problems with breakfast
The first thing I asked the cab driver as we were going from Changi Airport to our hotel on Bencoolen street, the business district of Singapore, was, ‘What is the best Singaporean food according to you?’ He said, ‘We eat our problems with breakfast.’ And then maintained a silence but then after a while he...
Attempt the absurd to achieve the impossible
This is me. I’m an optimist. I’ve always tried to achieve the impossible by attempting the absurd. And the best thing is that most of the stories that my life has got irretrievably inter-woven with, are those where optimism fuels the tone and character. No, optimism isn’t necessarily the material that the genetic structure of...
The lost traveller
There is hardly any romance in a wild goose chase in the middle of the night. I wouldn’t like to land in a strange city after dark and then go running from one place to another to find the right place to spend the night in. The traveller in me is generally lost when it...
The adventurous woman in my life
I clicked this and the other pics inside the London Olympics Park in Stratford. This happened on one of our walks there when Specky, my wife, pointed to the site where a Burma bridge and other rope obstacles beckoned. She said, ‘I’ve never done all this.’ I said, ‘Go ahead and reach for the top....
A bird, a cookie, and a lesson in love in Paris
July 2014. Paris. This was the day I realised that it isn’t cookies that make birds fearless but children who simply love them. We were waiting in a queue to enter Notre-Dame de Paris when a small girl said to her grandfather, ‘Will those sparrows come to me, granpa?’ ‘Yes, they can, if you want...
Melbourne really is psychic
Yes, this city does tend to enter and travel through your synapses and into the layers of your mind faster than you would imagine… and I am talking about the effect based on my online exploration of the city. Yes, I’ve been to Sydney and the memories of that trip remain fresh, unjaded, and full...
A little more is a lot more
There are more than 3 crore Indians settled abroad but that isn’t more. It isn’t less as well but then only numbers are never more. This summer I was in London and stayed with my son and daughter-in-law… and the two months that we spent in London have made me revise the way I...
Poet for hire
London. Queen’s Walk. 10 June 2014 London surprises you every time. I mean, just look at what happens on crossings in New Delhi. You find the same kind of ragamuffins selling pirated books, or similar looking amateur kid gangs doing the same act of threading their unexpectedly slim body through an astonishingly small ring...
