Not just old, but rare
I had spent a few days of my summer of 2017 driving around Scotland… well, you know, clicking pictures of the flowing terrain of the Highlands and the Lowlands and inhaling all the fresh air that transforms the heart into one that hums romance all the time… and, of course, talking to people who love...
The seven essentials when it is cold
The seven essentials when it is cold If you trek on mountains cold Remember to carry in your pack Seven things, some you may fold And joy shall never turn its back! One rhyme is all that I need to remind me of the seven things that I always carry with me when travelling or...
A legend charges into the mind…
One fact that I have always believed in is that legends never die. This could be because they are invariably a step ahead of even truth… and truth, as we have seen often, kowtows and merges into a stronger truth. A legend, a friend said once, is like a sip of 100 Pipers rushing through...
Half Ticket
I am not talking about my days when my parents bought a ‘half ticket’ for me during rail or bus journeys… but of times when we called one friend of ours ‘half ticket’ because he could never understand that the girls in our class would never want to be in our gulli-danda team. Well, not...
Of flavours and bouquets
It was one of those evenings when the mind is eager to get layered in bouquets of flavours. The mind is open and receptive and is ready to accept a new facet, a new truth, a new way, a new snippet or nugget of information. It is generally observed that at such moments, some information-laden...
The water of life
It was during a get-together with the medical fraternity that an interesting fact about the relationship of a healthy heart with moderate whisky drinking was revealed to me. One of the doctors there asked to be served a whisky that was at least 12 YO… and I was curious. ‘Any reason for this specific instruction,...
The purpose
Some of us are convinced that there is a purpose assigned to everything. A stone is there where it is for a purpose. That stone adopts different sizes over the years with some specific purpose in the mind of the creator. Inventions emerge only when they are supposed to… and this means there is a...
The battle of ‘e’
I know a lot of my readers will have the first impulse of associating the ‘e’ in the title with some new-age word like email or e-governance or electronics. The truth is that right from words like evolution to emergence, from elevation to energy… e has had a pretty good run. This alphabet rules the...
Water opens it up
This happened in a discussion I had with a bartender of a well-known pub in the NCR. I asked him, ‘What is more important to a whisky blend, the way the nose sensors behave or the way the taste buds respond?’ The bartender thought for a while and then replied, ‘What is more important to...
My whisky notes
A friend asked me, ‘You’ve been writing a lot of posts on whisky these days. Do you have any reason for this?’ ‘Reason?’ I said, ‘You want a reason? By the time we reach the end of this month, I’d have given you at least thirty reasons to appreciate this alcoholic beverage. But in this...
Emovere
Emotions are human experiences that are subjective and can have a strong presence in one person with little effect on another. Diane Raymond writes that the word emotion comes from the Latin word emovere, in which “e” means “out” and “movere” means “move.” The 7 basic emotions that most of us are aware of can...
Cocktails that you’ve never dreamed of
If you think a cocktail is a flavour-sensitive merger of two alcoholic beverages, you are both right as well as wrong. No, I’m not trying to sneak in mocktails here that have a shrewd leaning towards the tipsier ingredients. But then I am neither trying to say that a cocktail is necessarily a drink that...
