The sand is gooey in a grainy kind of way, sloshing and squishing under your sole. The forlorn fishing boats under conical thatches look heartrending like beached whales. The famous shacks – the micro capitals of bonhomie, debauchery for some – are shut or totally missing. A-butting folk grunt their protests – you are not supposed to here this time of the year – and waddle off farther towards the waves. What’s a beach without the sun? Right? Wrong. The coast hugs a translucent ribbon of sprightly spray, touched by

Shangri La is fiction. We know it yet we look for it everywhere. First described by English author James Hilton in his Lost Horizon, it has Tibetan roots – from Shambala, a mythical kingdom as per Buddhist beliefs. Several ancient adventurers from the East and the West, modern day explorers and television presenters have set out to find it. Some zeroed in on the Hunza Valley along northern Pakistan’s border with China, an isolated verdant region along the western side of the Himalayas – which Hilton also happened to visit a

Have fun at all coasts. Since I couldn’t come up with any suggestion or tip, I decided to tweet clever to a friend who recently completed a 1000-km coastal drive from Chennai to Rameswaram.  He, also the travel editor with a leading web publication, was giving live updates on his site as well as on Twitter. Readers could send in comments, feedback and advice with the designated hashtag. While I did keep an infrequent tab, what really caught my goat was the nature of the trip – its dynamics, the

‘If not the road, then the rail’ rallied somebody against the cramped and sterilised all-whiteness of air travel. I couldn’t agree more not because it was me. The Trivandrum – Delhi Rajadhani Express 12431 I took last week passed by Udupi in border Karnataka and was rushing towards Madgaon in Goa. The land glistened from an august overnight rain, treetops bobbed with the gleaming freshness of a kid just out of shower. If rains are supposed to drizzle out by 2040, the clouds here were pregnant with showers, poised to

  How well and truly have we moved on! Then, the colossal ecological devastation of Uttarakhand which left thousands dead and missing was two months ago! So now it’s time to shun, humiliate and threaten – and charge-sheet – Durga Shakti Nagpal, the brave IAS officer and crusader who went after the sand mining mafia ravaging Yamuna River. In Uttarakhand River Ganga, the country’s lifeline, flared up in anger and helplessness by reasons many believe to be more of a human nature than natural; locals and environmentalists call it a

For many communities by the sea it was firewood. Others – like the Norse – took the relevance up a notch and endowed it with the beginning of life itself: their first man and woman – Ask and Embla – floated in as driftwood. But for the lady who used to drag the weird-shaped stumps off the beaches of Andaman and Nicobar islands (the Bay Islands) to her workshop several kilometres away it was somewhere in between. What started as a passion soon became an obsession. Today many of these

This is no Thames. The coxswains aren’t second-skinned in Speedo, neither are they mic-ed up on live TV. Their fan bases do not extend beyond the four bunds of their native backwater villages. No frenzied tweeting after contest. No autograph rush, no sponsorship deals to plug protein supplements or aqua gear; not even the state broadcaster Doordarshan does a ‘how we did it’ interview. What makes none of this possible to an extent is the team size – not less than 100! Then this is exactly the charm of the

Any place with a captivating degree of scenic lure, the Pandavas have been there before you. Seasoned domestic explorers will agree that the famous five have traipsed over every picturesque mountain and verdant vale, camped across the most spectacular lake and gushing river and traversed every panoramic forest. At least according to local lore. The locals of Kuttanad too believe the warrior brothers passed through the region; even cite passages from the Mahabharata to corroborate their claim. Of course then it was not the ‘rice bowl’ it is today, neither

The charlatans in Kerala didn’t need toadeaters; the people were too gullible to doubt or too nice to question the power of their potions and mantras. ‘Chathan Seva Madoms’ or shrines that deified the devil mushroomed in different parts of the state promising to annihilate your enemy, bankrupt your business rival or just make life miserable for that guy you never took to. The devotee just had to provide blood by the bucket – usually live dogs or chicken (humans earlier) – and later on sneak in and plant ash-filled