From a distance it would have looked like the crystal and other jelly fishes had gathered for a surface party in the middle of the night, their unearthly bioluminescence in full swing. There was music even. In place of the emotion-shorn trance and techno, lovelorn songs from Malayalam cinema filled the air. Belted out by All India Radio, staccato broke in rudely now and then but love and longing prevailed. Bobbing around each other in a chain dance were little catamarans and bigger boats. In the gloaming of the deep
Nothing comes in the way of your interaction with the locals other than laziness and prejudice; even an alien tongue doesn’t. I say this with conviction as I wrote a road tripping book on Chhattisgarh when there was no GPS (definitely not in Chhattisgarh) and my Hindi was pidgin at best (it still is). My friends were surprised to see that I actually returned after 40 days on the road in this heavily forested central Indian state besieged with its own set of unique problems. I made up for all
A sudden blizzard – a regular occurrence at high altitudes – caught us unawares as we approached Khardung La and we stopped to chain up our tyres. Flaky snow fell on our jackets which were blown away by strong winds. There was nothing much we could do about the meltwater, ice-cold and mucky, that threatened to penetrate our trekking boots through submerging eyelets. Our drive up from Leh had alternated between treelines and skylines; approaching Khardung La at over 5,000 metres we drove straight into the clouds. An old stray
When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written. (Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer.) Deepak outside the pastry shop The police van was parked across the road from where the dead body lay as if poised for a quick getaway. There was a lull in activities when I walked into the crime scene; it transpired later that it was the break when everybody awaited the official police photographer. That nameless guy whose thankless work accompanies
Being the only uncle to a bunch of boys who can fill out a small platoon comes with not just enough responsibilities but a minimum knowledge requirement. Like knowing ‘fast track.’ “Tom mama, let’s get fast track,” said one of my nephews at the entry to the water park. “But didn’t I get you all watches just last year?” I was serious as I had actually gifted them outdoor watches from Casio the previous Christmas. In response the kids took turns looking exasperated and laughed. They glanced over their shoulders
A man goes to a shrink to check if he has gotten over his ex. Shrink: Do you get jealous when you think of her with another man? Man: But I have always wanted to see her with other men. You get the drift when the jokes go like this. We were three guys, slightly drunk or stoned, or both, all of us caught in challenging phases of relationships – jilted, starting off or in one. Connected by different aspects of filmmaking, we used to bump into each other at
Will he? Won’t he? Festivals remain popular and stay relevant when they don’t try too hard to reinvent themselves as something else, say, a youthquake. Nothing much has changed in the over two centuries of the Thrissur Pooram: a throbbing, vibrant face-off between two ancient temples, Thiruvambadi and Paramekkavu, in addition to eight smaller ones. Everyone assembles at the Thekkinkadu Maidan, a 65-acre park in the centre of Thrissur town with the iconic Vadakkumnathan temple sitting atop a hillock presiding over. The Maidan once used to be a dense forest
The GPS assured that we had arrived: in place of the curving, lengthening arrow mark, there was the sprogged onion. The famous toddy shop was supposed to be on our left side. Instead of – as I imagined it to be – lit up like Merryland, parking attendants struggling hard to find space for customers coming in and harder to aid those leaving, lungis flying high mast, politics discussed in bigsie voices and people gathering around in an impromptu belching contest, it was a desolate stretch swamped in pitch dark.
#instatravel #motorcycling #heritage #dhaba #nh2 #royalenfield #incredibleindia #travelogram And finally The city gives up. Hauz Khas, where I stay, conurbates into more highrises and flyovers, reverberating underpasses and fringe residential areas before thinning out into open mandis – wholesale marketplaces. As I passed by these throbbing centres of humanity, big boned jolies laides were making a beeline to collect the stock of vegetables, fruits and flowers from the previous day that were unsold. These would be, through the course of the day, hawked at traffic signals with snotty kids saddled
Vanity thy name is not woman anymore. It is man. A study published in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction puts the percentages of men and women exhibiting ‘selfitis’ – the condition of excessive selfie-taking – at around 60 and 40 respectively. One of the authors, Mark D. Griffiths, PhD, informs ‘From a psychological perspective, the taking of selfies is a self-oriented action that allows users to establish their individuality and self-importance; it is also associated with personality traits such as narcissism.’ I am not very sure about
