Category: Travel
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I recently made a short but pleasant trip to Lucknow, a north Indian city with a diverse and varied history of song, dance and political intrigue. Lucknow is also famous for its fine cuisine which developed to please the discerning palates of its luxury loving Nawabs. The rulers, appointed by the Mughal kings of Delhi…
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“I am empowered to give you a lawful order to move out of the pedestrian traffic flow. …I am asking you to move…15 yards to your right. If you do not, then I have the legal authority to order you to disperse. If you do not obey…you are subject to physical removal by my officers,…
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A forthcoming expedition to Everest aiming to establish what exactly happened is just the latest in a series of attempts to solve the puzzle. But despite the continued speculation, many of those with a stake in the mystery hope it will never be resolved, fearing the prosaic truth could never match the legend.
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As a child growing up after India's partition, Kashmir to me was always a part of India. Only in middle school did I begin to realize that it was considered "disputed territory" by much of the world, the sentiment being especially fierce in neighboring Pakistan. The map of India that we studied in school showed Indian Kashmir as a larger territory than what was actually under Indian…
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Shangri La commonly evokes images of easy utopia that don't quite describe the barren and rocky desert like character of Ladakh and the hardscrabble life of its cheerful inhabitants. Nevertheless, the awesomeness of its rugged terrain is breathtakingly beautiful and amidst the solitude and thin air, peace prevails. The amazing sky, the eerie silence on the high mountains and the shock of stumbling upon a green valley beside a…
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Through the cloud of volcanic ash spewed by the Icelandic volcano Eyjafyallajokull, that is. As thousands of flights were canceled over the weekend, desperate travelers sought any possible way out of airport lounge purgatory, driving across countries and paying unprecedented prices for one-way taxi or bus rides. The flights resume, after a few test flights…
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Glad to be back home after an enjoyable but hectic two weeks in New Delhi. The occasion for the winter travel was a family wedding. Most of the time was spent in attending to that - dressing up, eating and meeting with relatives some of whom I hadn't seen in years. On the return journey, I discovered to my…
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The taxi winds around the narrow maze of roads leading up to the fort. It's a very democratic cross-section of the population that lines up to enter the grounds: at Rs.10 per ticket, this is a poor man's park, not just the haunt of the well-heeled. The lawns near the entrance are surprisingly green, well-watered…
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In a blog post in the NYT travel writer Pico Iyer describes life in a small apartment in Japan as his route to finding peace and happiness. Says Iyer: So — as post-1960s cliché decreed — I left my comfortable job and life to live for a year in a temple on the backstreets of Kyoto. My…
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My short vacation last week took me to the beautiful little town of Brixen in the south Tyrolean region of northern Italy. Here are some photos inside and outside the historic Elephant Hotel where I stayed, the hotel’s gardens and of the main cathedral in the town square. Although we didn’t meet, I learnt that the…
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