Just like that, six months of this year are over. I laugh at the ease with which time flows, and we flow into it, thinking it lasts. Last year, at this time, I was super excited about my friend’s arrival from Ireland. The countdown had begun, and it was all I could think of. This […]
It’s going to be two years since I left the regular, strait-jacketed life in the corporate world. I have hated being away. I have loved being away. But one of the promises I made to myself when I left regular office work was to find more time to travel. I told myself that I would […]
I don’t take kindly to photographs. No, I appear better in photos than I do in real life, as an ex-friend once told me. But what I mean is that I am a horrible person to be photographed. I don’t have patience, I am shy, and I have to be ‘in the mood’ to pose. […]
Chettinad in April was a hot cauldron. The crumbling mansions here belonged to another era. Time had warped a slow dance through this village. As I stepped out of the heritage bungalow of Chettinad Mansion, the air suffocated me immediately with the heat. It was not yet noon. I wilted, but I walked on. I […]
This was easy. There are all kinds of families, as Tolstoy once wrote, and I have paraphrased him horribly. My family is one of a kind too. My family is one that doesn’t go out too much together. We don’t really travel together much. We are not even the sort who frequent restaurants together all […]
I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. I am sipping black tea with a tinge of sugar (just decoction, as they called it), sitting on the stone bench in front of a small shop selling groceries in a village called Devi Gere. I have just finished my bottle […]
I tried hard to think of something that would resonate with this word. Traditions. I have shirked them all my life. I live in the past too much for me to honor its traditions. I am not a Christian. I am also not much of a Hindu. Religious traditions hold little significance for me. I […]
It’s November 7th. I had left my house the previous night at 8PM, taking a flight to Mumbai and then an eight-hour long flight to London the next day at 11AM. I had spent some of the time on the flight sleeping and some reading. My mind had been restless, I was nervous, yet I […]
The last time I came to Ooty was when I was graduating from high school. I was a certified loner then, and I remember thinking that my biggest fear then was if anyone would agree to be my roommate. I don’t remember anything of Ooty. Not its hills, not its climate, not its gorgeous chocolates. […]