Gwalior: The hills are watching

The elation of driving into a heritage OD that is Gwalior is heralded by an eerie feeling: that you are being watched. The fort ramparts peering over boulder-strewn hills keep an eye over you, the way they were meant to. Blinking only at the bastions, measuring your every move, an arm inching gingerly towards the […]
‘Strange she leaped’ and other wakeup calls on Women’s Day

This Women’s Day we can feel happy and warm about the momentous strides made by women across spheres. I, personally, can vouch all the women in my life are better and stronger than me. But when it comes to the woman traveller, she is still mauled, molested and cunningly manipulated. And like the recent incident […]
Fog wheel drive

The highway became the set for a ‘Dream Girl’ song: save the noble-hearted, shiny-tessellated Hema Malini, vigorous gusts of translucent fog guffawed from many hidden directions enveloping my windscreen. What was earlier the billowy contour of a truck segued into a muddle of a silhouette; taillights snarled like the Joker’s lips. Vast swathes of cerulean […]
The summer rains of Deeg

Many of the heritage marvels we have today were ostentatious self-indulgences, sandstone and marble diktats rooted in personal tragedies – and victories – and the ensuing emotional upheaval, vanities and carnal excesses. Though not strangely but indeed rarely the climate, specifically the sweltering summers of the arid plains, has played edict to not just architecture […]
Promote Northeast tourism for racial harmony

A murder and a rape within the span of a week are not that random when the victims of both incidents are from the Northeast. Denying there is racial discrimination in Delhi would be a monolithic bluff like calling the Commonwealth Games a ‘grand success’. On the upside citing deep-rooted hatred, fear and insecurities as […]
Bhangarh, Acropolis of India

Romance gets precedence over credence in populist writing. And travel writing is one big pleaser – aiming to pull, pique and prod. Many of the bubbles are what you ‘buy in’ to when you just pass through, fated to burst if you look around a little longer and engage deeper with the locals. So those […]
Telling Tales: Ramphool Gujar, graduate

An occasional series on the more interesting – and helpful most of the time – people I come across during my travels. “Calling one of them Bina is alright. But naming two of them Bina-1 and Bina-2 is for the SPCA.” I said. “But the minister was personally involved in every step of their growth.” […]
Fact of the Ater

The river Chambal has been found to meander continuously towards the right during the past 28 years (1972 – 2000) at a distance of 140 kilometres away from the origin. ‘Stream dynamics change analysis of River Chambal using remote sensing and GIS techniques’, International Journal of Geomatics and Geosciences, 2011. Jeep drivers are icons in hinterland […]
Highway highlights 2013: India from the road

Real India is still in the villages and viewed best from the highways. I spent a sizable chunk of 2013 travelling in the north and central regions of the country on assignment. Besides learnings and memories, friendships and experiences there were also the photographs. Prodders, grabbers, freezers. Stokers of the intangible. A handy tool while […]