Sirpur Festival – Cultural extravaganza amid spectacular heritage
We have all been enthralled by talented soloists, dancers and ensemble performers who wove around us magical realms from myths and epics and immersed us in engrossing folkloric tales with narrative mastery. Their sublime gifts have left us in teary-eyed rapture, transported us into higher planes of existence itself. After an hour or few we […]
Ride to Dantewada
We passed by villagers heading back from the weekly haat, market, in Kodenar. Women balanced empty vessels on their heads which had ferried local brews mahua and salfi that morning. Men veered drunkenly towards the middle of the road, tilted their heads in the opposite direction attempting to tread a straight line. Those on bicycles held […]
Sonabai’s wall of fame
Daroga Ram raked back with his hand the sparse tuft of white feathery hair repeatedly. Frowns cut burrows across his high forehead. He had no idea what to do: this time the scrimshanking contractor had abandoned work altogether and had vamoosed. The museum that was coming up in the memory of his mother, celebrated folk […]
Paharganj lessons: Moneysaving tips for backpackers. By backpackers
The cab went around the landmark state secretariat building for the third time making the passenger, a tourist, suspicious. “But didn’t we pass by here earlier?” he asked, cautious, not wanting to offend the affable, garrulous driver. “Sir,” the cabbie replied, in his die-rather-cheat tone, “in Trivandrum we have six of them.” This could have […]
Dabanng nagar Mohada
What make a place really memorable are not its landmarks or landscape, wealth or history but the dreams of its people. As dreams shape action which chart destinies this could indeed be a faultless gauge on how it should be marked for posterity. ‘Dabanng nagar’ somebody had not scribbled nor sprayed in the hasty haze […]
Kotgarh’s Stokes of good luck
‘I thank god for this beautiful country and for the balm it is to my spirit, which has been in the last two years so cut and torn and is now by his mercy receiving comfort and strength again,’ wrote Stokes from Kotgarh to his mother in America in a letter dated September 1913. Thank […]
Kasauli and the rogue Himachali
If Shimla is about all that’s gone wrong with Himachal Pradesh, Kasauli is everything that’s going awry. Despite repeated warnings and notices by the Green Tribunal, the state government is in a perennial hurry to lift the construction ban on 17 green belts around Shimla considered the capital city’s lungs – and pave the way […]
The puke-green room: A Halloween feature
The first thing i did upon waking up was marvel at the ingenuity of the decor. My head was throbbing, threatening to split itself open. But over the years i had learnt to focus on other things through terrible hangovers, resilience cultivated through good time on the road. The jackhammer pounded at my temples from […]
The poo trail
‘Tatti par mitti.’ Soil over scat. So suggested the Mahatma when he realised the enormity of the sanitation mission he had undertaken along with the relentless fight to uplift the untouchable bhangi, the scavenger. Bindeshwar Pathak, Gandhi’s successor in this seminal work, incidentally also referred to as ‘bapu’ by many, started the Sulabh Sanitation Movement […]