Notes

It is a good thing to be bitten by the trekking bug, because it sometimes takes you to places which make you wonder if you are still in India! Let me talk about one such experience I had at Triund in Himachal Pradesh. Ever since I returned from Chadar, I found it difficult to get the prospect of yet another trek out of my mind. I longed to go back. But I was a little apprehensive. While the Chadar trek was on a completely flat terrain, I knew other treks wouldn’t be so. I am not an athlete, even by the most lenient standards, and I wasn’t sure if I would be okay while climbing mountains. And so I decided to do the Triund trek because I was told by Gaurav, a fellow trekker at Chadar, that Triund has all the elements to test one’s perseverance for Himalayan trekking. ...

I met him only once, and that too a long time ago. I don’t remember his name anymore and even the details of his tale are now fuzzy in my head. But I distinctly remember how fascinated I was with what he shared. We have all heard stories about how corrupt the government bodies that run our nation are, but it was the first time I heard an insider’s account of what he’d seen. He was down a couple of beers and I have little reason to believe that his story might’ve been fabricated or exaggerated! ...

Moments of self-realization are rare! You might go blank for a few seconds when a social networking website prompts you to write an About Me, but apart from few such occasions, you are generally confident that you know yourself well. And then something comes up that shows you an entirely new facet of your personality. I can tell this because something similar happened with me recently. I decided to purchase a camera after my Chadar trek. I had a Canon Powershot SX30 there and the pictures it captured came out so good that it made the question of what brand to purchase simple. I could either purchase an advanced point and shoot or a DSLR. I realized that I am good at doing my research: from more than a couple of dozen models on Flipkart and Amazon and given my constraints and preferences, I could come up with the best cameras in both categories in just three or four days. ...

Once the trek is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the trek is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the trek, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what the trek is all about. Just a few days ago, I returned from an unforgettable journey. It was a trek on a frozen river near Ladakh, at a time when the temperature dips to -25 (or maybe, -30) degree C! My Picasa album of more than a hundred photos fairly tell my story of the Chadar trek; I’ll be more general in this blog post. ...

It is rather difficult to not fall in love with Rajasthan once you visit it. I happen to visit Rajasthan at least twice a year; and the colors, the culture and traditions, the wide variety of sweets and spicy foods and the environment, in general, never failed to mesmerize me. What has awed me the most, however, have been the deserts. Even as a child, I had formed a pretty beautiful sight of Jaisalmer in my mind. When I finally went there on New Year’s eve of 2010, I wasn’t disappointed. The place was crowded but it had preserved that aura of ancient times which only added to its splendour. The city is small but has a plethora of forts. “What’s new in that? We are talking about Rajasthan, right?”, you might rightly point out! Well, the number of forts per square kilometer area would be, I guess, much more in Jaisalmer as compared to, say, Jaipur or Bikaner! In the center of the city lies the main fort: it is so huge and prominent that it is the general point of reference for everything in the city. Every road leads to this fort: if you got drunk one night and fell on the streets, you can be sure that the road on which you wake up next day would take you to the main fort! ...

If you are visiting my city Delhi for the first time, the one place I would suggest you to visit would be Chandni Chowk. This is because it is the only place where you can feel the true pulse of Delhi. The first time you set foot in Chandni Chowk, you will be terrified by the heavily congested streets. The streets are so busy and overpacked that while maneuvering them, chances are high that you’ll be tightly clutching your money and passport inside your pocket, lest you get pickpocketed! But beneath the pandemonium lies another dimension of this place. ...

There are many ways you can entertain yourself. To kill a couple of hours on a lazy Sunday afternoon, you might rather watch the dim-witted American Pie series than rack your brains in Inception. Alternatively, you might prefer exploring the remarkable cinematography of The Diving Bells and the Butterfly to fantasizing how one day, you too would be one half of a couple as loving as one shown in P.S. I Love You. ...

India is in a sorry state of affairs, to say the least. The latest incident that rocked Delhi, and with it the entire country, is but one of the many instances that damned the country. But what makes matters worse is that we have gradually begun to take such blatant acts of crimes for granted. When we hear about a young girl getting raped by her inebriated father or about an another scam worth thousands of crores, we merely feel disgusted for a few moments; after that we simply move on. For example, there is outrage among the people against the incident I mentioned in the first paragraph as is obvious from a deluge of angry posts, tweets and comments in the social media. Moreover, a handful of people took the streets to protest against the criminals and to pledge their support to the victim girl. People speak passionately about how overwhelmed there are by what happened at rush hours in a bustling area like Munirka; but how long will they remember? ...

It is Sunday and the time now is one hour past midnight. Weekends are a welcome respite from long hectic hours for five weekdays in a row and at this late hour, I should ideally be watching a movie or some random video on YouTube rather than writing this post. The reason for the latter is that I want to write down something before the enthusiasm fades away tomorrow. In search of a new non-vegetarian taste, I and Maneet today landed in Changezi Chicken, a small restaurant in Darya Ganj. I went ecstatic the moment I first put a bite of their Afghani chicken in my mouth and for the remaining hour I was as happy as a kid who just received a bicycle on his birthday! The restaurant’s speciality was (obviously) Changezi chicken and the taste easily exceeded our expectations. The place wasn’t too hi-fi and looked more like a dhaba. Moreover, Darya Ganj is considered a part of Old Delhi, one that is not as glamorous as other places around and one where you would probably never go as a tourist. Who would then expect that a small food-joint produces a taste like few others’ in the city? ...

Shawshank Redemption needs no introduction. Everyone has seen it and they say that the story was pretty straightforward. Then, why this blasphemous looking post from me, you might wonder. Well, I have my reasons. To make a long story short, the film was highly recommended to me by a close friend because, I was told, it was ‘like Prison Break’ where the protagonist ‘breaks the jail in the end’! And so I sat there, in front of my laptop for three hours, patiently waiting for Andy to break free! I knew what was about to happen in the end and for this reason, I believe, I interpreted the film differently. ...