Table of contents for 14 May 2018 in Open Magazine

EARLIER THIS YEAR, a friend lent me his derelict house in a small village in Tamil Nadu. I had been keen to visit the Mahashivaratri celebrations at a nearby yoga centre. However, since my trip was last minute, it wasn’t possible to get accommodation there. And so, instead of staying in the city 30 km away, I decided to take up my friend’s offer. I had imagined it to be in better condition, but I engaged a local person to give it a thorough cleaning and decided to make do. I put up my tent inside and stayed there for over a week. For windows, there were gaping holes in the wall with bamboo stick fences, and the bathroom was a small structure 200 metres on the other side of…

AFTER A FANTASTIC meal on board my Turkish Airways flight from Mumbai to Istanbul, I asked Eylül, the flight attendant who was looking after me, for a cup of tea. She brought it in a dainty little glass without any milk. When I asked her for some milk, she told me to trust her and have it as it is, without milk. “Not only is it refreshing, it is the true taste of Turkey” she smiled. And she was right. On my two-week long road trip, I would often stop for a cup of çay and it would truly refresh me. Amongst the many teas in Turkey, Doğuş has become my favourite. Of course, over the course of my trip I have come to realise that besides tea, katmer (wafer…

FOR MOST SPORTS fans around the world, travelling to a FIFA World Cup is considered the ultimate pilgrimage. In 2014, I too made the journey to the holy land; the holiest, in fact, in terms of football countries: Brazil. While the country, its people and the football lived up to the hype, for me, personally, Brazil was a hindrance (a beautiful obstacle, if you may) that put the brakes on my real travel dream—that of watching live Grand Slam tennis. The 50-something-days stay in Brazil, from end-May to mid-July that year spanned both the French Open and Wimbledon. And I was too cash-strapped before and after the World Cup to bother about travelling to either the Australian Open in January or the US Open in September. Which made 2014 a…

I RARELY THINK ‘BETTER to travel hopefully than to arrive’ when travelling these days, but I don’t think teleporting is likely to happen in my lifetime. Road trips are still wonderful once the city is left behind, but every other form of travel seems something which must be endured, the odd enjoyable experience notwithstanding. However, I still enjoy rail travel whether a local train, long distance or international. Railway stations are always special places, not least because so many of them that I use have now been restored to their Victorian splendour. I find their high glass ceilings, bustle and clattering platform boards exciting. My early visits to India always involved long rail journeys. We backpackers all had a long journey on our itinerary, believing like Gandhi in the 1982…

“Every city, every country, is an education of sorts that stays with me longer than anything I will ever learn in a classroom. India has been more of everything”David Lagane, 24 student of International management, Perpignan, France “Travelling for us is about creating and living our own stories, getting immersed in different cultures and embracing the unexpected”Tony and Karen Kimbrell, 62 Real estate managers, North Carolina, US “This is my first solo trip to my homeland after 15 years with a deep desire to reconnect with what I had lost and what is precious about my past”Gurpreet Tung, 32 corporate fund raiser, San Francisco, US “I enjoy the experience of meeting new people without any history or baggage of the past. Travel is about the unexpected…

AT FIRST, THERE was silence. An open expanse of snow was all that could be seen for miles on either side of the narrow ledge we’d been allowed to stand on. Photographers from around the world crouched, their cameras switched on, their lenses ready, their eyes glazed in both anticipation and the cold. The temperature was around minus 40 Celsius and there was little to protect our faces from the biting wind. Every few minutes, the need to brush away condensed snow would take over, and I’d do so quickly, not wanting to miss the spectacle we’d all been waiting over an hour for. The sweeping noise caught us all off-guard. In under thirty seconds, nearly 300 red-crowned cranes appeared over the horizon and in a brilliantly coordinated show, every…

I ARRIVED IN KERALA in June 2016 from the US, fully prepped to begin my PhD dissertation research. One of my first visits was to a palace museum where a very nice man took upon the task of showing me around. He had been overjoyed to run into a person as interested as he was in local history. We talked for over an hour about the Travancore royal family, the history of subaltern reform movements, the sad state of museums in Keralaandso on. When he learned that my dissertation was on Kerala’s pre-modern art, he whipped out his cell phone (ringtone set to KJ Yesudas lovingly serenading Guruvayurappan) and gave me a list of people that he thought may be of help. As we walked down the grand flight of…

IN MORE THAN a decade of lugging around a camera bag everywhere I go, I am yet to come across any photographer who doesn’t have a love-hate relationship with the rains. Monsoons are when lenses become foggy, cameras mouldy and batteries dead. My worst torment so far has been Mumbai’s deluge of 2005. As I was stepping out of my housing society, our secretary blocked my way, saying it is too risky outside. I gently nudged Saraf uncle aside and began taking photographs of the building’s sweeper trying to cross the flooded street armed with no more than grit and a broken umbrella. There have been good times, too, though. Like when I tagged along with a musician friend, the pint-sized powerhouse singer Shilpa Rao, to Petrapol on the Indo…

THERE ARE MEN and men with halos around their heads, but it’s a truly edifying experience to encounter one whose radiance is kaleidoscopic. This man’s was neither like a solar orb, sedate and static, nor like an angelic aura, heavenly and hollow. It was unique. The first time, it was black and furry, like an inverted beehive mounted on red; on the next occasion, it was pale green with metallic spikes and a fiery torch held aloft to its right; and the third time round, his head was crowned by a clock under a spire, though my memory of it may not be too reliable. He was seated behind a desk in a brick-and-mortar office with erratic lighting. Also, this was the pre-internet era, back when emotions outlasted images, and…

ALTHOUGH I HAVE been to Darjeeling a countless number of times, when I glimpsed it this time after a gap of so many years, I felt a little breath swell up in my chest. Our taxi had coughed and spluttered its way up, from the warmth of the valley through which the Teesta flows, winding our way this way and that, holding on to the back of the seats in front lest we tumble backwards inside the car or plunge into our fellow passengers’ laps, until we ran into such a thick mist that we couldn’t tell if we were inside a fog or a cloud. As our journey progressed, every few minutes a new layer of clothes would appear on our bodies. When I looked backwards, occasionally when the…

SO WHAT DO you do when you land at Vietnam? You can sense the air is heavy with both urbanisation and the memories of war. Well, you start drifting, imagining and feeling the place. You start creating your own understanding and you are changed by what you see. Vietnam, having been cut off from modernity for almost two decades, is now in a rush trying to make up for lost time. But it still retains its old flavour, rustic charm, now infused by a groovy cool. The streets are packed with plush restaurants, yet most people enjoy sitting around on plastic stools, hunched over steaming bowls of pho and beer. Then there are places like Hoi An, a vibrant colourful town with its covered bridges and quiet shrines, which recall…

Have you ever wondered what happens to the plastic that pollutes our oceans day after day? Or to the marine life that inhabits it? We are rarely caught thinking about the seas that nourish and sustain the planet we live on. Tonnes of garbage being pumped into the oceans are an everyday reality and often there is little or no effort to clean up the mounds of deep sea pollutants. It started as a dream, durable material for designers that could take any shape or form, until its mass production began in the 1950s. It is estimated that with current trends a whopping 12,000 metric tonnes of plastic will make it to our landfills. Sandy beaches are being crowded with plastics instead of natural materials. Plastic is also making its…

ONE WINTER AFTERNOON I reach the Anand Vihar Inter State Bus Terminal, located in East Delhi. En route, the cab driver asks me, more than once, if I am going to disembark at the bus station itself. He has no wish to cross the border from Delhi to Uttar Pradesh, he warns. Anand Vihar is the port of departure for buses to UP and Uttarakhand. As I wander the well-ordered lanes, announcements—for buses heading to Etah, Etawah and Meerut, Kotdwar, Ram Nagar and Shamli—punctuate the air. Unlike those with buses to catch and destinations to arrive at, I had a different mission: I wanted a ‘Dilli darshan’. And for my circumnavigation, what better vehicle of choice than the Delhi Mudrika? With a route of 105 km around the Outer Ring…

ARRE PINTU, YAAR, have you seen this ad they’re showing on television about an eight-night, seven-day tour of foreign, air ticket, hotel, Bombay thali cooked by bona fide Brahmin maharaj, sacred thread and everything, all included? What’s that? Where in foreign? Arre, yaar, foreign is foreign, only, no? What does it matter whereit is foreign. It is all same to same. Before we used to go to Goa, which is also foreign, having people with funny names like Fernandez, and Souza, and Miranda. But after that mantri called us ‘scum of the earth’, and all because we were doing soo-soo on the road, we decided not to go there anymore, after I looked up dictionary and found out ‘scum’ was an Angrezi gaali. Now we have to find other parts…