Perspectives and perceptions

I told myself this year that I'd start blogging again on a regular basis. What a better blog topic to blog about than my fun december holidays! After all the (read: three) new year celebrations that I've had in Hong Kong for the last three years, I wanted this year to be something different. Have a new experience, visit a new place, try a new cuisine, anything! And so it's not a surprise that weeks before I'm supposed to be leaving for my holiday, I find myself packing for two climates, because my friend's figured out a plan for a group of us to be in Vietnam for a short trip! :) Waiting for the long queue at the boarding gate for Vietnam Airlines The flight to HCMC is as expected, but the visa process isn't! :/ The rule for entering the country is that you are granted a visa-on-arrival provided you have a stamped letter from some registered websites. While we had that letter, we assumed that the next procedure would be to simply walk up to the counter,

Last year in the month of October, I had the pleasure of visiting this gorgeous little country south of India called Sri Lanka with my family. We had 7 days in that country and even though we might have packed in a tad too much, the memories are just wonderful. Even though I'm going to be sharing my experiences months after, I feel they're still going to be as rich. :) We were in SL for a week and we stayed in Nuwara Eliya, Kandy, Yala National Park, Galle and Colombo. As soon as landed in Colombo, we met our guide/driver/man friday who had organized a fancy van for us to travel in. My first introduction to the fact that nearly all cars in SL are imported (kind of obvious if you know that they have no auto industry of their own!) Day 1: We were set to go to Nuwara Eliya in the evening but our first stop was going to be at the Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage (90 km from Colombo). Luckily for us the elephants were having a bath in the river during this time. I know everyone

You know that feeling when you've been sitting on things that you've been meaning to get done and you just don't get past the idea? Can you believe that the last time I posted a blog was in August of last year! And this is a year when I've done very very exciting stuff. I visited Sri Lanka which deserves a post of its own, went to US and had a wonderfully scenic drive to Monterey, spent yet another fantastic new year in Hong Kong, read many amazing books which transformed my beliefs about life, watched some insane movies which I thought I was bound to hate and in general so much of my life went by and I didn't write about it... I just lost track of my blog and got so busy with survival that I stopped living in a sense. Everyone talks about "switching off" and how one must learn to take breaks, but gosh, it's so difficult. I decided to stay away from work for a couple of days so I can get back some of my sanity but the urge to check your email, to che

I always find the beginning of a post the hardest to write, and then I decide to just start writing and I bet by the time I'm done, I'll be the author of yet another loong post. :) This year has been fantastic in terms of my travel. Oh yes I've had some horrid experiences with transit visas but then I've learned a HELL lot from those experiences so that my next travels are a lot smoother. The US trip was special like that, because I researched and found and practically booked the flights and the hotels myself and ended up with a perfect trip. If you know me then you know that I'm jinxed when it comes to flights, tickets, dates and sometimes even online payments! But then, that's the challenge, and thankfully this time I managed to catch all my flights on time. Major win! After my Boston trip last year, this year was a totally different trip. I visited 4 cities for starters, San Francisco, Miami, New York and Boston. I think I didn't end up doing justice

(cross-posting from my notepad written post) Writing with a pen in hand on a wide notepad after years feels so strange. I've forgotten how to wield a pen to my wishes almost... On a side note I should probably keep writing a little bit every week to stay in practice. My plan was to spend half the day in going around Calcutta, having got a taxi to take me around I was excited about the day! My morning was beautiful. Sukanya woke me up at 6.30. Had some coffee and then got ready to leave. Hunted for this place called at Maharani to have Calcutta's famous breakfast, Kachori Subzi. To add a bit of trivia, this place is very near the guest house shown in Kahaani. V argues that Maharani serves very good Kachori Subzi and not Kuchudi Subzi (which is more bengalisized version). Grabbed that and then headed for Babughat. En route we saw Eden Garden decked up in the new face of KKR. Glimpsed at Victoria Memorial and found a beautiful cathedral, St. Pauls. Eventually turned out tha

I've decided I'm going to write a blog for every day for the next 30 days. I'm going to be in US for 3 weeks and I'm expecting that to give me enough content to blog about. :) So here goes: Finally the day when I am leaving for US. The morning was quite perfect actually, I woke up on time, actually managed to do laundry, get my foreign exchange sorted, reach office, finish and wrap off work in time, go to the parlour, come home, pack, skype, read, get ready, and then come to the airport. :) There's this beautiful tranquil kind of song playing in the background... not very elevator style music, but more like the kind of music you'd like listening to perched on a jharokha in a tall tower high up on the hill... the kind of music that makes you smile and breathe more calmly. There's a tiny place in the airport called Khao Galli. Ironically, amidst all this tranquility and silence, you can hear the person make hot doass on the tava with the noises of the

So after 3 years of my passport being issued, I finally got a stamp on it. I didn't get a visa (unfortunately) because HK doesn't need a visa if you're staying for < 14 days! Ha! :) Anyways. I had a super awesome trip. 13 days of pure bliss, enjoyment, fun, madness, shopping, traveling, sightseeing, thinking, clicking and all the 'ing's possible. The city is beautiful. After the first few days I realized that I was clicking all photos in the portrait modes because clicking in landscape mode wouldn't accommodate the tall buildings at all, and ALL buildings are TALL! Really! The roads are spick and span, like my kind of roads, people throw the trash in the dustbins, and in the right dustbins. There is a separate thing on the top for cigarette butts. There are bins at most signals, and on most streets. The traffic signals work and show you when to cross the road, and all people patiently wait and abide. Thanks to this, taxis, cars and buses zoom between signals

So the last time I blogged about finding those key, small but your people in establishments, I'd written about this person at my regular printers near Andheri station and this guy who'd helped me out at the Vodafone store. :) Something similar happened to me recently. In a new city. I shifted to Hyderabad because I got a job with Google! And it felt different to roam around in a city that I didn't know anything about. To meet new people everywhere I went after having gotten used to going to 'usual' places for just about everything, right from your parlour appointments, to your haircuts, to getting xerox, to buying medicines, to buying groceries, to clothes, to drinks, to food, everything... Just made me realize how much of patronising we do in our lives because it just makes our lives simpler and easier to get by... In this new city, I didn't know anyone, and the first people who get to know me and give me some level of preferential treatment because of the loy

A few of us friends were just talking and discussing about the ways in which we all go about our trips! It's funny, I'm a control freak of a person most of the times, (lying), actually all the time, but thanks to my friends, I've grown to like the unexpectedness and the unplanned mode of all our trips! I've literally reached a point where I don't want to go on a planned trip because that'll be just too boring and too decided... that element of surprise which brings with it the happiness, the joy and the exposure is just too beautiful and as a friend rightly put it, it's liberating! Megha and I tend to plan our days so much, that those few days of just being and just existing and just doing things based on what we feel and what we want feel like we've broken out of some sort of chains and it just automatically calms us down. Like when we had gone to Goa for the first time. We didn't know what to expect, where to go, nothing. We just got off at an earl

Recently I had gone for a trip with my mom and eldest sister to Saputara, a hill station in Gujarat. We had booked a car and a driver for the entire journey. From Saputara, we were going to go to Pune. The distance being approx. 280 kms. we estimated a 6 hour journey and thought that we'll reach around 4 pm in the evening considering we leave at 9.30 (taking a 30 min break for lunch) Little did we know we were going to be a solid three hours delayed! Having travelled in the same car for 3 days before the return journey, our patience of listening to the only CD in the car was exhausted. Desperate to buy new CDs, we scrounged for a CD shop in the lanes of Nashik. I found one and bought VCDs for Delhi - 6 and Luck By Chance and an audio CD of A R Rehman. The fancily equipped car had those LCD monitors on which you could watch a movie. Though it was a little difficult to follow the dialogues, overall it was an excellent experience. It took care of some great 3 hours of our journey. We