Tag Archives: Travel

In My Hands Today…

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Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India – Pankaj Mishra

In Butter Chicken in Ludhiana, Pankaj Mishra captures an India which has shrugged off its sleepy, socialist air and has become instead kitschy, clamorous and ostentatious. From a convent educated beauty pageant aspirant to small shopkeepers planning their vacation in London, Pankaj Mishra paints a vivid picture of a people rushing headlong to their tryst with modernity. An absolute classic, this is a witty and insightful account of India’s aspirational middle class.

Small and short conversations with different people about their mindset and living style are described in this book. The people includes young women from Jhansi, with dreams of winning a beauty pageant, and naxalites in Bihar trying to initiate a revolution, and a young man from Gujarat speaking of killing Muslims in public. The author has shared all his experiences through this book. Butter Chicken In Ludhiana: Travels In Small Town India is an interesting read with a rich variety of languages and cultures. The stories in this book are full of irony, humour, and violence. There are so many characters portrayed in this book, and Mr Sharma from Ambala stands out.

The lifestyles of both village and city folk are depicted by the author, in this book which narrates the differences between the dreams and psychology of these people. In Butter Chicken In Ludhiana, the author talks about the reason of unemployment, which is caused by small fast food chains in small towns.

Of Flights and Photos

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While travelling, I usually almost always take the aisle seat as I just can’t see myself squeezed into a corner seat for hours together. This means that I rarely see a city while take off or landing.

Last week, on a work trip to Kuala Lumpur, I decided to take a window seat. This is a ridiculously short flight with a total flying time of 45 mins which is why I decided to risk the window seat so I could take some pictures from the air.

As soon as the seat beat sign comes off, the stewardess rush to get the drinks trolley. Even before they finish the drinks run the captain starts the announcement to the crew to prepare to land! By the time they are back to collect the empty drink cans, it’s time to land…That’s how short the flight is. It takes longer to get to the airport, plus the wait and the trip to the hotel than the actual travel. For example our trip last week the outward bound flight from Singapore to KL was scheduled at 10:15. I left home at 7:30, reached the airport around 8:15, then a two hour wait at Changi, followed by the 45 minute flight (which was around 30 mins late), then an almost 60 minute drive to the hotel. So my door-to-door trip was a grand total of 5.5 hours. The total drive from Singapore to KL is 5 hours! Returning back was worse – we were stuck in the Friday evening traffic on the way to the airport and it took us 2 hours to get to KLIA from the hotel in downtown KL. We were on the last flight home, leaving the hotel around 6 and reaching home almost at midnight!

Anyway, here are some pictures I took, while take-off and just when we were about to land…

Another view of the Singapore coastline marred by haze

Another view of the Singapore coastline marred by haze

The Singapore coastline shrouded in haze

The Singapore coastline shrouded in haze

Suburbs of KL spread out

Suburbs of KL spread out

Changi Airport at take-off

Changi Airport at take-off

Picture just at take-off from Singapore

Picture just at take-off from Singapore

Singapore from the air

Singapore from the air

In My Hands Today…

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From the Holy Mountain: A Journey among the Christians of the Middle East – William Dalrymple

In the spring of A.D. 587, John Moschos and his pupil Sophronius the Sophist embarked on a remarkable expedition across the entire Byzantine world, traveling from the shores of Bosphorus to the sand dunes of Egypt. On the way John Moschos and his pupil Sophronius the Sophist stayed in caves, monasteries, and remote hermitages, collecting the wisdom of the stylites and the desert fathers before their fragile world finally shattered under the great eruption of Islam.

Using Moscho’s writings as his guide and inspiration, the acclaimed travel writer William Dalrymple retraces the footsteps of these two monks, providing along the way a moving elgy to the slowly dying civilization of Eastern Christianity and to the people who are struggling to keep its flame alive. The result is Dalrymple’s unsurpassed masterpiece: a beautifully written travelogue, at once rice and scholarly, moving and courageous, overflowing with vivid characters and hugely topical insights into the history, spirituality and fractured politics of the Middle East.

In My Hands Today…

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Nine Lives – William Dalrymple

A mesmerizing book that explores how traditional religions are observed in today’s India, revealing ways of life that we might otherwise never have known.

A middle-class woman from Calcutta finds unexpected fulfillment living as a Tantric in an isolated, skull-filled cremation ground . . . A prison warder from Kerala is worshipped as an incarnate deity for two months of every year . . . A Jain nun tests her powers of detachment watching her closest friend ritually starve herself to death . . . The twenty-third in a centuries-old line of idol makers struggles to reconcile with his son’s wish to study computer engineering . . . An illiterate goatherd keeps alive in his memory an ancient 200,000-stanza sacred epic . . . A temple prostitute, who resisted her own initiation into sex work, pushes her daughters into the trade she nonetheless regards as a sacred calling.

William Dalrymple tells these stories, among others, with expansive insight and a spellbinding evocation of remarkable circumstance, giving us a dazzling travelogue of both place and spirit

In My Hands Today…

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A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East – Tiziano Terzani

Warned by a Hong Kong fortune-teller not to risk flying for a whole year, Tiziano Terzani — a vastly experienced Asia correspondent — took what he called “the first step into an unknown world. . . . It turned out to be one of the most extraordinary years I have ever spent: I was marked for death, and instead I was reborn.”

Traveling by foot, boat, bus, car, and train, he visited Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, China, Mongolia, Japan, Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia. Geography expanded under his feet. He consulted soothsayers, sorcerers, and shamans and received much advice — some wise, some otherwise — about his future. With time to think, he learned to understand, respect, and fear for older ways of life and beliefs now threatened by the crasser forms of Western modernity. He rediscovered a place he had been reporting on for decades. And it reinvigorated him.