The Best Summer Vacation Ever

Summer holidays for me were never ever the same! This year is seeing a total upheaval of my idea of an ideal summer vacation. So what's the big difference? TRAVEL it is! Not beyond the four walls of the city, oh no; how I wish I could though. But this time round, I am spending my holidays traveling around town, visiting all those places I'd never seen, learning the historical nuances and different facets of the city that I call home - the place where my heart lies.


Delhi is a melting pot of cultures and traditions from across the world. It is a place where a mosque, a temple and a gurudwara can stand together in complete harmony and attract visitors of all castes and religious beliefs. If we have typical South Indian food joints and Punjabi dhabas around every other nukkad, we also have restaurants in the city serving British breakfast and authentic Chinese and Thai food. If there is the Sacred Heart Cathedral, there is also the Jama Masjid here.

There are said to have been seven cities of Delhi, established by different dynasties and rulers in different eras to suit their own whims and fancies. Invaders came, conquered, built shrines, gardens and institutions, and were then overthrown only to pave way for newer rulers, giving us a rich architectural heritage in the process. Travelers and backpackers from across the world as well as India throng Delhi throughout the year to discover the history of the ruins of monuments from the Mughal era, and to witness the traditional celebrations and religious rituals held in the many different places of worship to be found here. Delhi is indeed a traveler's true delight.



Now my love for my city hasn't been any secret from anyone. My family knows that if given the slightest chance, I'll take off with a backpack and return home God-knows-when with a ghastly tan and more to share than I can even mouth. My closest friends know my obsession with history and historical places. So much so that I was smuggled out to Safdarjung Tomb on my last birthday, only to have me cut my birthday cake there. So I kinda celebrated my BIRTHDAY at someone's BURIAL PLACE. And I didn't mind in the least. Seriously.

Given all I've said above or have ever given out about my true passions, getting to discover Delhi - in a new light, from a completely new angle - is heaven on earth for me. I've started my pursuits already, and plan to write about my travels. Now I should admit here that I don't know the first thing about writing a good travelogue. I am not a very organized traveler, nor a very smart one at that. I end up getting lost sometimes, covering several kilometers on foot in the scorching Delhi heat and falling sick once I'm back home. I plan very less, rely on my unreliable mobile internet connection for necessary info, don't even use GPS like a smartphone user normally would. I don't apply sunscreen, fumble with my umbrella on the crowded streets and end up all messy and confused in the middle of nowhere sometimes. But the only thing that matters amidst all of this craziness is that I love every minute of it. I would give up any amount of luxury and comfort of the air conditioned indoors just to be able to immerse myself in the history of a place or the magical ambiance that it radiates. And that's about it.

Yeah yeah, I get it. Enough about my perpetual love affair with craziness. I shall just conclude now, with a promise to come up with some fun (or boring!) travelogues in the coming weeks, covering monuments, temples, gurudwaras, mosques, food joints - basically any place that I end up at in the course of the best summer vacation ever. So I'll be seeing you around! :D

Excited!

Excitement (noun)
1. A feeling of great enthusiasm and eagerness.
2. Something that arouses such a feeling; an exciting incident.



Yes, I am back again! And hell yeah, I AM EXCITED!
Though for now I am really short on time, so will just have to do with sharing with y'all little snippets of all the things that are making me excited. Here we go!

1. Tangy dreams coming true
My start-up Kalakhatta just got legally registered as a company. So now we aren't just Kalakhatta, we're Kalakhatta Networks Pvt. Ltd. Sounds like music to my ears, what do you think?
NOTE: The website's still under repair and upheaval. Do NOT judge by the look of it. We aim higher than we portray. ;)

2. It's rainin' MEETS!
Okay so I remember telling you all about how much fun last year's HP Originals Indiblogger meet in the city was. But tomorrow, it's gonna be a double whammy, with two Indiblogger meets in a single day! I'm all excited and chirpy. So the first meet is an all-women meet organized by Dove. (These Dove people are seriously on an intensive publicity campaign these days. They're everywhere your eyes can see! *phew*)
And the other one in the evening by Spice Mobiles isn't just confined to women, so it'll thankfully provide us with some contact with the real civilization, not just an Utopian one. A complete report on both the events is in the pipeline after tomorrow!

3. Holiday season!!!
This one should've come first, methinks. Nevertheless, it's holiday time again! That one time in the entire year when studies, assignments, files or grossly-dressed-up-and-always-smirking teachers can not bog you down. The time when you can let your spirit soar, to achieve those heights of self contentment that you've always dreamed of. *starry eyes*
Or maybe that is taking things too far. 'coz I still have a summer training to attend and a project to write and a thousand and one higher-studies-and-job-entrance exams to prepare for. So it isn't exactly such a rosy picture as I painted. But it's vacation time nevertheless,hence I get to choose when to do, what to do, and TO DO OR NOT TO DO. That's more than fine, methinks. :D

4. Freelance freelance
Yeah, like the game ghar ghar we used to play while we were kids, I've started playing freelance freelance after all. Just happened to bag an opportunity to write for this amazing tourism website that's gonna come up online in some time. I am doing reviews of places around Delhi worth visiting, for their Delhi portal. That includes traveling a lot and that too, to historical places, museums and other places of my interest. What better subject could I ever get to write about! I am thoroughly enjoying the work and the very fact that I'm being *paid* to do what I'd have otherwise done for free, for my sheer love of both travel and writing, makes it awesome. More on it as we go. :)

That's all from my side for now. But now that the evil monster called EXAM SEASON is dead (if only temporarily), I'll see you people around more often. Cheers to that. :)

The Gift of a Holiday

The sudden sound of the doorbell jolted me out of my reverie. It was the mailman with all the usual stuff – the electricity bill, a couple of mails wrongly delivered to my house owing to the confusing house numbers, and letters from relatives back home in India containing pictures and details of prospective Punjabi suitors. Sigh. They’ll never really give up trying to make me marry a man of their choice, I thought. More so, now that they thought I had learnt my lesson. Tossing away all the envelopes into the waste bin, I settled into my favorite old reclining chair facing the woods beyond the glass walls of the living room. I had taken to sitting here most of time that I was awake, looking out at the wilderness with a calm state of mind, unthinking, completely blank.


It had nearly been a month since my walk down the aisle to the altar. Nearly a month since that one moment when Paul decided to walk out of the churchyard, calling off the wedding on the verge of having said ‘I do’. I never quite understood what happened, refusing to believe for quite some time that he wasn’t coming back. When finally I did, this invisible but heavy pall of silence enveloped me and my entire world. I lived alone, spending my days in denial, trying not to think or dwell upon it. And yet, we all know how much that really works. I had nightmares where I was getting married to him and things went wrong at the last moment. The wedding cake would go bad, or my dress would suddenly vanish, or it would rain. I never seemed to be able to make it to the end vows. Calls from friends and relatives berating me over my choice of an American man or sympathizing with me over the tragedy just worsened everything. And so I shut myself in.

The phone suddenly rang, disturbing my chain of thoughts. It was Kyra. My best friend from college days, who had went on to become a successful designer leaving her law degree behind, only to give it all up again to turn globetrotter. Wish we all could be so daring. She had been present at the wedding…was my maid of honor. And as it suddenly came back to me, I hadn’t really seen any of her after that day. She hadn’t been there sympathizing with me, consoling me after my misfortune, telling me to put myself back together, go out and enjoy myself, to find someone new. Where had she been? I wanted to ask her but couldn't. And ever so typically of her, the sunshine of my life that she always had been, she didn’t ask me how I had been holding up. She just straightaway moved on to explaining where she had been all the past month – it turns out, she had been putting together the best getaway ever, just for the two of us. I was dumbfounded and to be honest, hesitant. I refused to go. But she wouldn’t listen to a word I said. She said I just had to come. She asked me to pack my bags and be ready to be picked up in an hour. And she hung up before I could protest.

A good two hours later, the front door to the house flew open, and in flew the one sight that forced me to cry out with joy for the first time in weeks. She looked radiant – beautiful, surprisingly tanned, svelte and even sunnier than the last time I had seen her. Kyra was full of life, always brimming with energy and always there to spread joy in everybody’s lives. For a split second I wanted to be her, to run away from the life I had been reduced to. As if reading my mind, she told me to quickly fetch my bags. On my admitting to not having packed any, not being in a mood to leave home at all, she took a full look at me and rolled her eyes. And then fished out an itinerary of items from her pocket. She really had every single bit planned! Right from the beach hut we’ll be renting, to the colors we’ll be wearing, to the sunscreen we’ll be using, everything was there on a sheet of paper! Her hatchback was waiting outside, loaded with all the supplies. Knowing me only too well, she had packed in everything for me too. So within the next fifteen minutes, we were out the door, driving down to the airport from where we were to board the plane to our destination – Martha’s Vineyard. My favorite track from our college days was playing (coincidence or conspiracy??) - *Oohh…Mysterious girl, I wanna get close to you…* I felt my heart take a leap, like it hadn’t for as long as I could remember.

Squatting on the beach on the north shore of the island, watching the sun rise over the water, reality dawned upon me. Kyra had known from the start that I needed this more than any of those condolences and encouraging sermons coming my way. With her sunshine ways, she had tossed my self confinement into the warm humid air of the beaches, reminding me of what a fun loving person I used to be. So I walked up to our rented house, disturbing Kyra in the middle of her morning yoga session, demanding her to bring out everything she had stashed away and to come have fun with me on the sands. Shocked but clearly happy, she took out her goodies – skimpy swim suits in the craziest of colors, over sized hot pink sunglasses and her latest obsession – the Lakme Sun Expert product that she had used all summer to keep away the awful sun while she traveled. One look at all that, and all my residual reluctance just went poof into the air. With such amazing planning and such an amazing friend, who really needs a man in her life anyway!

And so our itinerary for the day looks somewhat like this – a late morning jog around the length of the beach, to be spent reminiscing old times, college days and all the pranks our duo was notorious for, followed by a session of beach volleyball with a group of holidayers staying in the neighboring house (she has promised to introduce me to a very cute guy she happened to notice among them!!) Following that, a proper seafood lunch awaits us at one of the open air restaurants lining the beach. Up ahead on the list is an evening of cocktails and getting drunker than ever, finally ending the night with a grand bonfire that this place is well known for. Kyra insists that I’ll have to play the guitar and sing tonight, something I haven’t done in a long while now. But I don’t want to refuse. Somewhere deep inside I know I wanna do it. Whoa...Kyra's already done wonders to my confidence and willpower in ways I couldn't have imagined! And I really want to thank her for such a lovely holiday, one that helped me rediscover myself all over again. So here’s to the beautiful holiday, the awesome friend Kyra, and to a new beginning. Cheers!

(This post is my entry for the Lakme Diva Blogger contest.)

What to do if I'm being copied from?!

I am currently in a position I somehow haven't ever found myself in before. It may be a trivial matter for some. But as for me, I am still not sure as to what to make of it - appreciation or plagiarism?

So I came across this guy's profile on Facebook through some random coincidences or common friends, I don't really remember. I somehow happened to read his description of himself in the 'About' section. And it almost came as a hard smack in my face. A lot of the words and phrases used there were a direct lift from my blog. To be more precise, they had directly been copied from one of my popular posts and from my profile description on the blog. To top it all, the words that he had added himself make it seem like he sat with a Thesaurus in hand while writing this self-flattering, completely fake description of himself. See for yourself -

A meandering and at times promenading psyche in pursuit of his true destination(which honestly is an enigma to me at this moment) at the same time trying to do just to the intent of his creator(another obscurity) having a demeanor that is inscrutable(as Bermuda triangle could never manage to be);affably good at times and yet inexplicably weird at another......somewhat conspicuous and a little contumacious(incredulous is how I perceive it as :D ).....an enigma ........a simple guy with ambitious dreams...proud to be what i m ......

I do not really know for sure if any of this describes him or not, or if he is indeed as enigmatic and charming as he portrays himself to be through my words. But at this moment, I am not in the least obliged to give him credit for anything. I don't know is this is called plagiarism or not, or if this is illegal or not, but it is downright annoying and frustrating. He must have come across my blog, read my fiction piece, liked the imagery I had used and probably thought of using it to paint a mysterious and impressive picture of his own on that social hub where everyone only wants to impress everyone else. If doing such a naive thing gives someone a much needed ego boost (and maybe a few friend requests from random girls on Facebook), I won't be a killbuzz. I'm fine with my words being used to enhance someone's self image, as long as I know. So the right thing to do was to drop me a line, maybe appreciate my work (even if he had to lie about that!) and tell me that he wished to be able to use my words. I'm sure I'd never have refused to that, even if he were a sworn enemy. I wouldn't even have asked him to acknowledge it publicly. But being an ass and just copying stuff from the internet without making the slightest effort to give the creator credit for their work seems to comes way more easily to people nowadays. Guess it always has.

I hope that guy reads this. Because I surely won't be doing anything further than writing about it here. If someone's being a jerk, doesn't always mean I have to be one too. Or maybe I can, but not at the same level surely. A dose of their own medicine usually suffices. Hope it did. ;)

P.S. Please, God, give some sense of decency to people. I'd really like that. Thank you.

Writers can troll too!

Apparently, trolling is fast becoming a trend within the published writers' community too. Many modern Indian writers are taking digs at people in their books these days (don't know about foreign writers). I was reading this book The Secret of the Nagas by Amish Tripathi the other day, and as I turned to page 186 and read it through, I was really in splits for a good five minutes. Wondering what was it I saw?? Take a look:

Isn't it just too obvious how the writer intends to pun Bappi da?! I couldn't help but be surprised at the sheer unexpectedness of such a thing from a book like that, which is set in such an ancient time and is mostly fiction. I mean, seriously? From rage comics on the internet to real life practice to the published word as well, trolling has indeed come a long way. I never thought I'd ever include any rage comic stuff on my blog, but as it turns out, things don't always take the course you expect them to take in life. (I must admit though, it's real fun to read rage comics *religious follower* xD)

Nothing more from my side for now. So till I write again, keep trolling!

Book Reveiw: Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.

Seldom have I showered such praise on any book in my entire life as I have on this novel by Jane Austen. I've read the classic version thrice and watched two movies based on the same quite a number of times each. That's the kind of love I have for Pride and Prejudice.


Pride and Prejudice is one of the most popular pieces of literature ever written. Published way back in 1813, it is basically a satire on the societal manners and superficial courtesies prevalent in the English society of early 19th century. If my three reads are anything to go by, it also reveals the undue importance assigned to fortune and inheritance in deciding one's future happiness. The fact that nothing's changed - every such aspect as well as many more are still seen in today's society at an even aggravated scale - makes the novel as fitting a commentary on today's society as on its original target. And therein lies its pull on the readers.

The story, which is very well known, unfolds through the eyes of Elizabeth Bennet, a twenty year old intelligent and lively girl with an exquisitely beautiful and equally benevolent elder sister Jane, and three younger sisters - one of them insipid, another headstrong and frivolous, and the third her shadow, all three equally silly. The girls have an excitable, narrow minded mother who likes to think of herself as a victim of frequent nervous attacks. Her sole aim as shown in the narrative is to marry off all her daughters to rich men and show off their good fortunes in all of their society, far and wide. Their father is an indifferent, cynical sort of man who derives pleasure out of purposefully irritating his wife and though he loves his daughters, fails to fulfill his paternal duties towards them as such. A host of other characters related to the family have been depicted, each in itself a study in character and temperament.

A little into the story enters Mr. Darcy, the fabled male protagonist of this book. He is an interesting character, as handsome as they come, quick to judge people, a social recluse, yet very kind in his dealings with people he knows. Though Elizabeth and Darcy don't like each other much on their first encounter, they are somehow brought together by fate pretty often throughout the narrative, thus being forced to get to know each others' characters in greater depth. As the events unravel, it makes for a tale full of interesting happenings, each shedding light on a different nuance of human temperament, giving us gems of Jane Austen's sarcasm and satire at the inconsistencies within the gentry of 19th century England.

The title of the book is believed to have been taken from a passage in Fanny Burney's popular novel Cecilia. In a way the title signifies how pride in Darcy's character and prejudice in Elizabeth's perceptions of people alienate them to each other's better qualities, and how, in overcoming their pride and prejudice, they come together towards the end.

Does sound like a typical love story when I put it that way, doesn't it? But it isn't just meant for the romance junkies, as would appear at first glance. It is one great piece of classic literature. Widely believed to be Austen's best work, overshadowing her other popular works like Sense and Sensibility and Emma, this novel exhibits uninhibited satire with a free indirect style of narration and such good humor at times, it would be a misery not to have read this book once in your lifetime. A definite 4 on a scale of 5.

There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of either merit or sense.

Do let me know what you think!

P.S. You can download the e-book, in a format of your choice, from here.

The Joys of Nature at My Doorstep

Having a room right next to a garden is like living right in the middle of the garden itself. If there's shade outside, it'll usually be pleasant inside on an otherwise bright sunny day. When it's raining, you hear the rain drops falling on the window pane and the wind howling through the leaves. Would you believe if I said I haven't had much cause to switch on the ceiling fan of my room for the past few days? And at the onset of the dreaded annual event called the Delhi summers, yes sire. The weather outside is just so beautiful and pleasant right now, with all those strong gusty winds filtering right through my window over to where I squat on my bed - I don't have better fitting words to describe the feeling. I figure I'll just make do by describing the delight that living next to a planted backyard/lawn/garden can be.


Though I wouldn't exactly call it a well manicured lawn or a beautiful garden per se, but it was more of a savanna grassland with rocks and shoulder high weeds, garbage and mud (not even soil) strewn around everywhere before we moved in. So I'd daresay we've made good progress. The grasses are growing well, hedges have been planted, and the mango trees are showering little mango-babies all over the place with every gust of wind. The banana bore fruit, we did not care to climb that high to take it down, so it wilted. The guava was, well, not in the best of its health when we came. But it has been treated sufficiently well for it to give such a beautiful silhouette against the blue skies.

The blue blue sky through the green leafy foliage. My idea of a delightful sight.

Ooo..that is just the friendly neighborhood crow. Drops in every now and then to say hello. Though mostly when I'm trying hard to study.

The mango in full bloom. These flowers have long given way to fruit. Mangoes! :D

And that's the humble banana patch. Quite in a mess, but fruiting nevertheless.

Spot the bananas if you can! :P

One of the cute little yellow and orange flowers we've planted. And no, they're not Marigolds.

I often wake up at (or stay up till) six in the morning to the extra loud, distinct chirps of at least five different birds outside, each perfectly in synch with all others. The sunlight of the early morning is actually invigorating. And I've even noticed a trend. Ever since I started sleeping with my head right under the window, I've been waking up early, at my will, and I feel fresher than ever every morning. And this isn't even the placebo effect. Waking up to sunlight streaming into your room certainly makes the day brighter and more cheerful. It's like having my own sureshot fix to untimely blues. Ah...if only I could have my morning light with me all day long.

Aren't things really getting beautiful around here? Or maybe it's just me, having got a personal garden for the first time in my life. It feels good. Really, I've always wanted one my entire existence. And to be able to really enjoy such a fantastic weather as this in a city like mine, a haven like this is all it takes. But like I've said before, wishes do get fulfilled, and how!