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Winter morning and chai at an Indian railway station
It is not even 7 in the morning as I turn on the ignition of my car. In Bangalore, the weather reading on a cold January morning hovers around 15 C or thereabout. Outside, there is a blanket of fog that is so thick, I can barely see beyond a few meters. Onward I muster to the nearby railway station, barely a 15 min drive away. I have promised to meet a friend for early morning chai there. The drive is dangerous in the thick fog. As soon as I get out of the car, the dew drops condensed on the eucalyptus tree branches above patter down on my windcheater.…
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The lost romance of train travel
“The trains [in a country] contain the essential paraphernalia of the culture: Thai trains have the shower jar with the glazed dragon on its side, Ceylonese ones the car reserved for Buddhist monks, Indian ones a vegetarian kitchen and six classes, Iranian ones prayer mats, Malaysian ones a noodle stall, Vietnamese ones bulletproof glass on the locomotive, and on every carriage of a Russian train there is a samovar. The railway bazaar with its gadgets and passengers represented the society so completely that to board it was to be challenged by the national character. At times it was like a leisurely seminar, but I also felt on some occasions that…
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Snapshots in our memories
Some memories are better captured in our minds than in our cameras. What are yours ?
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That sweet game called Cricket
An earlier rant that I had written on the deplorable state of cricket in its 20 over format. Now with allegations of corruption and spot-fixing, it might have been the proverbial last nail, but I still don’t see T20 dying out so soon. The audiences like it, the cricketers make a neat sum – what more is needed. Whatever happened to that sweet little game called Cricket ? What I see now seems nothing more than a trash can of cricketing shots promoted as sports entertainment, masquerading in the name of a great game. It is too early to write off the twenty 20 version of the game in its…
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Nostalgia is a rabid dog
I don’t know why I keep going back in time to May-June 2010, this time of the year. It’s been 3 years now, but I still can’t forget my first memories of that place. There must be a stupid internal clock in my brain that has an alarm set to go off this time of the year. The reasons – maybe it was the place itself and the jaw dropping scenery it made me take for granted for a better part of two years. On second thoughts, maybe it had more to do with the ceaseless rain there. (Utterly magical) WordPress statistics for my blog tell me it is the…
