Magic Moments

I want to travel to Istanbul and witness the amalgamation of cultures of two religions. I want to travel to Japan and live in their histories. I want to travel to China and understand their tales, myths, and legends. I want to visit Bhutan and learn about the Buddhist way of life and happiness quotient there. I want to see the Nazca lines. I want to see the ruins of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. I want to experience the peaceful and soulful Balinese culture in Bali. I want to travel to Florence and see for myself the beauty described in novels. I want to visit Jordan and witness the enormous creations, the red sand, the canyons and feel the wonder. I am not able to stay still, sit at one place without wondering and searching the details of these places. I have been searching for places that require no Visa for Indian citizens and the list is awesome. I also searched for those places that provided Visa on arrival. I think this is the first time I am feeling wanderlust at this scal...

‘The Beauty Inside’ is a 2015 South Korean movie based on a book named ‘Every Day’ by David Levithan. It’s a romantic comedy but talks at large of living a life of transition, alteration and inevitable change. It is a story of a man who wakes up every day in a different body. Some mornings he is a handsome young man; sometimes an old middle aged person with arthritis and poor vision and sometimes a woman. He wakes up as a child or a girl or a bald headed obese man at times. But no face or body ever repeats itself. He has to adjust to this 24 hour change that his entire system goes through. The story is how he becomes used to this change and finds love even in his unusual situation. The protagonist Woo-jin is a furniture designer.  The bodies he finds himself in, every morning, is regardless of age, gender or nationality. There are times he wakes up as a foreigner. He experienced this for the first time on his 18 th birthday, and his life was never the same. He withdre...

It’s a memoir on a language project that Jhumpa Lahiri takes up for about three years of her life. It’s about her deep and personal journey of learning Italian, trying to master the language, living in a self-imposed exile from her dominant language English by reading and writing solely in Italian. It might come across as a strange project, yet bold, brave and not more than a few can fathom to take so huge a risk while being on the peak of one’s literary career. This autobiography is her first, yet the truest, most vulnerable- about her joys and failures, about being a foreigner forever, about belonging not in a country or a culture but in the margins. It is about seeking comfort and solace in discomfort, seeking freedom in limitations. I loved this book. After almost a week of finishing reading it, I usually find myself opening a random page and re-reading it. I keep going back to the book. She says in one of the chapters, when she reads Italian, she feels like a gues...

Everything that starts comes to an end. The holidays have finally come to an end. The festivals are over. Our long trip with multiple stops has come to an end. Getting up early in the morning to start another journey has become a habit in this past week. How nice and exciting life would be, if we just traveled every day to new places! Every day would bring us to new roads and new destinations. We are already planning our next family get-together and our next outing. Hope it comes soon. Guess, I too have been bitten by the travel bug. I am also planning a trip to a nearby metro city with friends, but I’m not sure if it’ll culminate or not. Fingers crossed! My emails are flooded with travelogues nowadays. My Instagram follows include ‘ beautifulDestinations ’, ‘travelandleisure’, ‘forbestravelguide’, ‘tastingtable’ and many similar pages related to travel and food. The blogs I read these days are about the Balinese culture, the Bora Bora islands, the Buddhist Monasteries aro...

I thought to share a tiny bit of a short story that I was working on last April, but couldn't continue. I haven't found any more ideas or motivation to continue it yet. No dreams, no scenes flashing in my mind, no hints, no twists to introduce, nothing. I just know the start and end of the story, have it etched and well defined in my mind, but can't seem to take the characters from this end to that end. The journey intimidates me somehow. Hoping to get inspired by dear bloggers to complete this one, by this year. So here it is: I had a dream yesterday. A very weird one. I was climbing up the stairs, that kept on spiraling up, higher and higher, never ending. It was an uncanny feeling. I woke up with a start, my heart beating loud and clear. My roommate had switched off the fan, and I was already sweaty. I got up, switched it back on, had a glass of water and sat on my bed thinking what to do. Going back to sleep was impossible. I checked the time. It was 3:45...

#FridayReflections We went to our village in Ganjam district after the trip to Jirang Monastery. The roads had banyan and Peepal trees on the either side, offering beautiful views during the sunset. It took us a little more than two hours to reach the destination. I thoroughly enjoyed the long drive, listening to some soulful songs and eating boiled groundnuts in the backseat. We were going to the village after two years. My father was very eager, as it was where he spent most of his childhood and adolescence. We were excited too, as we were to meet a new member of the extended family- little baby Saanvi. You know it’s a festival when you hear the gongs in the temple from a mile away. You know you have reached the village when you have to press the horn twenty-a-times to cross a herd of cattle on the road. You know you are near the destination if you see monkeys on the trees and the terraces of the kutcha houses. You know you have finally reached if there are more than thr...

As we drove through the country road with trees, hills and valleys on either side, I thought back to our trip that we were just returning from. The dusky hue of the sky, distant mountains, the neverending farmlands, the constant greenery and occasional sight of a vehicle or some villagers with their cattle returning from the farms and a slow song in the background provided a perfect atmosphere for my reverie.  Our first stop was a deer park having barking deer and a small stream flowing under a small bridge over the rocks. Then, we stopped at Taptapani, a small temple with a hot water spring where the tourists are to wash their feet and hands. The temple itself was not much of an attraction but the sceneries surrounding it were absolutely breathtaking. A path of stone covered with moss overlooking a stream of water gushing down the steps, a stone bridge to cross the stream and trees stretching as far as the eyes could see - simply a beautiful sight for the eyes to behold. ...