Varanasi : The Day the Music Died.
Sadly today, the music is dying out in Varanasi. Living in neglect, the musicians now look at any opportunity to move out of the city. Music concerts are more on Bollywood themes, and Indian classical music as a consequence gets a short shrift. Students wishing to learn Indian classical music are few and far between and there is a real danger of some of the classical traditions vanishing and the old instruments falling silent forever.
How a Cop asks for a Bribe. Remembers his ‘Old Self’. And goes to a Temple.
They usually hum and haw and wait for you to make the offer. So when he finished the paperwork and looked straight at me and demanded, “Now get me the money”, I was taken aback. Even in his civvies, he looked every bit a cop. He was tall, had flaccid, clean- shaven jowls and wore […]
Golden Temple Kitchen – The largest community kitchen in the world.
This is no ordinary kitchen. This is the kitchen of the holiest Sikh Shrine, the Golden Temple or Harmandir Sahib which serves meals to more than 40 thousand people any given day. On a Sikh religious holiday however, the number can cross 1,00,000, making it the largest community kitchen of the world.
The Road to Sangla- The World’s Deadliest Roads
Firstly, like all mountain roads, the Sangla road has not been carved on a mountainside but rather bored through a rocky precipice. Therefore the road has an overhang of rock giving you a feeling that you are driving through a tunnel. At one stretch, you feel frightfully hemmed in, prompting travellers to christen it the ‘sandwich road’. If you dare to get off and look down from the ‘sandwich’, which inevitably every tourist does for selfies, there is a sheer drop of a few hundred feet. Down below in the stone strewn gorge, the Baspa river- a tributary of Satluj- appears but as a trickle of water.
Bhimbetka Rock Shelters. Art in the Stone Age
Call it a characteristic lack of interest in our history or lack of publicity, Bhimbetka hardly gets any visitors. Most of the tourists throng the other more popular monuments and pilgrim spots that litter this part of Madhya Pradesh.
Tawang- A Place China Calls ‘Southern Tibet’.
The Chinese claim- that Arunachal is part of its territory– has put the Indian Army on edge leading to an intense militarization of this isolated region.
Everyone here talks of how China has built a four-lane highway right upto the Tawang border. To counter that threat, road widening is in full swing and you have to wait at several points along the highway for the road rollers to finish their job.