The North East has always been an exotic place for those of us on the mainland. Hills, Militants, Tea gardens, and what have you. The flight from Calcutta to Dibrugarh overflew the Brahmaputra – and what a grand sight it was. Stretching across for tens of kilometers at places, serenaded by the peaks of Arunachal … Read more

When Awadh Assam express departs 1.5 hours late from Samastipur and reaches 0.5 hours early at Guwahati, you should be jumping with joy. Except that at 0330 hrs, jumping is not really high on priority. And when Abbas, your friend, philosopher and car driver for the next 8 days, who was to turn up at … Read more

We started the trip at Kochi. The high point for me at Kochi was chatting up with Padmakar Agashe’s friend from the rope industry – Pramod. One of the biggest sectors that Pramod deals with is the fishing industry. There are different types of nets. There are the ones that are fitted in estuaries – … Read more

Day 1 Started from Pune by the Intercity Express, which has a Thane stop instead of the normal Kalyan one. Caught a fast local at Thane to go to Kurla. Kurla (W) is an extension of Dharavi The station road is quite narrow, to the extent that only autos and two wheelers ply on these … Read more

In J and K, the Line of Control is different from the Line of Actual Control. The former defines the real border with Pakistan, the latter with China. Our nation’s optimistic politic rarely makes us see the real cartography of our nation. Here is how the country’s borders really look like: Cycled up to Panjtirthi … Read more

Spice jet recently started a direct flight from Pune to Kochi – which is what tempted to make a short trip to say hi to Manoj Thomas, who was holidaying in Kottayam, 100 km south of Kochi. Nowadays it is fun to use the Compass google app – it works in the plane! We started … Read more

Tourism and Riding have always been combined in our long distance cycle rallies. Combining it for a short ride was something that my friend Giri suggested the other day. So we started off at 0530 hrs. Not sure whether the decision to go via old Mumbai Pune road was a good one, because the traffic … Read more

We started at 0715 hrs from Sachin Kher’s place. Sachin’s company – Alten Expert Global – is helping Mukesh’s NGO with some of their Karjat projects. We left the expressway at the Khalapur exit – and then went under the expressway towards Karjat. We joined the old Pune Mumbai highway and had a breakfast pit-stop … Read more

Breakfast was a smoothie, followed by self made gajar ka halwa. Usually I do my dessert experiments at night, but wanted to gift the younger daughter something sweet before I left, hence the early morning kitchen duty. Cycled to the mandai to buy 3 kg oranges and 2 kg guava. Reached Town hall, off Tilak … Read more

If you look at Google Maps and trace a straight line between Pune and Nasik, you realise that there is a route, slightly shorter than the highway route, running through village roads. In the 20 years that I have been going to Nasik on work trips, I have never ventured outside of the highway. Abki … Read more