My World of Food and Travel

This weekend I thought we should visit Nandi Hills. It’s been a while that we visited the place…maybe two months. As usual, Nandi Hills turned out to be a gracious host and we had an amazing birding session, despite a huge crowd and some ear-splitting yodeling by a raucous group. Sigh.  Anyways, let me not digress. The highlights of this trip (Saturday, 21st February) were three sightings: 1. Red Spurfowl We had come across red spurfowls previously in BR Hills but the skittish birds just would not allow us to photograph them. They would suddenly emerge out of bushes, run in front of the vehicle for 5 seconds and before we could focus, they would be gone. I thought we would have to wait for another trip to BR Hills to see them again. But the old adage that extolled the virtues of one’s own backyard proved true. For, the spurfowl appeared right in front of us, on the way to the hilltop at Nandi Hills. For a moment, we thought it was a lone grey francolin or maybe a fema...

A road framed in pink... As the wheels of our car scrunched over the dirt track leading towards Old Magazine House, Ganeshgudi, a sense of deja vu engulfed me. I had never been to this part of the world and yet somehow I knew this road, I knew how the entrance gate would look, even the cottages on stilts that we had booked ourselves into… After all, had I not been reading about this place since the past two years, since the time we took up birding? A magical world, they say, where birds came to you. A cacophony of bird songs and colours. Or as Kartik had put it on his blog – a place where you can carry on ‘armchair birding’. It sounded too good to be true, and yet there were photographs to support these eulogies. Pictures that looked as if they were almost photoshopped. How could birds look like they had been posing for the photographers, perched on those beautiful mossy boughs?  “Let’s find out, shall we?” the husband said, parking our car in the shade of tall trees. ...

I had always been the girl who never raised her hand in class. Even to questions whose answers were on the tip of my tongue. I would always be the one who whispered answers to the girl sitting next to me during quiz competitions and clapped away as she collected the prize onstage for replying correctly. I could never muster enough courage to request my professors to clear a doubt for me in class. I could never even call out my name when someone asked about the artwork decorating the walls of our classroom in school. Reason – I was mortally scared of bringing the limelight on me, of people turning around to look at me, people with expectations…. And yet, although I liked being in the shadows, somewhere I wanted my voice to be heard. Just a tiny one, maybe, and get a little pat on the back. On the other hand, I loved paying compliments. Even here, there was a problem – in spite of all my goodwill, somehow I would end up forgetting to wish a close friend or a relative on his/her speci...