My World of Food and Travel

There is a cheerful rabbit on the calendar on my office desk, standing up on its hind legs and prancing around with joy, a toothy grin plastered over its face. The caption says ‘Dream’. Overleaf, there is a delightful gang of pixies, riding iridescent snails. The caption – ‘Life’. I sighed and turned away my eyes from the calendar. An excel sheet lay open in my computer, splattered with various graphs and charts. “Hey, wake up, sleepyhead,” my colleague looked over at me through the cubicle partition. “Why are you staring at the calendar like that?” He peered at it closely. “Want to go on a holiday, do you?” “Yes,” I replied wearily. “A holiday every month, if you please.” “In that case, you have the wrong calendar,” he said, smiling warmly. He then carefully opened a brown envelope, took a calendar out of it and placed it on my desk. “Here,” he said in a low conspiratorial voice. “This is a magic calendar. Now you can go on your holiday for every month of the new year...

“So, we are in Goa,” I said to the husband, who was lazily lounging around in the four-poster antique bed at Cancio’s House. “And the beaches are over.” “Now for the birds,” he replied sleepily. Goa’s susegad air seemed to have worked well on him. “But where?” I nudged him. “You are the researcher, you do the research.” He then rolled over and started snoring. I quickly browsed through some sites and before I knew it, I had fallen asleep, too. It was 6.00 am when I woke up with a start. The husband, surprisingly, was already awake. “Where to, then?” he asked. Morjim beach is what I found myself saying and Morjim beach was where we found ourselves at around 7.00 am in the morning. The beach is a nesting and hatching habitat of the endangered Olive ridley sea turtles. The Tourism Department has strived to aid conservation efforts by restricting temporary seasonal structures (like shacks) to a portion of the beach and requiring them to operate only during daylight ho...

Memories are strange things. They pop up when you least expect them. Take today morning, for example. We were happily yapping away on our WhatsApp group, comprising cousins and aunts, when my brother posted an old picture of us playing cards. It immediately opened a floodgate of memories and emotions and my mom found herself in tears.  “You have all grown up so fast,” she sobbed over the phone. “How I wish I could go back to those days.” I wished the same, too. If only I had a magical time travel machine. I was shaken out of my reverie as a little hand tugged at my dress. “Mamma, story please.” A pair of liquid brown eyes looked up at me, pointing at my laptop. I sighed as I switched on the computer – oh the travails of a modern mother. I had grown up reading fairy tales and other stories the conventional way, but now it is the computer that my son recognizes as a story book.  As I browsed through the stories on youtube, the little guy pointed at a thumbnail...

A few days back, Aditi had tagged me to write a post on how we think we can eliminate classroom hunger so that no child would go hungry and an entire generation is educated. It was an initiative taken up by blogadda in association with Akshaya Patra , an organization promoting mid-day meals in schools. Unfortunately, the whole week was a turbulent one with office work threatening to eliminate my sanity instead. Yet, the thought of ‘food for education’, played intermittently in the back of my mind. Somewhere, a memory was tugging at my heartstrings. It would surface vaguely and go away even before I could take cognition of it. Finally, it dawned upon me when I opened Akshaya Patra’s website a few minutes back. My eyes instinctively went to a young girl wearing mekhala chadar, the traditional dress of Assam. Her name was Krishna and she belonged to a remote village at Chandrapur block in Assam, a place which still does not have electricity connection fully. Krishna walked 10 km every...

(Caution: Long post ahead!) My first memory of Goa was as a wide-eyed kid, squealing with delight as the waves took away the sands under my feet, way back in 1989. The wonder of this small coastal state remained with me and I continued to visit it repeatedly in the subsequent years, sometimes with family, a few times with office colleagues and once with my cousin and her friends. And yet, each time I ended up seeing the same things over and over again. So much so that Goa became synonymous only with beaches, shacks, churches, clubs and port wine. Finally, the trip in October 2014, the ninth one in the series, cracked this belief. Goa was a revelation as we explored a side away from the beaches, the non-touristy circuit, a facet so rich and diverse in its ecosystem and culture that it took our breath away.  Come along with me and I will show you what I did this time that was different from the other trips and was so fulfilling. Here’s what I did: 1. Went bird-watchin...