From the category archives:

Travel

Sigiriya from the top and the bottom and from afar

March 5, 2010
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For eight centuries before Kashyapa the activity in Sigiriya was monastic. Then for the next eight centuries, it was again a home for monks. After that it was abandoned and the bricks crumbled and the timber rotted and something that approached a pharaoh’s doing didn’t stay intact for as long except for the foundations, and [...]

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art and soul

February 25, 2010
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The tree in the outdoor section of Dome Cafe is wild in detail, and wild on the whole. From its twisted trunk its limbs are further twisted on their own axis, and also in relation to one another. Such a tree—rapt in a dance that takes, perhaps, a few years for every move—they have bound [...]

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notions of immortality

February 17, 2010
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The walls come down the hill like two aged arms of the young Fort Canning Centre. People were shooting the Canning Centre, and the two plain two-hundred year old cupolas built by the architect Coleman, and the greens between the walls—with small and large cameras. None came up to the two old walls to see [...]

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the eye and Madurai

January 6, 2010
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I spent an entire day at the Aravind Eye Hospital, founded by Dr. Venkataswamy thirty years ago, and which many say is the second great temple in Madurai. In the book From Here to Nirvana, which is a Lonely Planet kind of guide to ashrams and temples, the Aravind Hospital is one prominent destination. The [...]

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the Hoysalas: brigand chiefs who became kings

December 27, 2009
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In my last post I told you that all the public walls of Bangalore are painted over with scenes of ruins of our historical monuments, and larger-than-hoarding depictions of our beasts and birds and beaches. I am sitting in the Cafe Coffee Day by the highway at Hirisave, a hundred and ten kilometers west of [...]

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Chasing the Race

October 1, 2009
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He was pleasant and made good conversation, and for a Singaporean manager, seemed quite easy, there was not that brusqueness about him. He is determined to source a range of aerospace components from India; for which he will open his office in Hyderabad by January. “You will be our first source,” he said, showing more [...]

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the taxi from Farmington to Hartford

September 12, 2009
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Image via Wikipedia

Omar’s “executive” taxi was long and clean and smelt sweet inside. It was Friday, and he wore a crisp Moroccan kaftan for the mosque. He is Egyptian. I would have called him for the return trip from Farmington, but my customer wanted to help and she organized the return. I watched this other [...]

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up and down the bosphorus

July 4, 2009
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At the pier everyone held back, knowing to be polite, but in the tension and the poise you could see that each wished everyone out of the way, and all suppressed (or didn’t have the strength for) the urge to push the rest to the edge and out. The woman behind me sneezed, and my [...]

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The great travelers

June 15, 2009
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Travels with my Briefcase was strongly recommended to me last fortnight, and I’m not disappointed. Also A Short Walk in the Kindukush, which I’m now reading, and I’m laughing every few passages. But I have to reconcile myself to this style of writing which, while it recounts enviable adventure, also looks derisively at the host—the [...]

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la dolce vita

June 7, 2009
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Mario drove as though we were given the free use of a runway and halted—in downtown Milan, at a stop-sign before the imposing Central Station made whiter with a heavy moonlight fallen upon it. I knew these seconds were all I’d get to see it this evening, but I did what I wanted: I verified [...]

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Tokyo Diary

May 15, 2009
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I walked thrice up and down the street to locate the memorial to William Adams, shipwrecked Englishman who taught the Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu gunnery, geography, and mathematics, and whose life inspired James Clavell to write the bestseller Shogun (1975). The stone is crammed in less than five feet between two shops. The neighborhood went by [...]

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Gandhiji’s Sabarmathi Ashram

March 25, 2009
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Once he had worn his clothes, and sandals, and spectacles, and after he’d gathered his stick, his packing was done. The march to Dandi was also his final departure from the Sabarmati Ashram. Almost nothing was left to leave behind, and his other possession, the love of millions of Indians, was not in his possession [...]

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