Stupendously Sublime

How do i put this gently, these guys are a freight train to my bridge. They shake me and wake me. They are like a triple shot of Hatti Kaapi coffee without the milk or sugar (well a little sugar cause they are sweet too). 5 years since i first met these guys, call me Jeet and the girl who loved chai (still does) and they finally came together to say hello to Bangalore. It was a trip of epic proportions and not in the amount of drinking these guys get through, it was epic because they came to have fun and boy did they have it. Wednesday, auri da came in and all hell broke loose. Now, the thing is that my levels of inertia are pretty high (just ask the people i live with) but auri da came and that was the impetus to some very uncharacteristic work that i put in. From coordinating various meet and greets, to managing accidents (i'm looking at you auri). From epic bike rides to climbing mountains, from grocery shopping to cooking heart-stopping (literally) eggs. I pulled out all t

The title is a playful rip off from Real Madrid folklore. 10 years of knowing you, 4 beautiful and 6 in the ether. Treading down the narrow and congested lanes of my memory I see rooms upon rooms...not unlike a chawl, every room a flash. every flash a story...peering voyeur like into the rooms through the barred windows catching a happy flash here, confronted by an embarrassment there while a small piece of innocence suddenly confronts me in that narrow dark alley like a street urchin, clothed in rags, yet oblivious all the same. That is scary, the images we projected when we first met and at the end when we would've let go of all the pretension to make that moment permanent. Tricky little bugger time is, it slips through your ribs like a stiletto knife. Taking a cursory and brutal look at our friendships, we have grown apart to the extent that we have no idea who the other is. Everyone has new friends, everyone has a new life and we have learnt to live the new life we have ma

My love for wildlife (and it is wildlife, not just tigers) has taken me to some fruitful and other fruitless places. The sum total of my experiences has brought me more joy than anguish and it is certain that this particular passion is not a passing fad. My latest sojourn (and I have many of those) took me to the literal center of India, Nagpur (they have something called center point or zero point, don’t remember which). Diverging from the topic for a minute, my job is absolutely awesome (though a raise won’t hurt) it pays me to roam around India talking to different people and all I have to do is to convince, cajole, prod them to join my organization. It is too good to be true. So, I was in Nagpur and through a gentleman that I had met at a leadership summit I’d heard about this awesome Tiger Reserve/National Park/forest range called Tadoba. He spoke with such passion that I was sold and it remained in the back of my mind. Now, Tadoba is about 160 km from Nagpur and a tough place