On a recent trip to Singapore, I made my way to the Mecca of Hainanese Chicken Rice: Purvis Street. Right by the uber fashionable Bugis Junction, no more striking contrast can be found. Purvis Street has started the inexorable change towards modernization, but when I first visited Singapore in 2002, it was an old-fashioned double…
One thing I never tire of during my travels, is to see how the same plant, crop or tree is used so differently in various places where it grows. Take the chinar, for example. It dominates the horizon in Kashmir, especially in autumn when each tree in the Valley looks like a giant globe of…
If you think of Sri Lanka as a minuscule island that lies to the south of India, you may be right, but if you think that it is too small to offer much diversity, you had better plan a trip there sometime soon. Because if indications are anything to go by, the somnolent country that…
Everywhere I travel, I like to see the fruit and vegetable markets, the motor spare parts shops, the back streets where printers have their presses and the second-hand clothes and books bazars. For, much more than the manicured centre of town, it is these areas, with their hair let down, that you will get the…
Before I got there, courtesy a kind friend who is from the fabled city, I had imagined the centre of the street food world to be centered around the ghats. Once we got there, I realized that nothing could be further from the truth. In the three days that my friend and I were in…
Most trips to Kashmir are three or four days long: much too short to sift through a jumble of poor choices. This list is a recommendation of various possibilities in Srinagar, all in the realm of eating and drinking. Do bear in mind that meals in most restaurants are likely to be tailored to tourists…
In 1953, a British led expedition to Mount Everest included a New Zealand bee-keeper and a Sherpa who had settled in Darjeeling. There was rather a lot at stake. Ever since the discovery and the naming of the mountain, it had been identified with the British. Or so the British themselves liked to think. They…
As symbols of normalcy go, the all-glass front of Pick n Choose on Residency Road, Srinagar, is as telling as any. Five years ago, you couldn’t find glass doors in Srinagar – they’d be a sitting duck for a terrorist’s bullet. Five years ago, you wouldn’t even have wanted the transparency of glass. Thick wooden…
