The Story Behind Hainanese Chicken Rice

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…

The Walnut Grove

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…

The Teardrop-shaped Melting Pot

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…

My Browsing History

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…

Knocking the bastard off

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…

Gujarat : Land Of A Myriad Hues

If your hotel has the mud walls and back-to-basics furniture of a traditional Indian home, and the electricity comes from a high-tech windmill, chances are that you’re staying in a Gujarat Tourism Holiday Resort. Chances are too, that you won’t find a better introduction to this multi-faceted State, where it’s quite in order to go…

Kashmir in the New Millennium

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…

With Love, for Kashmir

The best part about Paradise is that you can carry it around in your head. I was delighted when a shopkeeper in the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul called me Hema Malini. Not, I hasten to add, because I am a fan of that actress, nor indeed because I have any pretensions of looking like a…