Bangalore Rising

Having a riverside room has its disadvantages. And when electricity is available only for three hours between 7.15pm and 11 pm every day, there is not much one can do at night except sleep or try being one with nature.  And there are fewer things more alluring to me than say, being in Dah at night. First of all, you experience pitch dark. Not the city-bred folks’ “pitch dark”. The darkness in the mountains is quite something unexplainable. Dark and silent... absence of noise made by men and their machines. And the hostile desert that is Ladakh does not have much trees, so no rustling either. Therefore fewer birds or insects. No crickets, no toads, no owls. It’s dead silence therefore.  Second is the sky - its like being in the heavens, feeling one with objects a billion miles away. And thirdly, the river... the sound of life. And if you are with just yourself, in the dark, looking up at the sky, or down at the river, you’ve known unbounded joy... and peace. The effect o...

The Phyang festival is interesting. The courtyard behind the temple is the venue for the costumed dancers to weave their magic on a crowd of about 150 gawking foreigners and Indians alike. We have our fill in about an hour and half, and so decide to head out to our next destination - the Aryan village of Dah, about 150 kms from Phyang, 100 of which is on the Leh-Kargil route. We cross and traverse along several small and mid-sized stre ams for about 20-30 kilometers before those streams hit the mighty, muddy Zanskar. For the next 100+ kilometers till we reach our destination, we are never more than a few yards to the left of, and sometimes several hundred feet above this river. The Zanskar is for a very long distance mellow, as it weaves it’s way through the mountain passes, steadily building on its might, as more small streams join this river. Suddenly the river narrows as it finds itself squeezed into a gorge, turning into an awesome rapid, showing its fury on the scarcely-both...

Ladakh Diaries - Out of Leh Ladakh brings out something else in me - I want to say spiritual, but not being one, it would sound hollow. But it does soothe me, and brings some kind of inner calm. Today was Phyang, a small agrarian village about 20 kilometers northwest of Leh. It’s claim to small town fame is the Phyang Monastery perched on top of a mountain, and its Renpoche who has been supporting innovative and sustainable practices. It’s more recent claim to other fame are  its ice stupas, invented by Sonam Wangchuk, the man who inspired the Rajkumar Hirani film “Three Idiots”.  We went looking for remnants of the ice stupas, and I believe I found it. Ice stupas were SW’s idea of using gravity and pipes to take glacial melt and eject it 20-30 meters up into a cold, minus 20 degree air sometime in November, and see it freeze as it hits the air. Each “ice stupa” holds about 120,000 liters of water in ice form till the beginning of spring when glaciers have not yet m...

The privilege of being an administrative service officer in the sub-continent are many. While the usual seniority-driven protocol exists for promotions and postings, they all come together when it comes to perks such as overseas jaunts, and membership to elite clubs.  I have a pretty dim view of some of these bureaucrats. I know a number of them in the service, but the administrative and foreign service breed are a tad different from officers who belong to the revenue, or railway services; the latter are what I would term technical specialists, with measurable, outcome-driven jobs. Some in the IAS too have such jobs, but a huge number of them seem to, at least to the public eye, very little accountability, and a lot of authority. And when I see them lounging around in clubs, ostensibly talking governance over a beer, or at the ninth hole during regular working hours, I wonder. I wonder whether our terrible dislike for the political class has been exacerbated by the under-perf...

It is evident to even the blind that the media is not particularly in love with Modi. I wondered what was so different about Modi that the media hated this particular politician over a hundred others like him. So here is my half-baked take on this subject. This theorising is obviously just to get a conversation started. So here goes... Their philosophy: From my little tour of the web (most people call it research), I found that some of the more notable media persons in India today are products of left-leaning educational institutions, were flag-waving, and possibly card-carrying members of NSUI, SFI, and similar student unions that are far left of centre. And many of these journalists became journalists not necessarily out of choice, but were misfits in corporate India, or were unqualified for government jobs. And as journalists, they carried their political philosophies into their jobs. This probably holds good for Hartosh Bal, Purnima Joshi, Harshvardhan Tripathi, Nalini Singh, K...

I recently read an Economist article headlined “India’s prime minister is not as much of a reformer as he seems”. Coming from a reputed international newsmagazine, it was a bit surprising that such an impactful headline, was not followed up with depth or detail to make the point stick. From an economic standpoint, almost every ill - near bankruptcy of large PSU banks, poor tax compliance, massive bureaucracy in state sales tax (to a point that almost every state collected just about enough sales tax to pay the wages of the taxmen - yes, does it not surprise you?) that delivered zero meaningful revenue to the state, are a throwback of the past. Whether it was due to 63 years of Congress rule, 2 years of Janata Party rule, or 5 years of the previous BJP rule is not relevant; this, and every previous government inherited a plethora of problems that were/are extremely tough to untangle. It is a fact that every government of the past, especially the one with Janardhan Poojary as a min...

Sundarbans. 27 th December, 2016 Just as the needle edged past ten p.m. on a still, dark, moonless night, a small fishing boat slid silently out of its berth, with a party of nine aboard – the boatman, the tour guide, and seven wide-eyed city-bred men & women. As the boat swished its way into the deep and murky waters of the Gangetic delta, it kicked off two of the most magical hours I’ve ever spent in my life. A few hours back, eighteen tired bodies had returned to our temporary home in the Sundarbans eco village, after a ten-hour day on a modified fishing trawler, touring the various islands of Sundarbans, wonderously taking in the flora and fauna that the mangroves offered. After resting our tired limbs for a few minutes on bamboo beds in our room, we headed to the dining hut fifty yards away. Mowgli (yes, he is one of the threesome that runs this very interesting tour/village) and Om were on hand, dishing out plates-full of piping-hot pakoras and black tea (milk is a ...