Tag: Life’s little lessons

Travel Shot: The tailor at Landour Market

Posted on by sudhagee

I sat in the car with a sense of disbelief.

Here I was on a short holiday at Landour and a few hours after arriving there, was stuck in a traffic jam. I thought I had left traffic jams and noisy cities behind me in Mumbai, but the honking, the slamming of car doors and the fact that my vehicle hadn’t moved an inch in the last 15 minutes brought a sense of déjà vu.

My car driver had switched off the engine and gone off to investigate what was holding the traffic up. It had started raining by then and after waiting impatiently for some ‘progress’, gave up and started looking around. School had just got over and the narrow road was filled with school children returning home and were having to do it by squeezing between the vehicles stuck in the traffic jam to find a ‘route’ to get through.

Then I turned left and looked out of my car window into this.

Landour Market, Landour, A holiday in the hills, Rokeby Manor Continue reading “Travel Shot: The tailor at Landour Market” →

Summer of 1992

Posted on by sudhagee

1992 was a very important year for me. A turning point, you could say. A coming of age even. I can’t pinpoint to a particular moment or event for there were many that made the year so memorable. But two of them were really special and, interestingly (or maybe not !) both involved travel. It was not the kind of travel I do today; rather, it was travel for the purpose of study as part requirement of the Master’s programme in Geology I was pursuing at that time.

In May 1992, I arrived in Bhuj (in Kachchh district of Gujarat) with AK, a classmate, to undertake a 15-day field trip for our Master’s dissertation in Geology. Though both of us were based in Bhuj and had a common faculty guide, we had separate field work sites (about 15 km away) and our field work was individual. Our faculty guide was scheduled to join us in Bhuj after about 10 days when we would have finished the bulk of our field work and be able to present our preliminary findings to him.

I was very excited about this field trip to Bhuj for this was to be my first solo field trip. Previously, I had always been part of a larger group of classmates. Having a geological hammer, compass, and topographical map all to myself and not share it with anyone made me feel quite grown-up, important and empowered ! 😛

Bhuj, Smainarayan Talav, Mandvi Road, Geology field work, Summer of 1992, Sudha Ganapathi
First day of field work in May 1992. Just look how delighted I am !

The first day of field work was exhilarating and as perfect as a young geologist like me could hope for — excellent rock exposures, variety in rock structures and textures, fossils, some intriguing geological puzzles… It was also very distracting, but I soon settled down and within the next day or two established a field work routine.

Continue reading “Summer of 1992” →

Do you believe in rainbows?

Posted on by sudhagee
If you squint really, really hard, you can see the faint outline of another rainbow in the top left hand corner of the photo

On Sunday, as I was finishing my weekly vegetable and fruit shopping, it started raining. It was a short, sharp spell and the sun was out in about 5 minutes.

And along with the sun came the rainbows—all three of them. People stopped to look at the rainbows; some even took pictures of the rainbows with their mobile phone cameras, me included. And then went about their own ways, me included.

Continue reading “Do you believe in rainbows?” →