Category: Travel

Just as when you thought that Vikram Chandra’s Love and Longing in Bombay, Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City and Gregory Roberts’ Shantaram had, between the covers of their voluminous homage to the megapolis, had cracked open the city, comes Gyan Prakash’s Mumbai Fables, one more splendid and unputdownable ode to the city. But does this quartet close Mumbai to the hack-and-the-schlock writer forever? Hope not. Because Mumbai will always be open to multiple interpretations; because in the post-industrial, post-urban, post-Cold War and post-factum modernity of the 21st…

Idols coming into form. Kumortuli, 2009. Photo by author. The journey to the confluence of Ganga and Durga was a throwback to the collective past, finds Sayandeb Chowdhury and Joyjit Ghosh Chhalat chhal chhalat chhal chhalat chhal Ghater sathe golpo kore nadir jal (Splish‘n’ splash splish‘n’ splash splish ‘n’ splash The ghat hears the river’s tale go back‘n’ flash) The best person to ask about the ancestry of the ghat-river rendezvous would be the visiting goddess because the ancestry…

Henry Fuseli, Titania Caresses Bottom with the Donkey’s Head, 1793-94, oil on canvas.  Kunsthaus, Zurich. On a trip to Switzerland, organized by Pro Helvetia, Sayandeb Chowdhury finds that the Alpine country is not just about clocks, wine and chocolate. But also art, music, dance, theatre and cinema. And finds them anything but neutral. Renzo Piano is not a musician. But he plays music in glass and steel, brick and mortar. As I stood in front of the Zentrum Paul Klee,…

Photo by Karim Ben Van on Unsplash Switzerland, for Indians, is a vintage picture postcard–the splendour of the Swiss Alps lording over designer villages with pretty houses that stand in sunny glory watching glass-topped trains passing by in silent admiration. So when most Indians visit this small central west European country they are invariably reminded of Yash Chopra couples in shawls and striped sweaters drooling at each other and at nature beyond. But there is more to this…

Photo by Habib Dadkhah/Unsplash We have heard about Fleet Street in London, the media hub that spawned so many stories. But meat street? Across much of urban Arabia, there are food streets where pieces and pieces upon meat of various shapes and sizes are piled, in various hues, smelling of the ‘mystic’ East’s typical flavours, hung on iron hooks dangling from intertwined ropes in dusty bazaars. For a month in autumn, Mumbai’s otherwise nondescript Mohammed Ali Road swipes…