the nativity in calcutta

erected to the honor of JAMES PRINSEP by his fellow citizen

JP was a quite a guy it seems... had his fingers in many pies... coins, weights & measures, architecture, translations, civic amenities etc etc. for some reason he worked himself to death. goes to show that you can be too intelligent for your own good. Read more about his life here.

Armenian Church, Calcutta

Rev. Haruthiun Shumavonian
"Father of Armenian journalism
Born in 1750 in Shiraz Persia
Died on 9th February 1824 in Madras"

red bullet

le hoogly

d.gupta sr. & jr.

dattu

ride to bhimashankar

janhavi's mum ...

... from many years ago

chairman maow

katherine rechristened by renu ....

pryas

whose film, "siddharth the prisoner" recently won this

upside down

katherine panjabi

a.k.a. kitty-coo, buddhuram, dumbocat

karnala fort

looking for a quiet place to get away to...

3 shoots / what i do for a living

if anyone can guess what these 3 shoots were for i'll buy them lunch!

the sibling..

...is back in town !!

bye bye london

mukul

mukul patel : artist / sometime dj / fulltime thinker
if i had my way i'd cast him in a bollywood film!!
check out his work at www.ambienttv.net

robin koshy & the pork belly

thanks to robin i had the best meal of my trip.

that delectable piece of meat he is tucking into is a pork belly.. a cut from the underside of the piggy-wiggy, it has a layer of crisp fat on top (like crispy bacon), then a nice thick layer of good old pork fat under that, then a layer of a juicy mixture of fat and meat and then at the very bottom an absolutely divine layer of pure meat!

ummm-yumm! thank you robin!

a 'gig'

i witnessed a strange phenomenon in london which i was told is quite commonplace in all of england. it is called a 'gig' (both g's pronounced soft as pronounced in the word 'God'). it involves a few people, typically 3 or 4, standing on a raised platform called a 'stage', facing a large crowd of people. the numbers of persons populating the crowd varies depending on the size of the location where this phenomenon occurs which is called the 'venue'. small venues house 50 to a 100 persons and i was told a large one (such as a stadium) hold thousands upon thousands.

the people on the stage constitute what is called a 'band'. they play musical instruments which emit various sounds,

they clap their hands,

and then, strangest of all, the people in the crowd, who till then have been consuming all forms of liquor and shaking themselves gently, lie down on the ground and vigourously shake their legs in the air.

this is considered a pleasurable pasttime in england and is ingulged in by most peoples,
except the children and the very old. it is particularly practised on the days at the end of the week.

outside the royal albert hall

tanya

abeera

abeer gupta... student, fashionista, erstwhile e.p., traveller, bangali boy,
whose kind hospitality in his spare digs made my london stay possible...

seen here trying on vintage adidas jackets in a shop on portobello road.
much of my shopping in london happened under his able guidance
and much of the time we spent together was spent in trying on different jackets!

click on photo to see it larger.

portobello road

inverness

the loch ness or maybe its the river ness?

the bang on boogie band

some dubious street fashion

munro misadventure

a munro is a scottish mountain with a height of over 3000 ft. a very anal person, sir hugh munro, first compiled a catalogue of all these hills in 1891. there are 283 munros in scotland. 'munro-baggers' refers to people who try to climb all of them so they can tick them off on their list. though the objects of their foibles vary, people are the same everywhere! since i like ticking things off on lists and i like climbing i decided i must climb at least one munro since i was in scotland. as it turned out....

....this was a minor misadventure. i set out to climb the munro stob coire raineach. i had no map or compass, went off trail and reached a ridge which had a line of little peaks. walking up and down the ridge i reached the base of the highest of these peaks imagining it was the munro when the mist came in and i couldn't see 5 metres in front of my nose. much panic, prompt about turn and a desperate hunt for a banana peel which marked the place where i had reached the ridge ensued. banana peel found i slid all the way down on my backside. the jeans i was wearing were abandoned at the youth hostel.

later consultations with experienced munro climber, stuart mackenzie (see earlier post), revealed that i had reached the ridge of beinn fhada and though i had reached a point higher than stob coire raineach i still hadn't made it to the top of the munro on that ridge... stob coire sgreamaich. so inspite of my best efforts my munro count remains 0. the list remains unticked.

on the summit / pap of glen coe

where u are high enough to see the planes flying below u!
absolutely stunning views of glen coe and the lochs

self portrait, 13aug08

oban going into night

oban at dusk

looooong shadows

walking around oban 02