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Rediscover Love During the ’70s with ‘Once upon A Curfew’

It is 1974. Indu has inherited a flat from her grandmother and wants to turn it into a library for women. Her parents think this will keep her suitably occupied till she marries her fiancé, Rajat, who’s away studying in London.
But then she meets Rana, a young lawyer with sparkling wit and a heart of gold. He helps set up the library and their days light up with playful banter and the many Rajesh Khanna movies they watch together.

When the Emergency is declared, Indu’s life turns upside down. Rana finds himself in trouble, while Rajat decides it’s time to visit India and settle down. As the Emergency pervades their lives, Indu must decide not only who but what kind of life she will choose.

Once Upon A Curfew beautifully portrays the difference between love then, in the 70s and now.

Here are some poignant quotes from the book that will surely melt your heart!


Even an act as tiny as looking into one’s eyes or extending a hand for a shake when meeting each other for the first time was considered bold and gutsy.

 

The use of first names without any salutation between 2 people who have just met would be a sign of a developing intimacy.

 

Subtleties were still very much in trend and flirting would almost always be way too polite.

 

It would not only be scandalous but also very inappropriate for a young boy and girl to meet at each other’s houses or even less crowded or empty public spaces. Coffee shops and restaurants used to be the dating hot joints of the times.

 

Physical expression of emotion was not the norm of the day; it could send a wrong signal or the person initiating it might actually be judged in a bad way.

 

The expression of one’s love was mostly through words and silent actions and not outright and sometimes over-the-top declarations of love so characteristic of today’s times.

 

Physical proximity or public display of affection was frowned upon and was not common so it made couples self-conscious and awkward when they had to diplay even the minutest of affection in public.

 


Get your copy of Once Upon A Curfew today!

Romantic Quotes from ‘The Secrets We Keep’ that will Give You Butterflies in the Stomach

In this scintillating romantic thriller, Rahul, an intelligence officer on a secret mission, is undercover at a major’s house. In the process, he falls in love with the major’s daughter, Akriti, unknowingly putting her in danger.

Just when he thinks he has found a haven for Akriti, she goes missing. That’s when a research wing officer is put on the job, and Rahul realizes she is someone who seems all too familiar. Or is she really?

As the ghosts of a past passion come back to haunt his love for Akriti, Rahul must race against time to save the girl who holds his happiness in her soul.

Read on for eleven of the most romantic quotes from The Secrets We Keep, lines that will stir your soul while reminding you of the addictive chaos of the most powerful and enigmatic of all emotions.

 


Get your copy of The Secrets We Keep  today!

Get to Meet ‘The Four Horsemen’

Known as the ‘four horsemen’ of New Atheism, these four big thinkers of the twenty-first century met only once. Their electrifying examination of ideas on this remarkable occasion was intense and wide-ranging. Everything that was said as they agreed and disagreed with one another, interrogated ideas and exchanged insights – about religion and atheism, science and sense – speaks with urgency to our present age.

The dialogue was recorded, and is now transcribed and presented in The Four Horsemen with new introductions from the surviving three horsemen.

Get to know more about these Four Horsemen:

Richard Dawkins (d’Artagnan)

Richard Dawkins is responsible for introducing evolutionary biology and Darwinism to generations. His books The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker, never out of print, continue to inspire,inform and amaze. As the first holder of Oxford University’s  Simonyi Professorship for the Public Understanding of Science, he acquired a worldwide reputation as a sceptic, ‘passionate rationalist’, ‘proud atheist’, and witty exposer of charlatanism and fakery couched in pseudo-scientific language.

 

Sam Harris (Aramis)

Harris’s influential books The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation were followed by a later book and subsequent highly popular podcast series called Waking Up, which focus on his great interest in exploring how morality and spirituality can flourish outside religious teaching.

 

Daniel Dennett (Athos)

Professor Dennett writes on the mind, evolutionary biology, free will and much else besides. His book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon caused plenty of fluttering in academic, intellectual, religious and political

 

Christopher Hitchens (Porthos)

His preternaturally fluent articulacy, breadth of learning, extraordinary recall, diablerie, sauciness and panache raised his mastery of debate to a level unmatched in his lifetime. We are fortunate that this child of the 1960s and ‘70s did at least make it into the YouTube era; many of his coruscating flagellations of the dim-witted, malevolent, ill-informed and unprepared live on in cyberspace as well as in the pages of his many articles, essays and books.


With a sparkling introduction from Stephen Fry, The Four Horsemen makes essential reading for all their admirers and for anyone interested in exploring the tensions between faith and reason.

 

Know Anuja Chandramouli, the author of ‘Muhammad Bin Tughlaq’

When his father dies, Prince Jauna Khan succeeds to the throne of Delhi as Muhammad bin Tughlaq. His reign will prove to be epic and bloody, but unsurpassed in splendour, innovation and defeat. A formidable strategist and remarkable scholar, the Sultan will go down in history for his brutality as well as his brilliance, unfairly remembered only as a cruel tyrant who might have been raving mad.

In Muhammad Bin Tughlaq, Anuja Chandramouli, one of India’s best mythology writers, reimagines Muhammad bin Tughlaq’s life and times in incredible detail to bring to life the man behind the monarch.

Here are 6 interesting facts about the author:

————–

Her highly acclaimed debut novel, Arjuna: Saga of a Pandava Warrior-Prince, was named by Amazon India as one of the top five books in the Indian Writing category for 2013. No wonder she swears Arjuna is the great love of her life. Always.

*

Anuja Chandramouli’s articles, short stories and book reviews appear in various publications like the New Indian Express and The Hindu. She says she appreciates the bouquets and doesn’t mind the brickbats or trolls just as long as readers don’t complain to her mom.

*

Anuja regularly conducts story-telling sessions and workshops on creative writing, empowerment and mythology in schools, colleges and various other platforms. She says she is grateful to all who listen to her (or pretend to) and refrain from pelting her with rotten eggs (which apparently is a recurring nightmare).

*

Anuja is a student of classical dance and yoga. She blames the former for her hips and the latter for her inability to sock the deserving in the jaw.

*
Anuja’s first novel along with the second, Kamadeva: The God of Desire and the third, Shakti: The Divine Feminine are getting translated into Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati and Bengali. The author hopes to learn the above mentioned languages by then, and says she has made progress with the cuss words.

*

In 2017, Anuja achieved what many authors dream of – three books in a row released by different publishers. The author is grateful for the love and accolades she received for the triplets but wishes she would lose the baby weight already.


Anuja Chandramouli’s latest novel, Muhammad Bin Tughlaq: Tale of a Tyrant  is AVAILABLE NOW!

 

10 Facts that Portray a Thriving Christian Culture in India Prior to Portuguese Imperialism

‘Here are many and boundless marvels; in this First India begins another world.’

Jordanus Catalani, the first bishop of the Church of Rome in India, introduced the northern part of the subcontinent to his readers in fourteenth-century Europe in this manner. Two hundred years before the advent of Vasco da Gama, Western Christianity had already arrived in India, finding among its diverse people and faiths the Church of the East at home since the beginning of Christianity.

Siddhartha Sarma’s gripping narrative traces the cross-cultural trade of Antiquity which established the roots for the spread of Christianity in the Apostolic Age, across the intervening centuries to the alliance of Roman Catholic Church and the Portuguese crown which pursued an imperial policy.

Carpenters and Kings is a tale of Christianity and, equally, a glimpse of the India which has always existed: a multicultural land where every faith has found a home through the centuries.

The presence of Jewish communities in the western coastal region of India went back to the Achaemenid Persian Empire.

 The first Jewish communities in India are likely to have established themselves in coastal cities in the north-west around the beginning of the fifth century BCE, during the expansion of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Eventually, Jewish diasporic groups would settle along the Konkan, Malabar and Coromandel coasts. These, the oldest of India’s Jewish communities, are known as the Cochin Jews. But there have been others down the centuries, particularly after the formation of the Jewish diaspora following the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by the Roman Empire in 70 CE.

The Acts of Thomas, which was considered Scripture by early Christians of both Asia and Europe, describe the miracles of the apostle Thomas in India.

‘Send me where you want, but send me somewhere else. Not to India.’ Thus begins The Acts of Thomas, an account of the coming of the apostle Thomas to the subcontinent. Tasked with spreading the word of Christ among the Indians, a reluctant Thomas is finally compelled to travel to the subcontinent as a carpenter. In India, according to The Acts, he preaches among the people, heals the sick and converts royal families before being martyred. While not an account of history, The Acts does convey an idea of how Jews, Christians and other people of West Asia thought of the polytheistic Indians in that early period of Christianity. India was therefore a vital part of the early Christian imagination of the known world.

The slow spread of Christianity among Jewish communities in India in the Apostolic Age itself.

By the end of the Apostolic Age, Christianity had spread among Jewish communities and Gentiles in Greece and other parts of the Roman Empire including the Italian Peninsula and Egypt, besides Persia and north-western India, but perhaps no farther than the coastal areas of the subcontinent. As the ecclesiastical structures to minister to these communities grew, it would have been difficult for smaller communities of Christians in the interiors of India to be closely connected to centres like Edessa in Mesopotamia, where The Acts of Thomas was written and where the remains of the apostle found a final resting place. In coastal India, the first Christians were almost certainly converts from Judaism. There might not even have been a conscious break from the religion of their ancestors. Conversion by Indian Jews to Christianity at that point would have been part of internal religious reform within Jewish communities, led by baptizing cults. This happened in the Middle-East in that period as well.

The famed tale of the Christian prince Josaphat and his conversion by the hermit Barlaam, appears to be based on the tale of the Buddha.

Jataka stories percolated from India to the Sassanid Persian Empire in the sixth century CE. By the 11th century, these stories had circulated in Europe, where eminent personages of the Church and ordinary Christians believed that Prince Josaphat, based on the prince who became the Buddha, had been a Christian. The tale of Josaphat and the supposedly Christian monk Barlaam became one of the first bestsellers of the age of printing, with editions of the legend selling more copies than the Bible. Barlaam and Josaphat became the most famous and lauded Indians in Europe in the Middle Ages and were canonized by both the Latin and Greek Churches. By the time the Portuguese arrived in India, there was a great deal of curiosity about what the Indians thought of the two men.

The author of The Christian Topography, Cosmas ‘Indicopleustes’ found thriving Christian communities in Konkan and Malabar in the sixth century.

 Cosmas’s reputation among later scholars was so indelibly tied with his visit to India that he became known as ‘Indicopleustes’, the sailor to India. The old ports of India were as vibrant as ever, and there was still a vast market for western goods. Sailing south from Bharuch, Cosmas arrived at the town of Kalyan where he found a resident Christian community with a bishop ordained and sent from Persia. Syrian Christians had a well-entrenched ecclesiastical order in the coastal cities of northern Konkan. In ‘the country of Male’, that is the Malabar Coast, Cosmas found both pepper and a church of respectable size. He also found an established Christian community in Sri Lanka.

 Tibetan Buddhist texts dating from the eighth to the ninth centuries mention ‘Jesus the Messiah’.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, a sealed cave in the region of Dunhuang in western China was found to contain a treasure trove of Tibetan manuscripts from the fifth to the eleventh centuries, which reveal the impact of Nestorian Christianity on Tibetan Buddhism. One of the manuscripts, dated from the late eighth to the early ninth centuries, tells the reader to prepare for the End of Days, when ‘the god known as Jesus the Messiah, who acts as Vajrapani and Sakyamuni’ will return. This ‘judge who sits at the right hand of God’ will arrive and teach yoga to believers, who are told not to fear any demons or malevolent spirits. For Tibetan Buddhists of this period, Christ was supposed to return and fulfill the functions of Buddha Maitreya during the End Times.

The writings of Giovanni of Montecorvino have extensive notes on the Deccan and on the existing Christian communities.

In 1291, Giovanni of Montecorvino, a Franciscan friar, was directed to travel to the East from Persia. Starting from the city of Tabriz, Giovanni travelled to the Persian coast and then by sea to India, where he formally established the Latin Church. Giovanni spent thirteen months in India preaching among Syrian Christians, whom he found in abundance along the western coast, and the Hindus. He spoke of his favourable impressions of the land and the people.

 The strange case of the Four Martyrs of Thane, the most well-known historical Christian martyrs in India in the Middle Ages, also shows how the first Western Christian travellers to India came in contact with the resident Syrian Christians.

Three Franciscan monks and a lay European, Demetrius, arrived in India in 1317 and were hosted by the Syrian Christian community of Thane. The man at whose house the Franciscans were staying beat up his wife after a domestic quarrel. The woman complained to the local Muslim judge or ‘qadi’ against her husband and added that she had four male witnesses to the crime, monks from Persia. The qadi called for the Franciscans and Demetrius. The hearing then seems to have digressed into a religious debate between the qadi and other learned men present there, and the Franciscans. The qadi asked them what their view was of the Prophet, at which Thomas, one of the Franciscans, made some derogatory remarks against him. The court declared them guilty of blasphemy and they were sentenced to death.

 The writings of Jordanus Catalani, a Dominican friar from southern France which describe a largely tolerant Hindu society.

Jordanus, who originally arrived in India with the Franciscans who were martyred, spent more than a decade afterwards travelling in western and southern India. From his travels emerged the Mirabilia Descripta, the most detailed and scholarly account of India by a European in the Middle Ages. He found the Hindus welcoming towards Christian missionaries and never feared for his safety while preaching among them. In fact, missionaries would be treated with warmth and respect by Hindus across the land, and their safety would be ensured. Whenever a Hindu chose to be baptized, the people or the authorities would not create any hindrance or persecute either the convert or the missionary. This freedom, said the Dominican, was common to Hindu and Mongol societies and among other people east of Persia in his time. Jordanus met Indian Christians and discovered the deep roots of the Church of the East in the subcontinent. He would eventually be ordained the first bishop of the Church of Rome in India, with his seat at Kollam in what is Kerala today. Over the remainder of the 14th century, dozens of Christian monks and scholars travelled to India or through the subcontinent on their way to China, and wrote about Indian society.

 The Papal Bull of Pope Nicholas V seemed to have considered India as a Christian nation prior to the Portuguese arrival in Kozhikode and the beginning of European colonialism.

In 1454, Nicholas issued a second bull, the Romanus Pontifex, which expanded on the earlier Dum Diversas. The Portuguese were charged with exploring the seas and finding a route to India, ‘whose people are said to worship Christ’, and to convince the Indians to join an alliance with Europe against the Muslims. Nicholas and his advisers seem to have completely misread Church history on the situation in India, and assumed that Indians were mostly Christian.


Get your copy of Carpenters and Kings today!

Six Ways in Which Human and Non-Human Animals Are Similar

In Animal Intimacies, Radhika Govindrajan explores how the knots of connection produce a sense of relatedness between human and non-human animals. She uses the concept of relatedness to capture the myriad ways in which the potential and outcome of a life always and already unfolds in relation to that of another. To take these entanglements as constituting forms of relatedness is to acknowledge that one is not formed as a self in isolation but through the “doing and performing” of relations—both desirable and undesirable—with a host of other beings whose paths crisscross one’s own in ways that defy the integrity of bodies and communities.

Here are six similarities between humans and non-human animals –

Animals feel grief and anxiety like humans

“When Chanduli, Mamta’s cow, began to bellow when the Tempo that she was in drove away, I believe she had a premonition that her life was about to change; her frantic cries were an unmistakable expression of anxiety and possibly even grief. She might not have known that this separation would be permanent, but she certainly did seem to recognize that the intimacy of her everyday relationship with Mamta was about to be disrupted. This was animal instinct .”

Animals value proximity to humans

“When leopards move into human dominated areas, they do so with the expectation, perhaps even the knowledge drawn from past experience and from others of their kind, that they will thrive in these zones of multispecies copresence. They recognize that they flourish in proximity to humans, not at a distance from them.”

In a world of multiple and sometimes conflicting entanglements, new connections must sometimes be fertilized by the breakdown of old; this fact of human kinship rings true for multispecies relatedness as well.

“Surely a dog being eaten by a leopard had little in common with a woman leaving behind her family of birth as she journeys to her sasural (marital home). At the time, I thought that this was just a flippant comment, offered as appeasement for a broken heart. But in the six years that have passed since I witnessed that conversation, I have come to think that there might have been more behind the comparison between the kin relationships that are frayed and raveled by marriage and the snapping of bonds between dogs and their families when the former are snatched away from their home by leopards.”

Human folklore suggests shared pleasure between humans and bears

“Women and bears are thus related to one another by their shared desire for pleasure. These are, I have argued, queer stories that hold out the potential for an as yet unrealized world saturated with pleasure and desire. Telling these stories, in itself, is an act of pleasure; imagining oneself into the place of the woman who had sex with the bear in his cave illuminates a horizon of possibility that both exceeds and expands the limits of an everyday lived world.”

Like humans, animals also have a desire have a desire to be free and run wild.

“If pigs wanted to go wild, they would. Wildness was an excess that spilled over human attempts to tame and master it. However, recognition of the limits of their control did not prevent humans from making an attempt to establish tentative relationships of trust and even friendship. Prema had no illusions that she could change her pig’s ways by force or by persuasion. Her offer of a potato might be read as a bribe, something to induce the pig to return home when he grew weary of life in the forest. But perhaps it is better to think of the potato as Prema intended it, as an offer to maintain a difficult and fragile relationship (rishta) that recognized and even respected the exigencies of difference.”

 ∼

Animals can feel and reciprocate affection

“But this one doesn’t seem to have a mother. She usually sits alone, and all the others bite her. She started following me from the first day itself. I tried to hit her a few times, but she still wouldn’t leave me alone. I felt pity (daya) for her. She might have come with the rest of them but she’s not like them. She doesn’t steal like them. That’s why I give her something every now and then.”


In the book, Animal Intimacies,  Radhika Govindrajan illustrates that multispecies relatedness relies on both difference and ineffable affinity between animals.

Six Things We Learn About the Creative Process From Ramanujan

The A.K. Ramanujan Papers, stored since 1994 at the Special Collections Research Center at the Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago, contain hundreds of catalogued files ordered chronologically from 1944 to 1993 in seventy-one boxes. Since 2014 an additional set of personal diaries and journals, kept in series V of the Papers, became accessible to researchers. The book Journeys: A Poet’s Diary includes literary entries from A.K. Ramanujan’s travels, his thoughts on writing, poetry drafts, and dreams. His diaries and journals served as fertile ground where he planted the seeds for much of his published work.

Here are some noteworthy facts about Ramanujan’s creative process!

 

Ramanujan viewed keeping a diary as part of his creative process; the entries provided a permanent repository for otherwise transient ideas, observations and language.

Ramanujan revised and re-read his notes and diaries now and again in a continuous dialogue with the past and himself; ideas, images and concepts were re-circulated and redistilled.

In all of his work, especially his poetry and translations, Ramanujan was very scientific – as a trained linguist – and almost obsessed with language and form.

He recorded scenes and anecdotes of people and his life. Between entries, he jotted quotes from writers and artists.

By recording his inner and outer life, he preserved experiences for later use; by practising verse, he honed a craft. This was the fertile ground where the seeds of his published work were planted.

He was a writer at work observing the minutiae of life, the ‘ordinary mysteries’; and at the same time the thinker struggling with the larger issues of human relations – psychologies, and our understanding of body and spirit.


Edited by Krishna Ramanujan and Guillermo Rodríguez, Journeys offers access to Ramanujan’s personal diaries and journals, providing a window into his creative process.

6 Lines By Toni Morrison That Are Important For The 21st Century

Mouthful of Blood is structured in three parts and these are heart-stoppingly introduced by a prayer for the dead of 9/11, a meditation on Martin Luther King and a eulogy for James Baldwin. The author  Toni Morrison’s Nobel lecture, on the power of language, is accompanied by lectures to Amnesty International and the Newspaper Association of America. She speaks to graduating students and visitors to both the Louvre and America’s Black Holocaust Museum. She revisits The Bluest Eye, Sula and Beloved; reassessing the novels that have become touchstones for generations of readers.

Here are some path-breaking lines from her new book, that will get you thinking!

 

“We live in a world where justice equals vengeance. Where private profit drives public policy. Where the  body of civil liberties, won cell by cell, bone by bone, by the brave and the dead withers in the searing heat of ‘all war, all the time’”

“Writers are among the most sensitive, most intellectually anarchic, most representative, most probing of artists. The writer’s ability to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and to mystify the familiar- all this is the test of her or his power.”

“Complicity in the subjugation of race and class accounts for much of the self-sabotage women are prey to, for it is straight out of that subjugation that certain female-destroying myths have come.”

“The course of time seems to be narrowing to a vanishing point beyond which humanity neither exists nor wants to. It is singular, this diminished, already withered desire for the future.”

“Dream the world as it ought to be,imagine what it would feel like not to be living in a world loaded with zero-life weapons manned by people willing to lose them, develop them, or store them for money, or power, or data,but never for your life and never for mine.”

“The mind really is a palace. Not only for its perception of symmetry and the outrageously beautiful, but also because it can invent, imagine and most importantly, it can delve.”


 Mouth Full of Blood is a powerful, erudite and essential gathering of ideas that speaks to us all.

The Journey of Jugaad 3.0 – an Interview with the Author!

Based on hundreds of interviews, as well as the author’s consulting work within companies, Jugaad 3.0 Hacking the Corporation will prove that every organization’s best chance, to survive and become better than ever, lies within itself. Against the decidedly progressive, action-oriented, and above all restless backdrop of disruption, the DNA of established business is starting to realign. It’s the beginning of a groundswell that has started to make lean entrepreneurship a core competency within big business.

We had a chat with the author, Simone Ahuja. Read all about it below!


What was your favorite part while writing this book? Any particular interview was very interesting/enlightening?

My favorite part of writing is always interviewing intrapreneurs and innovation leaders. This allows for a more authentic and compelling story since I learn from their real experiences, victories, and challenges, and compare notes with experiences I’ve been through with my clients. It’s the anthropologist in me that likes to access practitioners from various backgrounds, and then synthesize and analyze the information they share to help others solve similar issues. My readers come from a diverse range of backgrounds, so it was important for me to provide interviews from an equally diverse range of fields.

One of my favorite interviews was with L’Oreal chemist, Balanda Atis, and Stanley Black and Decker’s PR manager, Sarah Wyndham. They demonstrated key characteristics of successful intrapreneurs (including passion and purpose, being frugal and managing ambiguity) to drive their innovations forward. Both intrapreneurs knew that they could not create their vision alone, so they “enlisted” others in a win-win collaboration to push their ideas into reality since the DIY methodology calls for curiosity, humility, a willingness to experiment and deep collaboration.

 

One piece of advice for a budding intrapreneur?

Definitley to partner with others. Finding mentors and sponsors in crucial in the innovation process since they can provide intrapreneurs with valuable lessons, networking opportunities, and varied perspectives. High-quality mentors and sponsors can take an intrapreneur to the next level of success because of their previous experience and resources, the air cover they can provide, the doors they can open, and the fingerprints they may be able to help keep off of your initiative. 

 

 What was your writing routine for this book?

I started this book by searching for intrapreneurs across the world and across industries. We then took deep dives into their journeys to understand their successes and barriers to intrapreneurship until I was fully immersed. Finally, I began to synthesize and analyze my interview data which is what resulted in the principals that I share in Jugaad 3.0.

 Any challenges you faced while writing this particular book?

Writing a book is all consuming and I had two births this year: the birth of this book and the birth of my daughter, Zara. Writing can be an immersive process, so it’s a challenge while also working and raising my two-month-old daughter alongside my 4 and a half-year-old son. This year has been extraordinarily busy and exciting, but these births made my priorities were very clear.  Anything superfluous easily fell to the wayside.

 

 How was it different from writing Jugaad Innovation?

Writing this book was quite a different experience for me since I wrote this one on my own. My editors and publishers supported me immensely, but in the end, it came down to my judgment and decision making – and at times that can be a lonely road! Being a solo author was unlike writing with co-authors; I enjoyed the camaraderie and collaboration of writing Jugaad Innovation, but I also fully enjoyed the experience of writing this book on my own, especially because it is so closely linked to my work and solving a problem (moving ideas through to execution) faced by so many of my clients.


Jugaad 3.0 Hacking the Corporation offers a spectrum of carefully crafted archetypes to help people see themselves in this trend and allow organizations identify the innovators in their midst.

6 Uproariously Bizarre Situations Sudha Mahalingam Found Herself In!

Putting one’s foot into one’s mouth might seem like an impossible feat of contortion requiring complex manoeuvring skills. How and when the author, Sudha Mahalingam, acquired and honed these enviable skills is of less interest than the fact that she has managed to deploy them time and time again, during her peregrinations through sixty-five countries in the past quarter of a century. And the consequences have ranged from the embarrassing to the confounding, the costly to the inconvenient, and occasionally, to the downright dangerous.

Punctuating her droll stories with breathtaking descriptions and stunning photographs in her book, The Travel Gods Must Be Crazy, Sudha invites readers on an unexpected and altogether memorable tour around the world!

Here are some whacky experiences that defined Sudha Mahalingam’s journeys:

When Sudha found herself locked all alone on top of a minaret, in Yazd

“When I find my way down the spiral staircase, the heavily carved wooden door is shut and seems to be padlocked from outside. I start shouting and pounding on the door hoping someone is still outside. There is no response. Only a sinister silence. Panic begins to well up in me. The prospect of spending the night on the ledge of the minaret under a starry sky may sound romantic in retrospect, but I was terrified. Besides, it was getting chilly too.”

 When an AK-47 was pointed at her son, in Israel

“We see a CCTV camera above our heads just outside the fortified gate. The voice belongs to Israeli security and she is actually yelling at my eighteen-year-old son, asking him to take off his cap so that she can see his face. But even after he does that, she is not satisfied. ‘Where are you from and what is your business?’ calls out the disembodied voice. Terrified, I reply meekly. ‘We are from India.’ She is not satisfied. She barks again, asking us to hold out the first page of our passports to the CCTV camera. Which we do with alacrity just in case the finger on the trigger of the AK-47 on the rafter above got a bit itchy! And troop out hastily when the gate opens, thoroughly shaken, to mingle and disappear into the crowds on the Israeli side of the fence.”

 When hygiene and the call-of-nature were at loggerheads, on Irrawaddy River

“The journey takes all of twelve languorous hours during which you loosen up completely. The only thing that is tightly wound up is your bladder, swelling to capacity and threatening to burst. The two toilets on the deck can put skunks to shame; they dare you to approach them, and naturally, you dare not.”

 When she slept at a railway platform, in Rome

“Around midnight, I am rudely woken by a few limbs tripping over me. There is a mad rush for the station gates as the limbs and backpacks reassemble and head out in haste. Roma Termini closes at midnight and everyone is shooed out. I too stumble my way out of the station and am promptly mobbed by waiting tout with offers of beds for the night. The rate starts at €120 for a night—depends on your level of desperation.”

 When she travelled with a king cobra

“We are travelling with a live, 11-foot-long king cobra, rudely interrupted in its quest for a mate. The bag in which it is coiled up is made of cotton cloth and nothing more. Its fangs can easily reach out to lacerate and inject its infamous venom into any limb that strays close enough.”

 When she was the only vegetarian at a dinner table, in Beijing

“My Chinese neighbour expertly plunges his chopsticks and delicately picks out some gooey squid and stuffs it into his mouth without spilling a drop. Then he uses the same chopsticks to pick up the bok choy and the lotus stem one after the other. So do the others, all of whom seem to be enjoying their meal immensely even as I sit holding my breath to escape the unfamiliar aroma wafting from the dishes. The tips of their chopsticks plunge alternately into the fish, meat and the vegetables with equal ease. This is interspersed with shouts of ‘ganbay!’ as the diners tip tiny glasses of rice wine to wash down the meal. No one even notices that I am the only one not eating.”


Get your copy of The Travel Gods Must Be Crazy today!

 

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