I have been to both Agra and Jaipur and seen most of their star attraction, a few several times. I visited both the Taj Mahal and the Amer fort only last year but then this year offered some unique opportunities. It was easier to do road trips and most of these attractions would have fewer tourists due to a mix of Covid fear and government … Continue reading Golden Triangle – Luxury and the Taj
The city has so subtly crept into the Indian lexicon that we barely noticed. One of the most famous Indian restaurant known for its succulent kebabs was named after it – aptly because some of the kebabs and shashlik in Bukhara was sublime. Plums also derive their Hindi name from this city -“Alu Bukhara”. While “Alu” is a potato in Hindi, it is a Plum … Continue reading Bukhara – Small, colourful and full of character
The Afrosiyab from Tashkent departed in the evening and rolled into Samarkand around 9 pm, right on schedule. The ride itself was quite comfortable and the modern Spanish train touched a cool 200 kmph. Once out of the train station, it took some deft negotiation with the cab drivers before we got going. The ride into Samarkand can be quite deceptive as at night it … Continue reading Samarkand – Astounding architecture and history
If compared to any Central Asian or even European capital, what Tashkent misses by the absence of a true commercial city center, it more than makes up with thousands of fountains. Every large park worth its name would have a display of dancing fountains with hundreds, if not thousands, of streams of water sending across a happy message. The city is amazingly green with wide … Continue reading Tashkent – Fountains, New Churches and Train Stations
The modern Indian (especially North Indian) culture has more roots in the seldom discussed country of Uzbekistan than most would believe. While the Guptas and Tomaras have been rulers of North India for a long time, the area was plundered by Taimur in the 15th century. This completely reset the culture and even some of the history as we read it. Post that, the Mughals … Continue reading Uzbekistan – Planning to see the history of our culture
Most conventional wisdom talks about not clicking into the Sun except for sunrises and sunsets. Even then it’s a hard choice to focus on the Sun and get just a lot of chromatic aberration or get all those colors in the sky. There is no one right answer, but what I have learned along the way is to be more deliberate about what you choose. … Continue reading Photography: Sunrise, sunset and everything in between
There are truly a lot of flavors of Jim Corbett National park – you just have to choose which one you want. It’s a beautiful forest, very green with two rivers, many tributaries, and a large lake. It hosts a lot of wildlife, tigers, elephants, crocodiles, deer, and many others. The way it is split up, though makes it harder to cover all of it … Continue reading Corbett- Rare combination of luxury and nature
It took nearly a couple of years of walking the streets and parks of Delhi before I even got a hang of what the term Macro meant. It was another few years before I got to know the true meaning. During all this time I had been clicking extreme closeups of insects and flowers without knowing the particular term. I enjoyed it but never generated … Continue reading Photography: Peeping into the small world of Macros
I attended a wildlife photography webinar this year when they suddenly became the ‘in’ thing. The key takeaway from the amazing session was that the pictures should not look like they are from an anatomy textbook but have a sort of character to them. Each photograph needs to either tell a story or have a little bit of creativity and art to it. While clicking … Continue reading Photography: Birds and the silhouette shot!
Moon shots are always fascinating – they can make for a wonderful background to nearly any outdoor night shot. However, with better lenses and cameras the moon is becoming more prominent in the foreground. On a clear night, a good DSLR with a high zoom lens can capture even some of the surface detail of the moon and this is all getting better. I remember … Continue reading Photography: The moon shot!
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