Explorer of Experiences

This article was published on The Punekar and can be viewed here .  I have been lucky enough to live in several cities over the past few years. Pune has been a particular favourite for me; I always feel home here. So I am always thinking about ways this city can be made more livable and more exciting!  1. Pop-up Restaurants Chef Gaggan If you’re a follower of the global food scene, you’ve probably heard of pop-up restaurants. Pop-ups are like wandering, nomadic restaurants and our neighbor, Mumbai, has seen quite a few of them over the past year. Case in point, Gaggan Anand of Gaggan fame (his eponymous Bangkok restaurant ranked 3 rd  on the World’s 50 Best Asian Restaurants list) set up a public tasting of his progressive Indian menu at Bandra-Kurla Complex. Needless to say, the city’s foodies were raving about it. Pune has a proud and flourishing food history too and we are sure there will be lots of takers of such pop-ups. 2. Dedicated Public Ope...

My mind was set on a week-long solo trip to Leh-Ladakh. And then before I know it, I’m watching the Mumbai runway hide behind white clouds from ‘Asia’s Boutique Airline’ (Bangkok Airways, if you must know) flying its way to Thailand. Don't ask me how that happened! But I am not complaining; Leh-Ladakh can wait until next year.  Recounting my entire trip would make one very long blog post, hence there are three parts to my 'Seclusion and Shopping in Thailand' series. Bustling Bangkok was the first and this one is my second. QUIRKY THAILAND Thailand is quirky, Thailand is strange, its peculiarity is its speciality... There is so much this country has to offer. Some things you can make sense of and some which just do not fit into the puzzle. Some which amuse and some which bemuse. I am sharing these accounts which really struck me on my trip.  I loved every restroom I visited! No kidding. No matter where or in how remote a location I was, the loos I we...

My mind was set on a week-long solo trip to Leh-Ladakh. And then before I know it, I’m watching the Mumbai runway hide behind white clouds from ‘Asia’s Boutique Airline’ (Bangkok Airways, if you must know) flying its way to Thailand. Don't ask me how that happened! But I am not complaining; Leh-Ladakh can wait until next year.  Recounting my entire trip would make a one very long blog post, hence there are three parts to my 'Seclusion and Shopping in Thailand' series. This is the first.  BUSTLING BANGKOK  Retail therapy in Bangkok can be quite a straining affair... The last time I visited Bangkok was when I went there for an internship stint with some mates from my university in Melbourne. I had pretty much discovered most of this bustling city during that two week work-cum-fun trip. We folded our hands before more than one Reclining Buddha and had one too many Tom Yums!  At the company I interned at. We all posed for a pic on our las...

I wrote this post a year into my transition in Mumbai (circa September 2010). My tryst with trains in the city continued till June 2013. I have since left Mumbai and looking back at this post, I pity my past self. Haha! If you have no stories to share from myriad train journeys in Mumbai then, I dare-say, your tryst with this city is incomplete. There is no evading those trains and also no denying their inevitability. Whether running at leopard-speed or crawling at snail-speed on the rat and litter-infested tracks, trains truly are and as popular parlance would have it, the ‘lifelines of Mumbai’. Long distance road travel in this busy and over-populated city is frustrating and utterly time-hogging, leaving the host of commuters with a rather sensible, economical, quick and preferable option of train travel. Sit in a train compartment and you will quickly notice how welcoming this mode of transport is to people across different strata of society. Affluent and chicly...