The Gandhi Museum

Mohandes K Gandhi was a river to the Indian people and led them with love and compassion to independence. His museum in Madurai seemed worth a visit. Gandhi was a powerful force for peace and his open smiling face seemed to exude the same sense of calm and joyful serenity as the Dalai Lama or […]

Graphic Art of India

In Ye olde days (the 1980s) India had fabulous graphic art everywhere. Hand painted and drawn signs, advertisements and giant movie posters abounded. They were glorious, and always just a tiny bit strange, out of proportion, really quite large stars making eyes at each other or gazing dreamily into the middle distance, looking as if […]

Mysore Palace

Mysore has the Palace from central casting. Overwhelmingly beautiful, a melange of styles and colours that come together incredibly well. It’s a pastel wedding cake that perfectly captures the essence of India – a hodgepodge, a mishmash, a series of stratified layers and rings more numerous than any tree or rock, an avalanche of appropriations […]

The Bollywood Bombshell

At a time when many romantic leads in Indian movies looked like this… A young man appeared who looked like this… A doe-eyed, slim hipped, rebel with a taste for Trouble. Over many decades he became The main man, the top-of-the-pops, the Big Banana of Bollywood, as omnipresent as any God. You see him on […]

Délices d’Architecture: Kochi

Kochi – seaside town filled with delicious Keralan fish dishes, happy holidaymakers, architectural delights. Here are a few.

Kochi #2

Kochi is so very beautiful, so full of amazing tableaux that it could not be contained in one blog. Thus…White ginger sifters, black Santa, Dhobi Wallahs, Ayurvedic massage recipients bearing uncanny resemblances to road accident victims, a Hebrew village, Bolsheviks, Catholics, Dutch Skulls and crossbones.

Udupi Idyll: Let’s Dance !

Udupi, Karnataka is a temple town, a place of pilgrimage and prayer, with rather amazing temple chariots. Rooly trooly chariots of the Gods. It is a charming place but we have a terrible, terrible confession to make. We know that in your eyes we are like a cross between Scott of the Antarctic, Edmund Hillary, […]

Art House in Udupi

We were doing our morning discovery tour of our latest destination – Udupi – South of Mangalore in beautiful Karnataka when we stumbled upon the most fascinating of stone fences – all different types of sculpture and art leading us to a gateway adorned with animals and idols. We peered in with unfeigned interest to […]

Rule Britannia & Co. Long Live Liz!

This Parsi restaurant dating back to 1923 is a bastion for royalists. Still headed by the sprightly 96 year old patriarch and passionate Anglophile, Mr Boman Kohinoor (like the diamond, the legendary Mountain of Light, the centrepiece of the British Royal Crown.)whose Zoroastrian family immigrated to Bombay from Yazd in Iran in 1905. Mr Kohinoor […]

Pushkar 1

When Brahma dropped a lotus from the sky it fell on Pushkar and created a sacred lake hemmed in by desert and mountains, a lake ringed by wonderfully scenic ghats now sadly over populated by predatory priests, persistently pugnacious and pointedly pertinaceous pundits who attempt with all their might to further confuse the already thin […]