Dog Blogs Travel Trips

Once you know something is coming to an end, you tend to look back and think of the good times. Right now it’s time for me to move out of Delhi so here’s the stuff I did during my short stay here. Visit the animal farm . What did you expect I’d start MY list with? Of course the animal farm!! Friendicoes has a fabulous animal sanctuary outside Delhi (in Gurgaon actually). It houses over 600 dogs, as many as 100 cats. They even have horses, cows and donkeys. All the animals are rescued and cannot be rehabilitated. I stayed away from the cattle section because I have a weird fear of big animals with hooves and huge teeth. Ok, stop laughing already! The unique thing about the sanctuary is the love and care with which it is maintained. The dogs are segregated by personality! Yes! Who does that right? The staff identified the rowdy dogs, the timid ones, the fighters and the introverts and have kept the dogs apart in a way that they ca...

Hello and welcome back to Dog Blogs and Random Trips ! I’m starting today’s doggie topic this way coz I got a grudge against a radio channel that I’m gonna vent about. A fellow dog lover in Bangalore (Michelle Stewart) wrote in about Radio Indigo who invited someone from Koramangala Citizen Cell. This is the Namma Bengaluru Program with HS Balram hosting aired on the 19 th of November, 2011. Anyway, like all good controversy seeking pseudo journalists, HS Balram asked their delightful dog hating guest about the “Great Stray Dog Menace”. As most of you know, the southern part of India has been going ballistic about these allegedly rabid dogs which are apparently on a baby eating spree. So the wonderful and esteemed BBMP and others (check Voice of Stray Dogs on FB for full updates) have decided that annihilating the dog population in India is the way to solve the world’s problems. One of these panchayats have even got this psycho dude named Moron-gun -- oops! sorry! Mu...

I enjoyed being a kid. If you got hurt, you could cry and then someone would show you an ice cream and you’d forget. Digging a pond in your grandparents’ garden was the achievement of the day. Scrubbing out dirt from your fingernails afterwards was a huge success. Life was about basketball, chocolates, being late for breakfast or that twist of ‘black salt’ from the guy in front of the forbidden boy’s school. Small things meant such a big deal. Like swallowing an orange pip had me freaking out for days about whether or not I had an orange tree in my stomach. Or whether I should have eaten that minuscule chatar matar off the field (“God said never to waste”) or not. We played in the flooded school ground with no worries about mud stains and spent hours in a soap fight when washing out the very same mud. The sand pit was cool coz we made funny sand cakes and plastered the wall. The slide hurt our butts and skinned our knees and we jumped in piles of freshly mown grass. Growing up was full...

On a tourist-ty trip the other day I landed up at Indira Gandhi memorial. It’s a beautiful old, white building, with sprawling green lawns, a winding path, with a ‘crystal river’ on one end. The ‘crystal river’. It’s like a photograph in my brain, since I last came here 10 years ago. Every time anyone mentioned Indira Gandhi (for whatever random reason!!) a picture of the crystal river at the memorial popped up in my head. For some half baked reason my confused conclusions about Indira Gandhi could be best described as “pretty cool you know…”… to elaborate further… school textbook stuff, how she had a strong personality, I knew the family history thanks to the newspapers and I knew she had been assassinated. Sometimes Sanjay’s controversial decisions came up, and I knew enough about Maneka Gandhi because of animal welfare work. More ideas were formed post the first visit – Indira Gandhi was a very strong willed person who was crucial for India’s growth, declared emergency, almo...

How do I even begin to describe to you what Delhi does to me….!! Guess I should start at the beginning…. “Once upon a time………” ……….naah, I’m kidding! I don’t know how I decided to move to Delhi. The ‘logical’ explanation that I’ve convinced myself with is I don’t wanna move back to Calcutta, I hate Mumbai and I don’t like coconuts, so cant move to the South (sorry for my biases, it isn’t anything personal!!) and I occasionally felt like I needed some time off from my super-loving-but-we-cannot-live-without-each-other friends. You know, there were moments when I’d thought I had a  few  co-joined twins… that morning phone call – “wasssssssuppp?!” always led to hanging out, and then another “wassssupppp” later, more hanging out…and then in the evening another “wassssupppp” would follow…and my life had become all about hanging out! A small part of me had started becoming ambitious – “I wanna DO something with my life….” (most of me told that small part of me STFU!!) ...