Dog Blogs Travel Trips

Walking around in Macleodganj , Dharamshala about 6 years ago, I turned a corner and saw a tiny door to a tiny shop.  Rogpa sells items made by Tibetan women, and serves to integrate the Tibetan community in exile. Their aim is to create a self sufficient Tibetan community while preserving their culture and identity. This bag from Rogpa is perfect for daily use, fits my wallet, keys, lip balm, smoke pouch and other stuff. Over the years with daily use, it's soft and faded, and started ripping in places. The little clippy buckle also broke in the humid climate here in Goa . I replaced that with two travel hooks, and started stitching in patches wherever it would rip. Most people tell me to just get a new bag. But I like this one. It's handmade, and helped people when I bought it. It's traveled the country with me, and has seen some super bizarre shit.    I'm also thinking of a few things here, every time I choose to repair my bag as opposed to buying...

The latest word to be added to my vocabulary is the Arabic word for bougainvillea -  Majnuneh  – the feminine for crazy. I fell in love with the word as soon as I heard it. A massive chunk of my world can be associated with the word ‘crazy’. If not wanting to stuff myself into the tiny little boxes society likes to pigeon hole people into means I’m crazy, it’s alright, I don’t mind being crazy. I learnt a long time ago that ‘crazy’ is often used to dismiss people whose intelligence is assumed to be irrelevant. I’m fine with being irrelevant in an ignorant person’s world. And habibi , all these stereotypes about women and feminine and girls and boys and mardangi and so on and so forth have become old and boring. Majnuneh is my new stereotype - where one can be just whoever the hell they wanna be. (yeah, I got myself an Arab friend, and she teaches me the best words ever!) I must confess I’ve been guilty of indulging in stereotyping as well. I attributed the love f...

I hadn’t hung out with Baga the bitch for a while because she’s become massive and sleeps all day! I think too many people are feeding her. Anyway. So about a week ago, I was chilling outside a friend’s farewell party, staring at the moon, contemplating about change being the only constant in life. Then I heard a soft scrabble of Baga’s oversized toenails on the gravel. My friend had found me. I like to think she sensed the need for silence. For the first time in all these months, she didn’t squawk the leaves down. Seriously, she makes an awful amount of noise, even mewing sounds sometimes! Watching her quiver in happiness I started thinking of these two people who stated that dogs leave a greater carbon footprint than an SUV. And maybe it is time to eat them. Perhaps they were correct. But we really need to consider our priorities when we read this research. I can’t ever accept such a peculiar suggestion that perhaps it’s time to eat dogs because they are more harmful for the enviro...

One morning in cold cold Delhi I woke up and felt like I'd just hit a massive  block in my life.Bangla ma’am had a great way of expressing that feeling. Only, she used it to describe her frustration with my pathetic spellings – she called it “hotasha”. Complete and overwhelming despair! And she spent hours painstakingly going over the difference between all the random bangla “sho”s. And I spent hours painstakingly researching organisations which would take as far away from Delhi as possible. And before I knew it - I was hugging Jess in Goa . Yes, yes, I work in Goa . Yes, yes, the Goa . Yes, yes and yes - land of sun sand and sea. And clear skies. And navy nights. And stars carelessly scattered around. And the fireflies with their lit up bums, flitting around and lighting my way when I’m gingerly stepping over the broken stairway to my office at night. And that oh-so-fat moon and bathes the backyard with a strange silver glow. There’s Baga the bitch who quivers with pleasure whe...