Dog Blogs Travel Trips

"Buddha doesn't refer to a person, but a state of mind which we all are innately equipped with. Buddha means awakening..." ~ Rinzin Dorjee , Writer & scholar, Dehradun. Vikalp Sangam is a platform for groups and individuals working on alternatives to the currently dominant model of development and governance, in various spheres of life. Its major activity is the convening of regional and thematic Confluences across India to facilitate networking of these groups. The briefing note on the ideologies of this Alternates Confluence read much like a theoretical module from my University degree! We were hosted at Prakriti Sadhana Kendra, Vidya Bhawan. Barely 15 km from the city, the Ashram is cocooned in the dry forests of the Aravallis. The crisp, cold air of Rajasthan was radically different from the lush, tropical Goa. Ninety or so social activists, healers, herbalists, teachers, trainers, farmers, khojis , feminists,...

The country is suffering, while the elite are engaged in Facebook wars. Nothing is going to change till each of us makes up his or her mind to fight patriarchy, caste, communalism and injustice. The working class continues to exist on a pittance, and the politicians continue to roll in rivers of money.  I was standing near a chai-paratha shop on the streets of Delhi when a luxury sedan pulled up. The obese man behind the wheel rolled his (illegally) tinted glass down, bellowing, ‘ abbe oye bhen-chod, paani laa .’ The little chai-shop boy complies, holding out the paani-bottle from a safe distance…I’m assuming that comes with the experience of being cuffed by the customers, and he says, ‘ ye lo ’ … (please note: no  bhaiyaa !) As the man stretches out for the bottle, he shouts,  ‘ Izzat se baat kar, chutiya …’ I struggle to keep the disgust from showing on my face as I wonder why anyone should respect this heaving, gasping, sweating blob of flesh with ...

“… cutting up women is a sport older than cricket but just as popular and equally full of obscure rituals and intricate rules that everyone seems to know...” ~ Mohammed Hanif , Our Lady of Alice Bhatti I'm reading Our Lady of Alice Bhatti as I travel trip my way across India, meeting women for our newest campaign - an ambitious one where we're hoping to dismantle patriarchy using videos and discussions. I'm looking for young women, who want to work with us as Correspondents, to document patriarchy preying on them in its own unique style in their areas. As I read about Alice, a fiercely independent former jailbird, from a poor, ‘low-caste’ Christian family in Pakistan, I am disgusted by how similar life for women in India is to the life of Alice. As I travel from Goa to Kerala, and move to Tamil Nadu, I met Nandhini, from a tiny village just outside Tiruppur town, in Tamil Nadu. She’s just opened a beauty salon, enrolled in English classes and is pretty pissed off wi...

  ‘One must have freedom, sunshine and a little flower.’ ~ Hans Christian Anderson CyberDragon’s Psychedelic Trips are perfect for staring at chickens in the sunshine.  I'm ensconced in a wholly different world as I sit in the balcony, watching Flirty-Chicken mince around, fluffing her tail, while the two roosters flap and squawk, ripping each other to bloodied ribbons. I occasionally run through the yard, reluctantly flapping my arms, calling up childhood phrases (‘fighter-cocks’) to break up the fight. Pichkoo watches from under my chair, covered in her resident cloud of mosquitoes hovering around her little nose. (Pichkoo is very generous, she always shares her various bugs with me, often leaving a fat tick at my doorstep.)  She’s watching the fight, hawk-eyed, probably hoping one rooster will flop over and die. She's also oblivious to Dove-White-Chicken greedily golumphing at her pet mosquitoes. [1] Usually friendly, Fatootie-Chicken is grumpily glaring at...

"May I be protector for those without one, A guide for all travellers on the way;" ~ Shantideva, in A Guide to the Bodhisattva's way of Life. The gorgeous Goa monsoon is washing my windows squeaky clean, and as I'm lying around in bed, I’m suddenly thinking of Sealdah railway station. I was there just last month, a sweaty, stinky blob of flesh melting in the heat and humidity. We were running to catch a train to North Bengal, pushing through a roiling mass of people, dodging handcarts, sidestepping squalor when three ragged, dirty, little boys ran past us, pushing each other around, laughing, eyes a-sparkle, running barefoot across the platform... and all I could think of at that moment was him. I saw a world & it was mean, and hope was nowhere to be seen… Impatiently pushing aside tangled, matted hair, one of the little boys lithely swung himself onto the train pulling into platform number 1. The other two ran alongside, deftly catching plastic bottles ...

In early 2015, the organization I was affiliated with had an opportunity to expand their network to West Bengal. The euphoria of finally getting a chance to explore my motherland almost drowned in the agonising amount of research and data crunching I had to do, identifying key issues, organisations and movements across the state we wanted to work with. Scenes from the illegal quarries, Birbhum, West Bengal The data was baffling – West Bengal boasts of being the sixth largest economy in the country, and the state’s power infrastructure and roads and railways network is top notch as compared to the rest of the country. Despite having literacy rates higher than the national average, over 30% of the youth in Bengal remained unemployed in 2012-2013. 47 million unemployed young people. This was the same year the state recorded the highest rates of violence against women in the country. Savage destruction of fragile ecology of the Sundarbans and the North Bengal, at the foothills of th...