can you vish?

Why do we travel? I can think of a few reasons: to catch a glimpse of life beyond the familiarity of our homes, to taste new flavors, to experience landscapes and weather patterns different from our own, to witness natural wonders and man-made marvels, to meet interesting people, and to hear new words. Khamma Ghani is the phrase we decided to hear this time around. The first step in making a travel plan is, of course, choosing the destination. Everything else - the timing, the things to pack, the number of leave days needed, and any legal processes - depends on where we intend to go. Thanks to the constant exposure to travel vloggers, we have a bucket list of destinations we hope to explore someday. The list gets updated every now and then, with current entries ranging from international destinations like Vietnam, Japan, and Italy to domestic ones like Meghalaya and Ladakh. Rajasthan was never at the top of our list. True, it is one of the most heavily promoted destinations on India...

I am a planner! I like planning things in my life and spend numerous hours researching, analyzing, and comparing different options in front of me to choose the right one. Of late, I’ve realized that even if you choose an option that feels like the best, life’s infinite twists and turns often end up presenting you with something completely different. Nithya and I, like many other like-minded and equally privileged people, make it a point to explore a new corner of the world at least once a year—a piece of earth far from home, where the language, ethnicity, beliefs, culture, or food differ from what we know. This year, when we (and by we, I mean me) started planning, our top destinations were Japan, Georgia, and Vietnam. I put in the hours and created itineraries for each of these places. Drafting itineraries is the fun, exciting part of travel planning. The boring, exhausting part is the visa process and document collection. Both Japan and Georgia required numerous documents, some of wh...

Covid brought a major upheaval to people’s lives all across the world. Lives, livelihoods, and future plans were all lost in the deadly pandemic that hasn’t died down even though a couple of years have passed by. The losses have been humongous that I do not even attempt to compare the same with the minor setbacks that we faced while planning our wedding, and a subsequent trip to an exotic foreign location. It would be fair to say that our lives were also impacted by the same. After foiled plannings, some refunded and some non-refunded flight tickets, and countless email conversations with airlines, booking agents, and insurance companies, we went over the process all over again and the travel plan was finally set in motion in the August of 2022 - a good two years after our scaled-down wedding during the lockdown days. There are numerous decisions to be made while planning a vacation, the foremost one being the destination. The destination sets the tone of the holidays I believe. Many o...