Yours Royally, Udaipur

I gratefully sipped my hot tea, sitting on the roof terrace of the hotel, watching the fog lift and reveal a lake so still, it looked like a mirror. Not a bad way to start the day or the year. Certainly a fitting welcome in Rajasthan’s ‘city of lakes’, Udaipur. I have a fascination with […]

An Oasis of Gold

As my friends and I sipped on cocktails, in an Irish bar overlooking a river with a world-famous skyscraper in the background, it was hard to imagine that just about 200 years ago, this was a little desert backwater, invisible on the world map. Today, Dubai is the fourth most visited city in the world- […]

Hola, Guadalajara!

Guadalajara? Where is that? How do you say it, again? In my home city of Mumbai, three continents, an ocean and a sea away from Mexico, most of us knew very little about the country. We knew it was the poor, desperate neighbor of the almighty USA and a haven for drug cartels that kidnapped […]

Blood Moon

A sharp knock on the door startled us in our beds. The first instinct was fear, being two young women in the politically charged and often unstable region of Srinagar in Jammu and Kashmir in India. I asked who it was, sounding braver than I felt. To our relief, we heard the familiar voice of […]