Light of the Lamp

 Hi folks,          Wish you all yet another New year that will give you courage and strength to deal with adversities that may lie ahead along with happiness, laughter  and health.  Wish you all more opportunities to travel and explore places around in coming years.               We ended our year with a short visit to Sringeri along with nearby amazing destinations. Instead of making this post long with details of each place, I decided to keep it light by posting more pictures of each place. I hope you all will feel lightness and happiness for sometime while waiting to receive 2024!!                       SRINGERI SHARADAMBA TEMPLE                                Delightful Homestay which was 20 kms from Sringeri temple was such a delight to spend time connecting w...

 Hi folks,                After a fall from the grace with a painful thud this world cup, Indians have slowly got back to business of their lives.               Some of you may have guessed with what I meant when I said Aussies won 2 'cups ' this time!! The second cup we gave them without our knowledge!        😡😩😣                It was terribly disappointing and unbearable day  for die hard Indian fans who made the gallery of the stadium uniformly blue to support 'men in blue!' Btw,  how many of us will know or go and cheer 'women in blue ' like this? No one, including me, knows who the captain of women's cricket team is. Nature and biology being partial to men, women can never match the speed and agility of their counterparts of men! Oops,  I veered away from the topic! When India won 10 matches in a row and looked to be invincibl...

 Hello friends,              Every travel is unique, but a few are more unique due to its geographical location. The border crossings between 2 countries, travelling to one edge of a country are more exciting and evokes more curiosity! Our journey to the tip of India recently was one such. A trip to Rameshwaram and dhanushkodi is not only exciting, but also spiritual!!  Yes, it is on one edge and we can experience the land waning out and oceans taking over and Sri Lanka is so near from there yet so far!!      This Navarathri holidays, it was destination Rameshwaram with our running buddies and their families! From Bangalore to Rameshwaram it is a very long drive by road and so we stopped at Madhurai to have a good darshan of Meenakshi Amman! We planned out in such a way that we did not have to wait in queue for long hours! Because it was Navarathri season, we were lucky enough to see the display of golu bommais ( dolls of deiti...

 Hi,             "In a world where you can be anything, Be kind."                                                    Unknown.         The months of January and February are seasons of weddings, especially in South India. Recently, we attended a wedding of one of our nephews. The celebrations and rituals lasted for 3 days in a resort and there was lot of fun and frolic, catching up with extended family members after a long time. After the traditional nischayathartham (betrothal) in the morning, we expected that the bride will take hours to dress up for the reception. But voila!! Here she enters in a simple saree devoid of heavy makeup, very minimal ornaments making the whole evening look like more of a casual affair. The 'performances' for the evening included bride's father giving a speech about his daugh...

 Hi,         When I informed my neighbour and relative that we were going  to Ooty with our running group, they blinked and confirmed twice when I said I am going to see that hill station for the first time! In my school,  my classmates used to circulate this small poem :              'First do your duty,             Then marry a beauty,             Have honeymoon at Ooty,             Bring back a kutty.(child)'  My husband dismissed it by saying what sub standard poems we were circulating!              Majority of the readers would have gone to Ooty and so I do not feel I should give a grand description of the place! My first and perfect impressions of Udhagamandalam was shattered when I saw many of the places there was spoilt by commercialization and over population which has led to ...