Everest Calling - Kathmandu - Pashupatinath temple

Author : Sowmya      Blog : A Protest of Romance      Date : 5/1/2013 3:00:00 AM

'In the evening, we visited the Pashupatinath temple. Cameras were strictly not allowed. I took a few pictures from the outside. It is not one temple but a temple complex and it is huge. There are many shrines, many ‘gopuras’ or rather, pagodas that make a much prettier picture from a distance than from inside the complex. Also from the distance, one is not aware of the crowds of people inside it nor of the squalidness that characterize all popular pilgrim centres.'

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Everest Calling - Kathmandu

Author : Sowmya      Blog : A Protest of Romance      Date : 4/28/2013 4:00:00 AM

'What a relief it was to see a proper bathroom after 17 days! We got all washed and cleaned and got out for lunch and went to a Marwadi thali place.On the way, I took a few pictures of Kathmandu – the capital of the only Hindu kingdom in the world. And it hurt. I only hoped that as in the case of India, it’s spiritual wealth made up for it’s material paucity.There were flashes of architectural antiquity set of course in midst of squalid surroundings, but on the whole…'

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Everest Calling - Lukla to Kathmandu - Arial Pictures

Author : Sowmya      Blog : A Protest of Romance      Date : 4/25/2013 7:51:00 PM

'The pictures were spectacular. The fact that they were taken through a smudged translucent medium called the window (of a rickety plane), was a limitation. And of course my camera, though I hate to admit it. The objects of my camera lens, the terraces, fields, villages, I am sure were no less than the ones I have in my coffee table books of breathtaking arial pictures.'

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Breeze

Author : Sowmya      Blog : A Protest of Romance      Date : 4/8/2013 4:24:00 PM

'I had heard of people covered in an aura, people surrounded by a sweet fragrance, people radiating positivity and many such... but what about a person exuding peals of laughter? And that too, not mere giggles, jokes and funny passes, but hearty laughter...every time I saw him and all the time...I met such a guy.... I was lucky to.It showed something new... taught me something new... I did not notice the dimples first, but it was the twinkle in his eye that charmed me....over coffee,(...)'

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Refusing the High Pedestal

Author : Sowmya      Blog : A Protest of Romance      Date : 3/31/2013 3:41:00 PM

'“Women can go nude for all they want; it does not give men the right to rub them”.That was a live tweet posted by someone attending a forum that happened to be discussing the subject of the safety of women in Bangalore, organized by the Times of India.It does not matter who, it suffices to know that the view is becoming increasingly representative of the thinking of more and more women across the nation. What is shocking, however, is the fact that it was posted as a counter argument(...)'

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Everest Calling - Phakding to Lukla

Author : Sowmya      Blog : A Protest of Romance      Date : 3/28/2013 6:17:00 PM

'The very last lap of our trek.It was the trek from Phakding to Lukla and it seemed like a never ending one. Oh boy! It just went on and on, and what more it started raining on and off. We had to take out those raincoats, put them on, and put them back in. The weather had been so different, so bright and sunny when we had walked down this trail 2 weeks ago. The picture was different, the colours were different, what was revealed to us and what was hidden were different too. Our mood (...)'

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Is That a Freedom Fighter? No, Its Sanjay Dutt

Author : Sowmya      Blog : A Protest of Romance      Date : 3/24/2013 4:47:00 PM

'Sanjay DuttA person who shook hands with Dawood Ibrahim, one of India’s most wanted underworld criminals. Helped him to sneak in weapons to strike at this country, to explode bombs that killed and injured hundreds of innocents. For months and perhaps years, the police, the CBI and other special forces had to labour away to figure out the who, what, why, when and how of this conspiracy.According to some of the reports, Sanjay Dutt, seeing the police catching up with him and his partn(...)'

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Everest Calling - Namche to Phakding

Author : Sowmya      Blog : A Protest of Romance      Date : 3/17/2013 10:17:00 AM

'The next morning, we started our very last lap of the EBC trek; the trek from Namche to Lukla – the longest one, to be completed in one day. We stopped a few minutes at this shop in Namche where they were issuing certificates to those who had completed the adventure successfully. And surely, I got one. Will post it later…Two weeks ago, when we had trekked from Phakding to namche, it had been foggy and rainy, and scenery looked so different from now, when it sunny and the weather, al(...)'

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Veneer of Transformation

Author : Sowmya      Blog : A Protest of Romance      Date : 3/10/2013 2:27:00 PM

'That the trainer who was imparting business communication skills to a group of software rookies was himself talking rubbish, was the least of his faults. That he was rolling his tongue at all his ‘r’s, ridiculously trying to ape the American accent, was a lesser fault too. I say ‘fault’ because in a way, he was defeating his assertiveness, his self esteem by trying to imitate someone else, but perhaps, ‘self esteem’ was the subject of some other soft skills trainer, not his, so he c(...)'

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A Walk in the Mist

Author : Sowmya      Blog : A Protest of Romance      Date : 2/20/2013 10:26:00 AM

'It was still raining. But we had to get going.We put on our ponchos (rain coats), the few of us who were left after the rest had marched ahead. What followed was one among the most beautiful walks of my life. The walk through clouds. You could see a hundred feet ahead but no more. Beyond that all world was mist.The poncho that effectively wrapped me made it difficult to take out the camera. To add to it, I was running out of memory. But I did take a few pictures. Having taken one pi(...)'

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Everest Calling - Tengboche to Namche

Author : Sowmya      Blog : A Protest of Romance      Date : 2/15/2013 5:26:00 PM

'The walk from Tengboche to Namche was the walk through clouds. But that came later. We walked till noon and stopped at this place for lunch. We had our lunch but the rain would not let up. Our singing began and went on and on but the rain would not let up.Just outside our building, on both sides of the street was this beautiful spread of jewelry, mostly semi precious or ordinary stones, but beautiful ones, by which sat Nepali village women, occasionally speaking of the specialty of(...)'

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Electric Personality

Author : Sowmya      Blog : A Protest of Romance      Date : 2/8/2013 4:53:00 PM

'It was during my visit to the US in 2007 that I experienced ‘static’ for the first time. I would get down from cars at the end of the ride and close the door and oooooh! my fingers hurt from the shock upon contact with the door.Why, one day, it was late in the night, quite dark and I saw sparks at the tip of my finger.My habit, of avoiding all contact with the door of a car, after getting down, and closing it instead by gently pushing the glass window of the door, persists even to t(...)'

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Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

Author : Sowmya      Blog : A Protest of Romance      Date : 1/31/2013 4:21:00 PM

'It took me much resolve to pick up this book.It has been on my shelf for the last 7 years now. I hadn’t picked it up because I had thought it would be a formidable read.The location, the setting of the story was solitary as I understood from the cover page.The blurb, the title and the story itself, I heard from all who had read it, was dark. So I thought it would be some slow moving narrative, one of those books that’s of interest primarily to academicians and that I would take an e(...)'

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Everest Calling - Tengboche

Author : Sowmya      Blog : A Protest of Romance      Date : 1/27/2013 4:00:00 PM

'Tengboche is perhaps the most picturesque of places we have seen in this trip. Namche is picturesque but it is crowded. What lay hidden behind the mist, we knew not. What we saw was a neat looking lodge, a significant looking monastery and a very small and tidy market place with 4 to 5 shops, the most prominent of which was the Everest Bakery.There was a clearing at the centre around which there stood the monastery, our lodge, the German Bakery on two sides and on the other sides, t(...)'

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To Be

Author : Sowmya      Blog : A Protest of Romance      Date : 1/23/2013 4:57:00 PM

'The question, ‘what is the greatest blessing in life?’ will receive as many different answers as the number of people in this world. Well, almost. And different answers at different times.I stumbled upon my answer recently. And it seems to have a feel of finality to it.To be able to do what you want to do, without constraint, is certainly a great blessing, if not the greatest.I quit my job early this year. And decided to take a break for a few months, as I usually do in between jobs(...)'

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Gourmet Evening with Michelin Star Chef Baptiste from France

Author : Sowmya      Blog : A Protest of Romance      Date : 1/20/2013 6:28:00 PM

'How does one describe taste in words?How does one portray food in any other way except offering a morsel of it to the person to whom one wishes to make the taste, the aroma, the texture, the temperature and the aftertaste understood?I am having to do it now because I accepted an invitation to savour the offerings of Michelin star chef Baptise from France at ITC Gardenia, Bangalore on the 27th of November 2012.For the first time, I know that my words, no matter how carefully chosen, (...)'

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Everest Calling - Periche to Tengboche

Author : Sowmya      Blog : A Protest of Romance      Date : 1/16/2013 5:42:00 PM

'The next morning, walk from Periche to Tengboche was less of a trek and more of a picnic. Everyone was in a light happy picnic mood.People ambles this way and that, stopped, snacked and took their cameras out. Their fingers no longer hurt. The disciplinarians were told off. We had lunch at Pangboche (or did we?) and resumed our walk.When we reached, a very pleasant surprise was awaiting us all.'

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Language and Evolution

Author : Sowmya      Blog : A Protest of Romance      Date : 12/31/2012 6:26:00 PM

'Somerset Maugham in his preface to his work ‘Liza of Lambeth’, asks the reader to take the book not as a picture of life in Lambeth today but as that of life of Lambeth long ago, and says the following...‘...they had not the varied vocabulary that their children have (today); and with a more limited command of language at their disposal, felt and thought more simply...’What a profound truth! We are all only as rich or as impoverished as our language, as our vocabulary. Our experienc(...)'

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Everest Calling - Kala Patthar to Periche

Author : Sowmya      Blog : A Protest of Romance      Date : 12/25/2012 8:07:00 PM

'The walk back from Gorakshep to Lobuche through a landscape, arid, rocky, dry and colourless, made me thank God for the snow that had been there like a vast white carpet two days ago when the needle pricks had turned to knife cuts.What a difference snow had made!We were lucky. Everything had been turned so perfectly to give us the best of all possible experiences. It had snowed at the right time. The snow had melted at the right time.The sky that had been cloudy for a week had clear(...)'

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Careful, Thats the Edge. Of the Mountain & of Politeness

Author : Sowmya      Blog : A Protest of Romance      Date : 12/19/2012 5:44:00 PM

'The whole world is yours. That’s how you feel in the mountains. For, it’s just you and them. The skies, the mountains all around, the stretches and stretches of land around you, the rivers, the snow, the pastures. All, except the trail on which you walk.There is just one trail. Narrow. And they belong to many contenders. Yaks, porters, local villagers and the tourists. Walking back and forth.You own all the spaces around you except the two square feet that you need. A sort of law of(...)'

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