During my recent trip to Uttarakhand , I was faced with a problem I had never encountered before. We were passing through Delhi, but we had hardly any time in the city. On earlier visits when I have had to change trains/flights at Delhi, I have always arrived in the morning and left again at night, visiting relatives in between. This time, I was arriving in the city at night, and leaving again early in the morning. There was hardly any time to visit people. I would only have a couple of hours with them before I’d have to leave again. For the first time, we considered booking a hotel, but there again, we were hesitant about the actual hotels, the costs involved, and the logistics of getting from the airport to the railway station and then back again from the station to the airport. That’s when we remembered reading something about a corporate-managed lounge at Delhi station. We soon figured out that we could book online and pay by the hour. Besides, we also learnt that there wasn’t ju
Mumbai’s beaches . The first word that comes to mind when we think of them, sadly, is ‘filth’. Over the years, we have so got used to seeing our beaches in a mess, that we rarely give a thought to the marine life teeming there. Our eyes were opened to the incredible marine bio-diversity of Girgaum Chowpatty, (more popularly called Chowpatty Beach), when we recently went on a walk with Marine Life of Mumbai and INatureWatch Foundation . Over the last few weeks, I have racked my mind about what to write about our experience, but I have finally decided to cut out the words, and show you instead, through my photographs, the incredible life that manages to survive despite all odds…. Shells are everywhere , which is not surprising. But what is surprising is the fact that each of them, small and big, have creatures within them – the molluscs whose natural homes these are, as well as hermit crabs , which occupy them once they are abandoned. Hermit crab in spiral shell