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Review of Executive Lounges at New Delhi Railway Station (NDLS)

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

Introducing the Ladakh Diaries

4 years ago, Shankar and I went on a trip to Ladakh and Srinagar. It was a special trip… Samhith was off in Germany, attending a German language summer camp, and the two of us were travelling by ourselves the first time in almost 13 years! We had been planning the trip for months, and the choice of destination wasn’t our first, or our second, or even our tenth! We had first planned an international trip, and selected and rejected destinations galore. Eventually, I realized I wasn’t getting excited about any of them, and that is when we decided that we would visit the part of our country we had never visited – Ladakh. After all, the timing was perfect… the roads would be open, the weather wouldn’t be too harsh, and we had almost 2 weeks, enough to get a glimpse of the region we had only seen photographs of. And so it was that in the first week of August, 2017, the two of us set off on one of our most memorable trips, ever.

I had intended to write about this trip immediately after returning. However, that did not quite work out as I had planned. For a variety of reasons, I took a break from blogging. It was meant only to be a short break, but re-starting to blog turned out to be harder than I imagined, and the short break grew longer, and longer. And Ladakh never got written about.


I had, however, maintained a diary during the entire trip, and the farther we got from mobile network and internet, the more I scribbled in it. On our return, the diary was relegated to the book shelf, and all but forgotten. And then, we shifted to a new house, and all thoughts of blogging, or the diary were relegated to the farthest recesses of my brain. A few weeks back, I stumbled upon the diary while (as usual) searching for something else, and it brought up memories…. Not only of the trip, but also of memories from the time I started my blog. I used to keep a diary then too, where I wrote about the trips we went on, and my earliest posts were little more than the jottings in my little diary. It sparked a desire to see if I could do it again, and so, I am making an effort once again, to revive the blog, with memories of my Ladakh trip, from my diary and my photographs.

Join me, on my journey, once again….. 

Coming up -

Ladakh Diaries Part 1: The Beginning - Manali to Jispa


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