Krithika, my school best friend once gave me a gift I still carry in my heart. On one of my birthdays, when we were still in school, she calculated exactly how many years, months, days, hours, and minutes I had been by then. I remember her sitting so patiently beside me, doing every calculation by hand behind the notebook, fully focused. It felt less like math and more like love expressed in numbers. It's been many years since then. She now lives in another city, and life has quietly drifted into something unrecognizable from those days when we hid fiction books inside our textbooks, hearts racing, pretending to study while actually escaping into other worlds, praying the teacher wouldn't notice. And somewhere along the way, I’ve understood something I wish I had known earlier, life only gets weirder. And it is often the very things that happened in childhood that, years later, helps one find their way back to oneself again. Yet somewhere in between, we lose them, only to re...
“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.” ― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars Replace that with 'place' and you have what I feel for Old Manali. I visited this charming little village of Manali during the Good Friday weekend of March 2024. I first came across Old Manali through videos by travel youtuber Visha Khandelwal , who spent over a month there during lockdown. I left for the place by taking Thursday off from work and since Friday was an off I got four full days off for my trip. In fact, I have learned that slow travelling which truly grabs the essence of each moment is what suits me best. Hectic vacations don’t offer the same sense of escape I crave from the routine of office life. I booked my bus to Manali for 28th March 2024 taking the earliest one at 5.30 PM. In hindsight, I...