Slumming it alone in India's most romantic city: Udaipur

When I put Udaipur under my roster of sights and sounds through Rajasthan, it wasn’t with the intention to explore a romantic city, per se. To be truthful, I was quite sceptical about delegating my quickly depleting funds for a city that was clearly high on the list of tourist vacations, especially the honeymooners. The idea of being surrounded by coochy-cooing newly-marrieds was enough to put me off. But its strategic location between the historically rich Chittorgarh and Kumbhalgarh made Udaipur the most ideal city to base my day-trips from. Never did it cross my mind that I too would have my very own private love affair with Udaipur.

The city finds its significance in history as the strategic capital of the Mewar dynasty. Surrounded by the Aravallies and dotted with man-made water bodies, the capital proved to be a tough battleground for infiltrators. Today, war is a distant thought. Instead its mystical lakes, royal palaces (one for every season) and a salubrious climate come together to cast an enchanting spell of love on its tourists and travellers alike. And fall in love I did!

It’s a date

Like getting ready for a blind date where everything feels uncertain and unsure; I wasn’t over the moon about visiting the City Palace either. If it wasn’t for the special deal on the combined boat ride along with the palace tours, I doubt I’d have stepped inside.

View of the old city from the palace

The royal courtyard

Located on the east bank of the Lake Pichola, the grand palace is an architectural expression of the lavish life of the Mewar dynasty. From extravagant mirrored ceilings to beautiful murals, silver-works and marble sculptures; the City Palace is more than just another splendid Rajasthani haveli. It is a symbol of status, prestige and elegance.

Truth be told, I did not linger at the palace for long. It was bustling with tourists everywhere. And I had to stand in line to get from one room to another. While I was taken by its sheer opulence, the date was over in two hours flat without any regrets.

A candle lit dinner for two

It’s not the real fancy-shancy dinners you hear about in Udaipur. In fact far from it. I was staying in the midst of the Gangaur Ghat where I presumed all the action happened. I was even more kicked that I’d be staying right on the waterfront without burning a hole into my wallet.

Book and beer... Chilling in the evening

So when I went looking for food in the makeshift rooftop cafe of my hotel, I was pleasantly surprised with the quiet romantic setting. Candles were lit on all tables with Diwali lights (what I like to call the twinkle lights) adorning the entire balustrade overlooking the Lake Pichola. While intimate dinner for two wasn’t on my cards, I got comfy with my book and sipped beer while marvelling at the myriad hues of the setting sun on the lake.

Love is blind. And I often lost my way

I have this habit of deliberately getting lost. With no real direction sense of Udaipur, I took just about any road that caught my fancy. Sometimes, I was rewarded with a quaint cafe at the end of the alleyway and other times just dead ends. But once in a while I ended up walking through what might be a residential back road along the lake. These were more steps than real roads. Women washing clothes, children playing kit-kit on the stairs, loitering goats and cows being chaperoned to their homes; it was the side of Udaipur that no one talks about. Untouched and charming. Often I took my time to ask for directions, only to get lost again on my way.

As a ritual, I would go down to the waterfront every night to just sit on the steps and do nothing. There’s something spectacularly soothing about staring at the dancing reflections of faraway lights on the dark night water.

Girl’s gotta shop

The main market along the waterfront offers an incredible choice of silver jewellery and crockery. From delicate trinkets to heavy silverworks, Udaipur has some of the country’s cheapest silverwares because of its proximity from the silver mines of Chittorgarh. Considering, I was going there next, I waited to score an even cheaper buy from the very source :D

A romantic getaway to the royal monsoon hideout

Like a white tiara atop a hill, the Monsoon Palace (Sajjangarh Fort) finds its significance in history for its royal connections and in popular culture for its feature in the James Bond film Octopussy. A white marble structure, the palace offers an astounding bird-eye view of the Udaipur city on one side and the gentle slopes of the rolling Aravallis on the other.

View of Udaipur from the Monsoon Palace

View of the Aravallis from the Zenana mahal

Among all the sights and sounds of Udaipur, the Monsoon Palace holds a special place in my heart. Without commercialisation, on most days the palace is empty, in fact hauntingly so. There were no long queues to the booking office or crowds to hinder the unmatched view from the balcony. I spent three hours just exploring the palace grounds, reading through old artefacts displayed in the empty ground floor museum and mostly just enjoying the view at my own pace.

When Joan Didion said, ‘we tell ourselves stories in order to live’, I think she meant - the stories we delude ourselves with.

I used to think that if I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the morning, I’d hammer through the noon and end it with a Thud! Whack! Clanggg! before I hit the sack. But once I had a hammer, I realised I wasn’t hammering as much I said I would.

A road-tripper’s recipe to beach-hopping: Sri Lanka south coast

Nay-sayers said it couldn’t be done. Well-wishers said it probably shouldn’t be done. The fact that the mercury would rise to its zenith high in the peak summer didn’t stop us from travelling to the southern coast of Sri Lanka last month. After a rickety eight hour bus-ride that saw us descending into the plains from the hill country, we reached the bustling sea-board town of Weligama. If you are travelling along the same route, keeping a day in hand for the Yala National Park would seem like the most obvious choice. However, short of money and time – my fiancé and I headed straight for the holy trinity of sun, sea and sand. It would be safe to say that any road trip involves the road (duh!), a pair of trusty-ish wheels and at least one companion (who you will most likely fall out with at least once a day. But regardless the offense these silly skirmishes that start with ‘let’s stop for a cola’ have a knack to smooth itself out soon enough). Like life, which’s about the journey and n

Rude Awakening Series: You might find it offensive. But so is the world around us.

It has been one year and nine months since my last entry. A lot has happened since. The dude who used to say “You’re fired” on reality television is now the very real President of United States of A, Delhi beat Beijing to become the most polluted city in the world by a chest-thumping margin, the planet regardless of our skeptical opinions has continued to become warmer - putting the birds and bees out of business. On the other hand, some things haven’t changed. North Korea is still batshit ballistic, China ghost towns are at best dead, Japan is LOCO but still zen, fortunes (as usual) have waxed and waned to the changing tides of tax reforms, share prices and demonetisation. If there is a hidden lesson over the months that I have learnt, it is this - nothing changes or gets better in this world unless we act (as opposed to react) upon it. And it is with this foolhardy notion that I once again set about to write; to abuse, to anger, with a direct intent to offend the blogosphere.

Three salad dressings with a side of honesty

Salads. The healthy-and-mighty of all meals. The snooty accompaniment to a glass of rosé. The veritable rainbow on your plate. In Fran Lebowitz’s words, a salad is not a meal – it is a style. Well, as long as ‘style’ includes a fair amount of mud under one’s fingernails – I couldn’t agree more with Fran. Sure, it’s fashionable to eat a salad – but there’s a certain panache to going down on all fours in wet mud, rummaging through fresh lettuce pods every morning and wondering what you’re going to dress them in. While it’s far from the fashion statement that salad has come to symbolise, growing your own food definitely is a style of its own. There are many categories of salad snobs – the ingredient minimalist, the chop-it-right evangelists and the brigade of dressing-goes-first, but the only consensus between the salad factions is that you don’t actually need packaged dressing. A homemade vinaigrette made from basic ingredients lives just as happily on your refrigerator door, not to ment

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The following is best enjoyed with food or beverage that's a tad bit sour, bitter or whatever seasoning that leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Besides teaching me calculus and semi-conductors that have been of no future consequence, the four years at an engineering college furnished me with an elementary knowledge of scientific thinking. I was glad to learn that the minds of people (themselves a product of natural causes) was a function of the brain subject to the laws of cause and effect, like any other part of their body. And that these laws were the same as those that governed the movements of star and atom. I exulted at the thought that the universe was no more than a vast machine in which every event was determined by a preceding event so that nothing could be other than what it was. These conceptions not only appealed to my dramatic instinct; they filled me with a sense of liberation. It gave me such satisfaction to learn that the Earth was a speck of mud whir

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MADTROTTER

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