TRAVEL TALES of ranaruby

DERBY DERBY -  the entrance to the stunning Peak District As far as I could recollect, I first heard of the word ‘derby’ in connection with horse racing contests. That was quite a way back, perhaps during my college days in Calcutta, when at local tea stall ‘addas’, a small group of people interested in horse racing used to discuss about derbies at the Calcutta Race course. In the new millennium, people have started debating the derby between two major football rivals, East Bengal and Mohan Bagan. I have never taken any interest in horse derby, but in the case of football, which I love, the phrase ‘derby’ stumped me when I first heard it during one of the post-COVID clashes between East Bengal and Mohan Bagan at the Salt Lake Stadium in Calcutta. Why Derby? The answer to this seemed to have been waiting for me when, along with my wife, I visited the town of Derby in England. Even the name of the city, Derby, stemmed from ‘Djura-by’, meaning the village of...

THE GEORGE (Inn of Hathersage) The George  (Inn of Hathersage) Hathersage is about ten 9miles from Sheffield in England. Situated strategically in the Peak District National Park, this small, picturesque village offers much more than initially expected—something we only realised when our son Arjun took us to The George for lunch. This majestic 500-year-old hotel sits right on the T-junction of the road descending from the medieval town of Bakewell. It also boasts a literary history. When Charlotte Brontë, the eldest and most prolific of the three surviving Brontë sisters of the nineteenth century, visited Hathersage in 1845, she stayed at The George. The hotel is believed to have inspired Charlotte Brontë’s renowned novel, ‘Jane Eyre’. The fictional ‘George Inn’ appears in her story. Descriptions of the inn’s interiors, such as ‘mantelpiece ornaments, furnishings, prints of George III and the Prince of Wales’, are based on her observations during her stay. The b...

Great Tastes - Wazwan Kashmiri recipes Wazwan Where better to fall in love with  wazwan  than in Kashmir? In October 2013, I visited this beautiful valley along with my wife for the first time in my life. Through all the breathtaking natural beauty, the rolling green mountains and valleys, and snow-peaked horizons, my focus, my greatest love, never wavered from the fantastic culinary tradition of this mountain state . Many things combined to create the mouthwatering wazwan for which Kashmir is so rightly famed —from the Mughal past, where Emperors commissioned some of the most romantic baghs (gardens in the world), made as the earthly template of heaven, and were also incurable gourmands who searched far and wide for great chefs and gave them their one-point agenda: create exceptional dishes. Kashmir’s wonderful climate, which allows the growing of a mind...

SEVILLE Sevilla Seville After living up to some wonderful moments at Granada, the birthplace of the renowned Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, we decided to further our coadventure through the heartland of the southern Iberian Peninsula, composed of lowlands, mountains and valleys. You’ve got it right. To arrive at Seville, we traversed the fascinating Spanish heartland. The landscape presented some vistas composed of rustic plains, lowlands, winding roads through the Sierra and then vast stretches of olive orchards. About 200 years back, a couple of decades after Napoleon’s army plundered and destroyed parts of Alhambra, an American diplomat and writer, Washington Irving, and his Russian counterpart traversed the path from Seville to Granada. It was highly adventurous then, because of the fact that the transport system at that time was horse-drawn carriages and muleteers. It was such that they could ‘wander among the romantic mountains of Andalusia’...