Posts


Featured Post

Seville

Image
SEVILLE Sevilla 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’ (Tales of Alhamb...

LED and Fireflies

Image
 From Twinkling of Fireflies to LED - more on Green Light,the Millennium Light! Twinkle Twinkle little stars. NOW I WONDER WHERE YOU ARE??  Leave aside stars; on a clear night in urban India you do not even get glimpses of fireflies nowadays. Vanished! Magician – Artificial Light Pollutant. Lighting professionals all over the world are relentless in their effort to relive the olden days of mystical star gazing experience on clear nights. The solution lies in LED as light source in general lighting. Reason being it is a tiny light source and thus can be optically controlled in a highly effective manner. Imagine a stadium lit by LED floodlight or all major thoroughfares in a city lit by LED streetlights. No untoward upward light, no glare, no pollution. LED is here and has progressed at a furiously rapid pace since the dawn of this millennium. Recently, scientists inspired by the twinkling of fireflies have modified LED to make it almost one and a half time more efficien...

Wazwan in Kashmir - more on GREAT TASTES

Image
Great Tastes - 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 Kashmir is so rightly famed for—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-boggling variety of beautiful nuts, fruits, vegetables, and spices, including saffron, the world’s most expensive spice, played an equall...