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Seville

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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...

Visit to India's oldest living city - Benares

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Born in Benares ---- revisited 2014 Proud and privileged I feel to be born in the holy city of Benares. I have stayed there but it is as good as not staying because I had not come to terms with my senses during that period. So when my wife proposed that we pay a short visit to Benares during the summer of 2014 I was excited. Excited to visit a city which carries a highly inspiringly vivacious introduction in Lonely Planet – “Brace yourself. You are about to enter one of the most blindingly colourful, unrelentingly chaotic and unapologetically indiscreet places on earth. Varanasi takes no prisoners. But if you are ready for it, this may just turn out to be your favourite stops at all" . Benaras is also known as Kashi, ‘the abode of Lord Shiva, the Hindu God’, or Varanasi nowadays. It is about 600 km from Calcutta and involves a comfortable overnight train journey. We stayed in Hotel Surya in the Cantonment area, which is a relatively peaceful retreat and located behind Benares s...

An Evening with India's Most Daring Mountaineer

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Basanta Singha Roy On the evening of 10 th August 2014, Basanta Singha Roy invited us to his Bijoygarh residence in South Calcutta. He is my wife’s colleague in Punjab National Bank and also a good friend of hers. He has the wiry and sturdy physique of a seasoned mountaineer, but despite his extraordinary achievements in scaling the mighty and formidable Himalayan peaks, he is as friendly and easy-going as your next-door neighbor. He had his formal training on mountaineering at the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering, Uttarkashi, where my wife also had a stint in basic training when she was a teenager. Basanta’s fearless passion for embracing nature’s fury at heights where not even the eagles dare has always been his defining feature. With Debasish Biswas, his climbing partner, he reached the top of Mt.Everest, the world’s highest peak, in May 2010. They were the first civilians from Bengal to do so. After Everest, the duo went on to successfully summit two mor...