TRAVEL TALES of ranaruby

Ultimate Varanasi Travel Guide: Experiencing India's Oldest Living City Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links (including Klook, Tiqets, and Kiwi). If you book a tour, hotel, or flight through these links, I may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. Born in Benares—revisited  2014 Proud and privileged, I feel, to have been 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.  Why Visit Varanasi (Benares)? Excited to visit a city that carries a highly inspiringly vivacious introduction in Lonely Planet—"Brace yourself. " You are about to enter one of the most blindingly colourful, relentlessly chaotic, and unapologetically indiscreet places on earth. Varanasi takes no prisoners. But if you are ready for it, this may just turn out to ...

An Evening with India's Most Daring Mountaineer 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 ...