In The Valley of Gods: A Personal Journey

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Urstruly:

On this post I support you. Indians have no clue on how to laugh at themselves. Anal retentiveness is a Brahminical trait.

dost-mittar
Good writeup, thanks. And do write about s.India :).

Since veeresh brought it up, well Mr Hamid Karzai went to Simla recently and here is part of what he said :

`` I come here not as President of Afghanistan but as a boy and student of Shimla,” he said to a thunderous applause from a select gathering. “I know more about Shimla than most of you here do. Name it and I will tell you,” he said, to another round of applause.

Karzai said when he first stepped out of the train in the month of July, “it was love at first sight. The drizzle that greeted my arrival…. I remember everything I ate in the smoke-filled tea shop listening to the lovely lyrics from the film Mausam. I remember every walk I had in the town and I must confess that I am fit today because of the walks”.

Walking down memory lane and even choking at times, the Afghan President said his years in Shimla taught him many things in life. “When I came here with my cousin I was only 18 years old. When I left, I was 22. They are years that can either make or break people. They are the formative years. For me, they were the making years. Years that taught me to be strong,” he said.`` ..``

#38 by Studebaker on April 30, 2003 9:16pm PT
Ok I am lil confused now. I was referring to Tipu`s comment
``You Sankriticised Southy do whatever you want south of Mumbai or Vindyas ........ ``
Not yours. I didn`t know you guys were the same. (R u?)

Rahi baath DOSA ki (it is DOSAI by the way)...nope I am terrible...My grandma is the best when it comes to dosa``I``. awww I miss her now!

And also Hari`s comment that ``URUDU IS PAKISTANI LANG`` is sort of true. The 130 Million Muslims that you were talking about don`t really speak ``URUDU``. It is a mix of Urudu and whatever regional language of that area. Very confusing and hard to understand.
By the way you should hear Tamil Muslims in Triplicane speaking....it is pretty funny if you can understand Tamil. I know I Digress

yaar why you people have to be so anal retentive all the time; can`t you take a joke.

Que sara sara guys

Lovely.

dost-mittar ji,
Very well written travelogue taking the reader along with you to all those interesting places.In Pakistan Muree is the most visited hill station which has fallen victim to commercialization and lost it uniqueness forever. Nearby is Nathiagalli, which has a decent ski run but less popular.The
real out -of- the- world experiences are at Chitral, Hunza and Nagar in the North and Ziarat in Baluchistan. Sadly, the infra structure at most of these hill stations is abysmal. There are some more places in the north of the Valley of Swat, which are hard to reach due to horrendous roads and lack of proper transport, hotels and restaurants.
Looking forward to the write-up on Delhi. Do mention about the Qawwali on the nau-chandi jumeraat at Nizamuddin Auliya. The ambience and the magic transports you to the India of the Sultanate period, or was it my imagination gone haywire?

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urstruly # 32, once again, you hit the spot. As a matter of simple fact, many of the governments in exile or their representatives currently present in India tend to hover around in Himachal. Factions from Afghanistan and neighbouring Central Asian territories, Tibet, Burma, Chittagong Hill Tracks, Gurkhas, Kurdistan, Polissaaro, PLO, even some Armenian and Assyrian types. For a while there were some Maoris and Australian aborigines too. The Irish have been present for over a century.

So if a Pakistani Gormint in exile wants to set up in Shimla, I am sure they will be welcome. The only visa regulations, then, would be the ones that help keep our visitors alive.

Boss, beat us a new shtick sometime atleast? Try??

#32 by Urstruly on April 30, 2003 12:26pm PT

``Nicely written travelogue - the Mall scene resembles quite like our Murree Hills and Nathiagali etc. I suggest that all Indians should take authors route and visit Shimla etc. while they can, because pretty soon there are gonna be pretty strict visa regulations imposed on foreign visitors by Government of Pakistan in that area``

Wet dreams!!
O mughalo..abhi tumhari tabahion me kuch kasar baki hai kya? abhi dil bhara nahi desh ka batwara karke..abhi kasar baki hai jo tum..hindustan ko, bharat ko ab pakistan banana chahtey ho...pehle hi ek hisa cheen kar le gaye jo ab baaki ke india par buri nazar daltey ho..sharam karo..

baki india ke hazaron mandir to tabah kar diye ...ab kya himachal ke paharon par jaa kar wahan ke bache-khuche mandir bhi tabah karne hain..??

And yes, this is the reason Indian Govt was not at all ready for `dialogue`, because the basic paki mentality is still like that of Ghauris and ghaznavis..

Zafar:
So, you went to Manali on a mission like dullabhatti`s friends?
You are right about the peaks we saw from Kufri. And there were more, too.
Re. Niazamuddin, I will write a piece only if you coauthor. I have to be careful about what I write after being unmasked by some unnamed people.:-)

Veeresh:
Thanks for all the value-added info. No, I did not eat at Bhuntar. For my meal stops, I had to depend upon my hired driver who, no doubt, stopped at places where he had made prior ``arrangements``.
We had to stop a long way before the trijunction on the road to Rohtang Pass because of the road closure due to snow.

Ref dost-mittar #31

[Ansari:
Thanks. As for your querry, those who did go to honeymoon a generation ago did know what it was all about....!!]

Well, you could have included the joke about how a sardarji found out what a honeymoon meant several years after he was married and so went up to his wife and told her to pack so that they could get going on the honeymoon. The poor wife, having her hands full with housework and children, told him, ``Can`t you see I am busy? Take your Mom if you want to go someplace!``

[harimou:
What you say makes sense. And now, I am afraid to write anything on South India.]

Oh, go ahead and write. I will just put in gentle corrections when I feel like!

[BTW does Arunachal mean immovable sun.]

Literally, yes; idiomatically, Mountain of the Sun. Appropriate since, being the easternmost state and mountaionous, the sun would rise there first in India. `Achal` (immovable) is the opposite of `chal` (movable) (derived from `chalana` - movement) but almost always used to mean `mountain`. The Vindhya mountains are referred to as `Vindhyachal`. Place names in the South such as Vriddhachalam (Vriddha + Achala = Old Mountain) exist and Tirupathi where Lord Balaji (Venkateswara) has a temple gives rise to names such as Venkatachalam and Lord Balaji Himself is referred to as `Venkatachala-pathy`.

Ansari:
Thanks. As for your querry, those who did go to honeymoon a generation ago did know what it was all about....!!

harimou:
What you say makes sense. And now, I am afraid to write anything on South India. BTW does Arunachal mean immovable sun.

ajeet:
If Pinjor garden is the one near Chandigarh, I have visited it earlier. And, yes, it is very beautiful.
No, Kashmir is on my list for the next visit, Inshallah and inshajihadis!
And thanks to you, dullabhatti and Veeresh for added information re. Scandal Point. The incident involving the Maharaja of Patiala may or may not be true, but it makes for a colourful story about a colourful character.

Ras:
Thanks. It is known for Simla Accord only to the political/historical junkies. To most Indians, it is still a place to go for a holiday.

septran:
Yes, I too was thinking of Kashmir when in Himachal. The aerial distance is not that much.

nazarhayatkhan:
Thanks for your comments. India started late on name-changing but is catching up fast - Mumbai, Kolkutta, Chenai....

Nicely written travelogue - the Mall scene resembles quite like our Murree Hills and Nathiagali etc. I suggest that all Indians should take authors route and visit Shimla etc. while they can, because pretty soon there are gonna be pretty strict visa regulations imposed on foreign visitors by Government of Pakistan in that area.

Dear Farzana:
Am glad you will be visiting Dharamshala soon. Try to take in Shimla/Manali too. Don`t miss the Tibetan cultural museum and a replica of a Tibetan monastry near Dharamshala (not McLeod Ganj!). And when you are doing the parikrama at the Bodhi temple in McLeod Ganj, you will see a number of large drums with thousands of mantras inscribed on them; you get the same `laabh` by a single rotation of the drum as you would do by reciting all the mantras on them. What a time-saving device! Who says buddhists are not hindus?
As for a piece on Mumbai,
Yahaan aur bhi hain mujh se zyaada Mumbai ki galiyaan ghoomane vale
Mujh se behtar kehne vale, mujh se achha likhane vale
(with apologies to Sahir!)
But here is a little incident from my Mumbai visit. My host and I had to go to the Victoria Terminus station (renamed Chhatrapatti Shivaji like everything else in your city!) to change my railway bookings. We had great difficulty finding a parking spot but finally found one near the Subway restaurant. We entered railway station through one gate and came out from another and all streets looked alike not only to me but also to my host from Navi Mumbai. We asked everyone where Subway was but no one knew. I finally had an idea that worked. We asked someone we should have asked in the first place, McDonald`s. They certainly did know.

Oh that is a good theory about why temples survived in hills! Muslims and Christians were smart, they would put their religious centres downtown and soon control trade. Us Hindus, on the other hand would make it difficult for ourselves and position them in far away natural features, the more difficult the better.

BTW, your rating just climbed to a ``3``.