Lunch with Lang – A Celebrity Encounter!

I had lunch with a celebrity. This happened completely by accident. I’ve met very few celebrities. I did shake hands with Vijay Amritraj and sat next to Kevin Wright once. ( ** see footnotes below ) Now, Michael Lang may not be your idea of a celebrity and lunch with him isn’t strictly accurate either. 🙂 Still, I’m chalking one up on my slate here. Considering the paucity of celebrity encounters I’ve had, I have to take what I can get, sort of like what Janis Joplin sort of meant when she (more…)

October 21, 2015
Travel / Music
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Punjabi in Paris – The Monastery at Mont St Michel

Day 9 of The Great Trip dawned bright, sunny and warm and off we went in our Renault 308 to Mont St Michel on the first leg of our Normandy trip. From the Paris suburb of Neuilly-Plaisance to Mont St Michel is a good 4 hour drive.

We took the slightly northern route that skirted past Rouen and Caen on towards Avranches. As we came off the country roads running through the flat lands of Normandy we (more…)

August 4, 2015
Travel
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Blue Spring

Yes, that’s the colour ( color, if American ) of spring and to prove it I’m going to show you a set of pictures with lovely hues of blue. First though, lets start with this one.

As you can see, not only are the arms of the bush a brilliant red, the jacket of the old lady sitting sunning herself is also red. But the recycle bin is blue, the garbage bin is grey and if you examine the (more…)

April 13, 2015
Travel / Recipes & Food
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Punjabi in Paris – Normandy Notes 3

This is the concluding part of the Normandy sub-series within the Punjabi in Paris series. You can, of course, read Part 1 and Part 2. Part 2 has more pictures and even, hold your breath for this one, shaky videos!!
We left Ste Mere Eglise after a late lunch / tea of fries, beer and Coke and drove out towards Omaha beach. Drove down the highway and came to the exit ramp that would take us to St Laurent sur Mer. However, even at this late stage of the day (more…)

March 26, 2015
Travel / Memoirs
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Punjabi in Paris – Normandy Notes 2

The Story so far This is where we left off at the end of the first part of the Normandy Notes 1: We'd missed the morning's parachute drop re-enactment after…

March 2, 2015
Travel / Memoirs
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Peas and Paneer

So I’m back from Kolkata or Calcutta, as it used to be and will ever be for some, like me. It was a crowded trip, with remembrance services, weddings, school and college reunions interspersed with sporadic maintenance shopping. ( I’ll have to explain that some other day, that “maintenance” thing.) It was three years since my last visit, so naturally on my way there I’d wondered what changes I would see, other than the omnipresent blue and white paint I’d been warned about, which is, as you can see from the picture, true.

The short answer is: (more…)

February 3, 2015
Travel / Recipes & Food / Memoirs
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16.12.95

The phone rang in the very early morning hours of Dec 17th, a Sunday. In the USA it was still Saturday, Dec 16th.
I rose from the warm bed and padded out into the cold hall to the phone. I heard the pips that foretold a transatlantic call, waited for my oldest brother’s voice telling me he was coming for a visit, but there was no voice, just a silence, a silence that seemed too long, before he came on.
“Oh, you’re there? Wait a minute”, he said.
A strange vibration went through me. Why would he call and say “wait a minute”?. There was another brief silence before my sister in law came on.
“You there? Wait. Talk to your brother”, she said.
My brain spun wildly through a list of unimaginable possibilities. Then he came on again. (more…)

December 16, 2014
Travel / Memoirs
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Punjabi in Paris – Normandy Notes 1

Introductory Passage Yes, I do realize that Normandy is not in Paris and so, technically and pedantically speaking, the Punjabi can't be in Paris if he is in Normandy. You…

November 11, 2014
Travel / Memoirs
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Kathmandu – The Boxed Set



http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/458304859

Due to the overwhelming response from the 4 readers who took time off to read this Tale of a Traumatic Travel Trip, The SloWord has been goaded into producing a Boxed Set. Which really means that (more…)

October 12, 2014
Travel / Memoirs
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No ID? No Problem! From Kathmandu to Kolkata, finally

< There are some who have waited patiently for me to finish so they can start reading. For them, I say, tsk tsk, but here it is, the final installment of the series that started with Part 1 and then went from Part 2 to Part 3. It continued with Part 4 and ground on with Part 5. We then careened into Part 6 which saw some racing heartbeats, cooled by Part 7. >
http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/95581815 The last day of my life dawned dull and grey. Someone had reached up and turned down the sun, or at least hung their shirt over it. The light was distinctly grey and thick cloud cover covered the sky. I sat in the coach heading for the airport, wild thoughts rushing through my head. There was a part of my brain developing a story, a part that had little men running around screaming at the top of their voice and another was repeating a mantra I had learned during my experimentation with (more…)

September 10, 2014
Travel / Memoirs
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