URB Scribbles

Image from Wikipedia Talking of McLeod Ganj, what greater testimony of a colonial hangover could there be if not the name itself! URBScribbles tells a story here of McLeod Ganj’s glorious colonial past and a fading memory of the same. The administrative habit of the colonisers to name places for the colonised subjects after their own names was, so to say, their way of letting the world know that something has been discovered and brought down to terms. That vast stretches of nondescript land in greater parts of the world are waiting to be discovered, labeled, categorised and formalised by the “white men”. And this in itself was one way of justifying the “white man's burden”. Named after a British Lieutenant Governor of Punjab, Donald Friell McLeod, McLeod Ganj sustains the colonial heritage in its very name. In the post-independence drive of restructuring and finding a new identity for itself, the newly born nation-state made quick attempts to rename many old p...

If there was nothing special about McLeod Ganj or say Dharmashala, the place would not have featured in the writings of so many writers. It would have not featured in the to-do list of numerous travelers. It would have not been a destination for so many bloggers including your very own URBScribbles of course.  Be it John Avedon’s magnum opus In Exile from the Land of Snows, Isabel Hilton’s In Search of the Panchen Lama, Thomas Merton’s Asian Journey, Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath her Feet, Pankaj Mishra’s The Romantics, or Rohinton Mistry’s Running Water and A Fine Balance, Dharamshala finds mention in a way or other.  URBScribbles too has been traveling to the place for years now to decipher the unexplainable pull that the place has on him. By November 2018, URBScribbles has made some six visits to upper Dharamshala i.e., McLeod Ganj, still ignorant about the condiments of its enigmatic flavour and still unaware to the fullest of its enthral...

The New Delhi – Kanpur Shatabdi Express was late by some thirty minutes that day. In the pre-winter of the previous year, I was in Kanpur for the very first time. This March I am here for the second time. The question that almost every other person had asked me, was for once by then, tickling my own consciousness too. Why Kanpur? Of all the places in and around Delhi, why does one choose Kanpur? On this long weekend while travel enthusiasts and backpackers were all set to leave for the mountains of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, why on this Earth was I traveling to Kanpur instead? Besides the fact that all these years I have been attempting at establishing alternative ways of traveling and seeing, I too had no precise answer to the question. Nonetheless, I was sure this short trip to Kanpur shall in many ways be an attempt at answering this question. I was sure I would succeed in redefining travel and establishing the agency of the crowd and the cities, bey...

Having said whatever I said in Crisis of Existence , the bitter truth of life however remains that economic stability and sustenance is to a great extent – if not to entire extent – the ultimate benchmark of success for the times we live in. Till the moment you do not ensure stable cash inflow from the activity that you prefer doing, it mostly is a passion and not a profession. To understand the fact better, try showing your wallet to your parents, narrating to them how happy you actually are after having made that small amount of money out of blogging.  Sad, but the ultimate truth here is that till the time you are not good enough to make considerable money out of your aspirations they are absolutely of no good for the people who you need to prove yourself to. And hence you are obvious to face immense friction from them when you perform irregularly in your present position which no matter how much insignificant you consider to be. Say for instance, if you fail to sc...

Have you been in this perpetual crisis of existence, absolutely clueless about who you are and what you want to be while realizing that the world around is a myth, a homogenous force conspiring each moment to slow you down? Do you aspire to be a fashion blogger in the morning but want to be a calligrapher by the evening while actually doing something presently that you consider is absolutely less or unchallenging? Have you been wanting to rebel so as to take a reverse or an alternate walk through the trajectory of progress set by the world but are absolutely weak and fragile to do it?   Are you in return being shown ruthlessly down by the people around you that sometimes out of concern and sometimes otherwise put you in a sense of self-doubt? I am sure many of you are. Who knows more than you of the friction generated in the process of uprooting yourself from the last year of your high school where you presently are and planting yourself somewhere in the world that y...