Keepsake Photos

 Photographs are a great way to remember people, occasions, planned events, chance meetings, and places too. Many of us have a Taj Mahal pic from our visit to the beautiful monument. I have one from the Eiffel Tower, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa too.

My grandmother's pic at the steering wheel of a car (she didn't drive) is one of her best in my collection. Another is from when many of my aunts had visited us with their kids - my Mom had six sisters and a brother. 

Another category is with students, alumni or colleagues from various workplaces. Some I meet repeatedly and some I met maybe only once. But a photo reminds me of the fun time we had. There is one with Vivek Gupta - a colleague at IIM Lucknow, which was during a hailstorm we had on campus. I went home, got my camera and we took some memorable pics. One with Avinash Mulky too, during this short time.

Many of the vintage pics from IIM Bangalore-an architectural wonder that I was lucky to be in- are now priceless. A couple with the Clemson Tiger- he was a mascot of Clemson University, or one during a break in the Football game -very colourful, are similarly priceless. 

Pics with family - particularly when our daughters were small-are gems in our collection. Digitisation has made it easy to preserve these, but I have a huge collection from pre-digital days, including a flight in a Cessna over Clemson! 

Europe

Europe Pics, and a couple from the Bahamas- scuba and bathing beauties.

Weirdest Places I Have Been to

There's a website advertised that lets you advertise places that you have travelled to, I believe. Like the websites that tell you what colour your necklace should be, which celebrity you will be reborn as, or things of that sort, if you get the drift. So I thought I would join the movement by listing the weirdest -ok, unusual, if you don't like the word weird- places I have visited.

Gatlinburg in the U.S. is one of them, for sure. The only time we thought of it was when the Fall colours were in full bloom, that is, trees were orange and yellow instead of green. Gatlinburg was a mountain full of these multi-hued trees. One time, we drove 4 hours to get there from Clemson, and drove right back coz there were no rooms available in the whole town.

The four-Presidential-faces-carved-in-stone fame Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. Had it not been for the man who carved those, South Dakota might have had a visitor population of zero. I am not even sure there is a population of any kind there, visiting or non-visiting.

Pisa in Italy, with its famous tower. It's the only tower (or building) I know which does a Hamlet, as in, 'To Fall or Not to Fall' is its existential dilemma. Shakespeare would have loved it!

The Old Faithful geyser that shoots a spray of hot water every 45 minutes in the Yellowstone National Park, USA. The question is, who is it faithful to, and why?

Kolkata today would take the cake, not because of the place itself, but the special person ruling over the state, who is, shall we say, a bit unusual? Why, Mr. Tughlaq suddenly looks cool.