Travel Experiences- 1 Thailand

I have travelled to Thailand a few times - first for Golf (my DP comes from that trip) and then for a family vacation and conferences, and found it an easy place to travel in. It is tourist-friendly right from the arrival visa, to bus and taxi transport, to cheap hotels compared with India, for the same quality. I found the food tasty too.

Cleanliness is also a virtue, and the malls in Bangkok are of high quality. So is the metro, of two types-under and overground. Pattaya and other destinations now have Indian restaurants too, in case you need them. The Golf courses are, of course, superbly maintained and customer-friendly. Some pics-

 Above- a temple in Bangkok.

 Gallivanting off Pattaya..

 The Alcazar show is completely performed by transgenders- an artist in the pic above. Below, a yummy dish we partook of.

Bhopal- A City Review

After Nagpur, this is the first clean city I have come across in our country. My expectations are minimal. Wide roads without choking traffic, without heaps of garbage all over. Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Bangalore, do not stand up to scrutiny on these counts. Bhopal does.

I was there on invitation to talk to budding young entrepreneurs. CII was the do-gooder, and a bunch of young guys there have taken up the cause of mentoring people with ideas. People of diverse ages and experience were a part of the audience. Many were existing entrepreneurs-the mentors. One among whom was a former student of mine from IMT Nagpur.

Anyway, the talk went off fine, judging by reactions during and after. It was on marketing strategy. Both on the way and back, we drove along the (Upper) lake, and it reminded me of Tank Bund in Hyderabad.

There are a lot of things one can see around Bhopal too, and I am sure I will visit again. Bhojpur temple nearby and a prehistoric man site called Bhimbetka seem the most interesting. MP Tourism, incidentally, is one of the most pro-active in popularising their destinations. I should know, having been to about a dozen of them, including Marble Rocks, Bhedaghat, and Pench Tiger reserve in the last few years. They had a restaurant at Dodi, halfway between Indore and Bhopal as a rest stop, with clean toilets. With posters and free brochures for other destinations to visit in MP state.

Imagination Fired by Rohtak

Staying in Rohtak does make you think. The reason is, there’s not much to do after dark-or before. I therefore went into this dangerous territory- thinking, I mean- again.

And here’s what came out.

Haryana and Punjab are neighbouring states, that share the capital, Chandigarh, India’s most planned city according to most. Haryana also looks pretty well-planned to me, except one thing. Things to do, I mean. Gurgaon showed the way to the rest of India in terms of using malls to waste (or use, depending on how you look at it) time, which Delhi-ites took to, and made Gurgaon theirs to waste time in. The time that could have been spent fruitfully discussing politics, sports, etc. was (literally) spent in the malls. And that was how Kejriwal sneaked in and became CM – not once, but twice, while no one was looking. And now they are stuck with him for five years.

Anyway, the stand-up comedian Surendra Sharma once joked that the only culture in Haryana was agriculture. Another joke I heard from a friend was that after 8 pm, the percentage of English speakers in Haryana goes up to 90 (before that, it is 10). I am pretty sure these are just jokes, but I found a rather oddly named University in Rohtak. I can’t resist sharing this, because it has the most unexpected name. It is called Baba Mastnath University (I am NOT kidding. You can look it up). I can imagine a student from there appearing for a job interview and answering a question as to where he studied. There is also a larger than life statue of the gentleman after whom it is named close to the campus.

On the positive side, I found the food good, the people simple, and the streets relatively clean-actually cleaner than parts of Delhi. And nobody went to watch Roy, playing at a nearby theatre. So I presume they have good taste in films.