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I came to know about the Baha’i faith just by chance.

In the early seventies, immediately after my initial training at Grindlays Bank (Now Standard Chartered), I was asked to man the foreign exchange desk. Those days the foreign exchange business could only be transacted at banks and hence the desk was mostly busy. On that day, a young boy, probably in a hurry, was trying to jump the queue. He told me that he had to attend his class and had no money for bus travel. I told him to get the consent of the girl standing next to her, which she very graciously gave.

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Yercaud needs no introduction, but for the benefit of all, here’s a small intro. Yercaud is a quaint little hill station in the district of Salem in Tamil Nadu.This is often referred to as the “Poor man’s OOTY”. I cannot quite see the logic for this. Yercaud is not as crowded as Ooty, and at the same time, it offers all that is expected out of a hill station.

Facts
Yercaud is aprrox 235 kms from the city of Bangalore. The distance can be covered in 4.5 to 5 hrs. The route is Bangalore-Hosur-Krishnagiri-Dharmapuri-Salem-Yercaud. The last stretch (Salem to Yercaud) is 30 kms out of which 25 kms are climbing the hill. This 25kms has 20 Hairpin bends , most of which(19) are near the top.
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Hello People!!!

Last year, I had the oppurtunity to take one of my groups to a campsite in Himachal which is closeby… 377 Kms from Delhi, 17 kms from Shimla, and yet is untouched by the daily clamor of a hustling bustling town next door. The place is called Daujidhaar.

The route:

NH-1 till Zirakpur, NH-22 till Shimla, take the Shimla Naldehra Road, 4 kms from the Dhalli tunnel, and 2 Kms before the Mashobra village, the road forks out and the one on the right, going uphill will take you to the Baikalty link road through the Mashobra village. Take a right from a small chowk in the village. From there, the motorable road leads you to the campsite 3 kms ahead.
The highest peak of the area… Shaali Tibba
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I had the chance to accompany my husband to Indonesia during his official visit in January 2008 and got a rare chance to see an active volcano. We boarded the flight from Delhi and changed at Singapore and reached Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia in the
island of Java. Then we took a domestic flight to Yogyakarta on the same island. Java is one of around 17,000 islands in the country.

Indonesia is a lot like south India. In Yogyakarta, or Jogja as it is called, we stayed in a hotel of traditional architecture. With sloping tiled roof, the buildings look similar to traditional houses of Kerala. The next day we went to see Mount
Merapi, one of the largest active volcanoes in the world.

Smoking Mount Merapi
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