Editorial

From the Editor – Some Essential Skills for Travelers

From the Editor – Some Essential Skills for Travelers

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Travelers perhaps have more opportunities to run into adventures than anyone else, and are also more likely to find themselves in risky situations. But if they weren’t willing to take risks, they wouldn’t be travelers, right? We pride ourselves in taking charge of life and heading out into the unknown, ready to take any trouble that fall into our path by its horns. And the particular community of travelers who are likely to tread glaciers, or explore jungles on foot is constantly growing larger. And through all this, they take a lot for granted, in particular their own safety.

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From the Editor – The Second Chance

From the Editor – The Second Chance

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These are some of the proverbs we have practically grown up hearing and, unfortunately, all of us have been “bitten” at least once and, in most cases, multiple times in our lives. All of us experience minor failures every day without realizing their impact on our psychology. At times, these so-called minor failures have such a huge impact on our confidence that we can hardly gather courage for a second try. Every New Year Resolution that we are not able to fulfill leaves us with slightly less confidence in our ability to achieve goals. Each promise that we make to others but are not able to keep, not only impacts the trust others place in us, but also makes us lose faith in ourselves.

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From the Editor – The Incredible Journey of a Phone

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Last year in September, I was really happy. One of my most precious dreams was coming true. I was in a tour bus that was travelling through the misty, green highlands of Scotland. We were looking out at the mesmerising terrain of the Isle of Skye, the island where even today, no one locks their doors or cars at night. It was the third day of my 5-day trip. We had just visited a cemetary at the top of a hill and a general sense of calm had descended upon the occupants of the bus. Several dozed off as the sun made a brief appearance. It was the perfect time to call my parents. So I reached inside my pocket, the phone wasn’t there. I knew at that instant that it was lost. But I still kept searching inside my handbag, my rucksack, hoping to prove my intuition wrong. The search, however, yielded no results. In the bus full of strangers, I suddenly felt lonely as hell…

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From the Editor – The Unexpected Second Editorial

From the Editor – The Unexpected Second Editorial

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If you haven’t read the first Editorial published this morning, then I insist that you do so because this editorial won’t make any sense to you if you don’t. Here is the link.

And now for a revelation – following are the only lines from this morning’s Editorial that you should believe:

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From the Editor – What Kept us Busy!

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Anyways, you all know that the team at Ghumakkar is pretty busy preparing the stories and managing your content on Ghumakkar. But we do make some mistakes. After all, we are all human. However, we had beeen brainstorming for a really long time to see how we can minimise the mistakes and we were pretty convinced that if one of the top publishing house in India was running this site, our work would be cut down to the minimum and then we can concentrate on other things. We identified the publishing house that we would like to associate with and then approached them. It was a tough job, but our brilliant marketing team finally convinced the publishing house that it was a win-win situation. So the deal is that they manage the post-preparation and publishing part of the job and in exchange, they use some of the real estate on Ghumakkar to post their own content.

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From the Editor – Arre, Bura na Maano Yaar

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There is a lot of curiosity for the colors and they quite envy us for being able to play with colors and water and for a while go back to our childhoods. To cater to these curious foreign tourists, festivals such as Holy Cow Festival where foreign tousists can enjoy getting smeared with non-toxic Gulaal and bhang-flavoured lassis.

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From the Editor – The Age of the Gadgets

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All of these are very practical solutions to most of the issues faced by travellers. But what about the romance of travelling? Do we lose out on the adventure part of Ghumakkari if we carry such gadgets around? I guess yes to an extent. While a kindle may be practical, it can never replace the comfort of curling up with a book. And while plugging in earphones and listening to music privately will take care of boredome, can it ever replace the enriching discussions you can have with your fellow passengers?

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Ghumakkars of the year – 2011

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Thank you Ram, Nisha, Manish and Jaishree for readily agreeing and for your detailed write-up on your selections. Thank you.

Yet, as expected, we did not get the same names so we did a little bit of union and intersection and arrived at top 6 Ghumakkars. Each of these 6 had at least one vote on each parameter and most of them had more than one vote while one person had all three. I will hold the excitement here.

So we did some slice-n-dice of data, looked at relative rankings from the jury and in the end fell back on our own judgment to arrive at the final 3. So far so good. After we arrived on final 3, we incubated the decision for some more time. This was to ensure that we are indeed fully convinced or not and once that went past, it was time to raise the curtain.

So with much ado, I take pride in announcing the winners of ‘Ghumakkar of the Year 2011’ award and the names are (in no particular order)

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From the Editor – Year ‘2012’, The Harbinger of Change

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But it is not easy to accept change and it is really hard to accept a change within oneself. At times, we consider ourselves too perfect to require any change. And that is when we stop growing. Our physical growth may stop when we reach a certain age but there are other aspects of our personalities that we can always continue to evolve. Spiritual, mental, and emotional growths are not restricted by age and there is no upper limit to where we can reach in these aspects.

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From the Editor – Citizens of a Positive Community

From the Editor – Citizens of a Positive Community

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The question is what do we do when we read someone’s well-written post that makes the amount of hard work that would’ve gone towards creating the story apparent. Do we post a comment or do we simply appreciate the story in our mind and move on to the next? And if we do post a comment, is it just a general comment or do we take pains to show the author that we read through each line and appreciate the details?

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