February mesmerized us with a whiff of love and yes, we were all smitten, weren’t we? From start through end of month, celebration filled the air. While prior to the Valentines’ day many of us put on the thinking cap to get creative with the gifts for the season, the days following the Love day kept us nostalgic, pragmatic, romantic and panic? Just kidding about the last one!It is love which keeps us going through the various ups and downs of life!
In this context I must mention how proud we @ Ghumakkar feel about our lovely community of authors and readers. Without your constant support and love, we couldn’t have sailed so smoothly during those days when our servers faced severe outage and we did have some attacks on our site, during the last few weekends. We thank you all for standing by us when we were troubled by these technical issues.
In this monthly digest, I would like to throw light on the current working model @ Ghumakkar. We are hosted at HostMonster – one of the popular and respected hosting service providers. We are on a shared server plan because of which, we do run into bandwidth issues. The solution to this is investment of time, effort and of course money and to have self-managed servers or self-managed hosting.
The recurrent challenges we encountered this month has definitely made us cautious and alert. We are now taking daily backups , every night. The loss of some data due to this has put us in an apologetic situation and we are sorry for it.
We will need your help during such troubled times. How? Firstly, keep us informed, write to any one of us or at info@ghumakkar.com. Next, request you to show patience and tolerance since these are unplanned events. Lastly, if some of you are in the tech world of WordPress, MySQL databases and beyond then, we would love to have any consultancy. What we have done is that we have done a complete review to block all leads. From front end, we had to add captcha which sort of comes in the way but probably helps to keep bots away. We have put a stricter regime of database maintenance. After all this, please be assured that we will take care that, if due to unavoidable circumstances your post misses schedule, we will reschedule it at the next available slot.
Alright, after this short but necessary briefing, let us welcome new members to our family!
Anoop Gusain is fond of traveling to the mountains, enjoys the freedom and luxury of time he gets when he takes his vehicle to most of the trips. Traveling seems to be persistent through his life : basically from Uttarakhand, pursued his studies in Delhi and now lives in Noida. A story on Ladakh marks his entry to Ghumakkar family and also got him a lot of fans! His post saw a great response and we hope the trend continues!
Next is Mishri, an IT professional who loves traveling and exploring new places. With a simple and elegant post about an enchanting trip to Mukteshwar, Mishri stepped into our author community. The post has some really wonderful pictures and adds glamor to the post.
T V S R K Prasad is our 3rd new author for the month. He is 61 years old, retired from State Bank of India as Chief Manager (Govt Operations) Local Head Office, New Delhi. Being passionate about driving, he uses his modified Alto 800 car to travel to places. He has traveled from Delhi to Hyderabad by car and has described his journey log in an amazing post on our website.
Please welcome our wonderful new authors with a huge round of applause! If you haven’t read their posts yet, read them now! It is always better to be late than never, you see !
It is these newbies who groom themselves to become popular authors over a period of time. While some gear up quickly to win several hearts in a very short span, some others are steady and inch towards a glorious position. At Ghumakkar, we leave no stone unturned and no category of authors unmentioned. This month we have the King of Humor – Sushant Singhal identified as our Featured Author of the month of February.
Sushant
Sushant is no new face for us and am sure there are many among us who wait to read his posts! His introduction to Ghumakkar happened through Google (again!) and now Google can show him up as a result under Ghumakkar banner! He is an excellent writer and a fantastic entertainer. Nandan got a chance to have a relaxed conversation with him. Here is a bit from the duo’s conversation:
“..Ghumakkar: And what motivated you to write your first story here?
Sushant: I had perhaps never written a travelogue earlier but did have a story of my earlier Mumbai trip lying somewhere in my laptop. I sent it to you. However, erroneously on my part, it was not “Submitted for Review” and was in “Drafts” folder only. When I didn’t hear anything for three-four months, I forgot everything about it and Ghumakkar but one day, I got an email from Vibha asking if the Mumbai story was ready for submission from my side. When I said yes, within a week, another mail from her confirmed my story having been accepted.
Mr & Mrs Singhal
Ghumakkar: Yes, I remember that time. It was just 7-8 odd months back. And then you wrote more and more.”
See more at: Ghumakkar Interview with Soulful Sushant Singhal
February was blessed with a great variety of posts. Several ones made it to the FoG Category. Take a quick look at them here:
Valparai- The series
Lammasingi-Andhras-Kashmir
Pleasant Walk
Dakshinachitra-a cross cultural living museum in Chennai, Tamil Nadu/
If you think there are other posts which fall into this category and we have missed them, please bring it to our notice. You can write to us at : info@ghumakkar.com.
Several other posts too grabbed their slots this month.Posts on the lucid and romantic walk of Praveen continues in the high meadows of Himalayas while Rakesh Bawa finished his long journey to Mewar; SS is back to Iceland with a loving and rich finish to his series on Himachal and our regular authors like Abhee, DL, Amitava continue to entertain us with their ever interesting stories. Among all these stories, it was difficult for us to pick one story as the Featured Story for the Month. Please put your hands together for Gita and her series on Valparai.
Congratulations Gita!
Gita is a resident of Mumbai and is a staunch nature lover. Her interest lies in off season travel to places of natural beauty and ancient heritage.
This chosen series on Valparai is a compilation from several visits to her favourite place – Valparai, a pretty little ‘tea town’ in the Anamalai range of the Western Ghats, some 100km south of Coimbatore. The place looks beautiful through her lens and the text is a perfect travelogue. Here is a snippet from the series:
“The Valparai Plateau comprises gently rolling mounds covered with tea plantation, interspersed with patches of dense shola forest against a backdrop of high mountains. Add to that some azure blue lakes to complete the canvas.
Valparai is a biodiversity region in the outer buffer zone of the Anamalai Tiger Reserve. Most plantation companies now actively cooperate to maintain the wildlife corridor and to increase the rainforest cover in their respective estates.
Valparai
Getting to Valparai:
For us, the most convenient way to get there is via Coimbatore which is well connected to Mumbai by train and air. Our faithful Coimbatore taxi driver Mr Jagdeesan picks us up and ferries us across to Valparai….”
Do you wish to travel to such picturesque places often? Are you already planning? Then count me in ! Who wouldn’t want to frequent such places!
Thinking about travel often confuses me with a zillion options to choose from. Be it flight deals or deals for accommodation or the choice of the place! It looks like cheap tickets are now back in vogue. Back in January, Spicejet had an offer and recently Jet Airways too had an offer. In my opinion, Ghumakkars wait for no opportunity to pack their bags, do they?
He has been with Ghumakkar since 2010 and has been writing and reading consistently @ Ghumakkar. His posts have till now concentrated mostly on lush green and popular South Indian destinations. Coorg, Nagercoil, Ooty, Temple trails of Karnataka and the like are some of his really popular posts. To tell you more, his Temple trails series has also been chosen as the Featured Story in the past.
Congratulations Venkat. Get set for a super-exciting interview with Nandan, very shortly! The interview will go live in the mid of March. Please watch out for it!
On this last day of each month, as I compose this monthly digest, I feel extremely happy to bring the new and the chosen authors – everyone on to a common platform and to introduce them all to you, dear readers. The month has been good, in spite of all odds. Let us look forward to a happening month of March. I shall be back with more exciting stuff next month. Until then…
Cheers,
Archana