BRO

I took this photo somewhere along the road to Tso Moriri. The Border Roads Organisation(BRO) have some really amusing signs all the way to Leh which had us all cracking up whenever we zipped past one of them. This is that one sign that I really loved, seems like the BRO are not only funny but also philosophical! To come across this sign in the middle of nowhere was quite a surprise. 

PRAYER FLAGS

My never ending fascination with prayer flags and all things Buddhist. A photo I took at a monastery in Leh. 

PTF

I am constantly reading travel stories and articles on the web when I have the time and I just chanced upon this article by Eric Weiner, who incidentally is the author of The Geography of Bliss. I have a copy of his book and I love reading parts of the book whenever I am sitting around at home. His article describes what I call Post-holiday blues but he calls it by a much more creative name- Post-Trip Funk(PTF). It is funny I found this article when I did. And of course, he describes it much, much better than I did so I am posting the link to his article below.

http://www.worldhum.com/features/eric-weiner/post-trip-funk-ptf-20100329/

READING

Reading is one of those things I was very passionate about growing up. I could read and read and read and sometimes it used to even annoy people around me since I pretty much did only that. I would go home for the holidays and spend the entire day curled up on the couch reading and my parents would force me to go out for a walk at some point during the day and I would be ever so reluctant to put my book down.
In boarding school too, I had a bunch of friends who also loved to read as much as I and since we were allowed to only pick up two books from the library every week, we would all pass our books around and by the end of the week, we would have read about eight books each. I remember how we would all decide on a single author and then pick up books by that particular author so that we could exchange them with each other. Reading was never more fun than when I was in school and after each book we read, we would all sit around and discuss the book, narrate our favourite parts and exclaim on how wonderful the author was or how perfect the man in the book was!
After school came college and that was when I stopped reading. Not completely of course, but it reduced significantly since I got caught up in living the life of a college student and occupied most of my spare time watching movies and tv serials. The only time I did read was in college, in class to be more specific. My college friends still recall how I used to read in almost every other class and I do admit I hardly ever paid attention except in English and German class.
A while ago, I started reading again, and it was only then I realized how much I had missed it. Granted I am a complete movie buff but there is something almost sacred about reading. I love how a book manages to enthrall you so completely that you forget everything else around you. I love how I can totally immerse myself in a book and its characters. I love the way the words can paint an absolutely vivid picture in your head of the scenes unfolding across the pages of a good book. I love how sometimes, a good book can be the best company.

JOGGING

This particular word has haunted me for the past four and a half years. I think about it often enough, and try to will myself to start but for some reason, I just have not been able to. The funny part is five years ago, when I was still in school I was a long distance runner and we used to run a couple of kilometers every single day and I loved it. Now for some reason I am so very lazy. Funnily enough I think about exercise at least once a day, it plagues my thoughts and I dream about starting some form of exercise or the other and I dream on about how I would go jogging every single day and I would be so,so very fit. In my head, I even plan my jogging outfit and think about putting on my nice jogging shoes and about how they would be so happy to be used after lying around for three years collecting dust. 
Once in a while, my guilty conscience bites me in the back and I take off the next day, jogging a very short distance until I stop, huffing and puffing and promising myself that the next couple of days will be better since my muscles wont be protesting as hard! And this continues for about a week, as I go around proclaiming very proudly to all my friends and family that I have finally started jogging. And then it fizzles out just as everyone around me thinks I am actually getting serious about my exercising. This has been going on for so many years now, that it has become a long-standing joke among my family and friends as soon as I get my jogging shoes out.
Hopefully, someday, I will start jogging and take it up seriously enough to do it everyday. Until then I just to bear with all the jokes that come my way the very second I mention the word 'jogging'.