Mussoorie Diary

On good days, the drive from Mussoorie to Delhi takes seven to eight hours, and when I arrive at my destination, I am bent double, looking like a question mark. It takes two or three hours and a couple of whiskies with my hospitable publisher for me to unwind and look my usual self, i.e. an exclamation mark!

In spite of the discomforts of a long road journey, I prefer it to other forms of travel. You don’t see much from trains any more—the windows appear to be made from some sort of opaque, frosted glass (or are they just dirty?), so different from my boyhood journeys when you pulled up the shutters and countered the telegraph poles rushing past. The romance has gone out of rail travel. And as for flying, there appears to be a general reluctance on the part of planes to take off. Last month, I was given air tickets to visit KIIT (Kalinga Institute of Technology) in Bhubaneswar, and dashed down to the not-so-jolly Jolly Grant near Haridwar, only to find that the flight to Delhi had been cancelled due to fog on the runway.

Grabbed an ever-ready taxi and got to Delhi in time for the scheduled flight to Bhubaneswar at 7 pm, only to find it being postponed again and again until it was finally cancelled around midnight. Fog on the runway, of course. Scores of flights were being cancelled and the departure lounge (‘lounge’ is a misnomer) resembled a chaotic Howrah railway station. Two days later, on my return, I had to again take a taxi to Dehradun. Jolly Grant was still fog-bound.

Full report here Outlook