Bombay ... meri Jaan, my life!

The Gateway of India

The city that never sleeps, where the lights never go out, the east meets the west, poverty confluences with affluence, energy lashes alongside power and all the ordinary walks of life suddenly seem so extraordinary! Step into the most populous place in the world, the hub of anything and everything India, the heart of millions - Bombay (मुंबई, Mumbaī ) - the Maximum City.

So what concoctions really make up this city called Bombay?

The Lonely Planet has attempted to compose Bombay's constitutions in the following words. In my opinion, these lines have captured almost an excellent view of the city's social, economic and cultural landscape:

"Measure out: one part Hollywood; six parts traffic; a bunch of rich power-moguls; stir in half a dozen colonial relics (use big ones); pour in six heaped cups of poverty; add a smattering of swish bars and restaurants (don’t skimp on quality here for best results); equal parts of mayhem and order; as many ancient bazaars as you have lying around; a handful of Hinduism; a dash of Islam; fold in your mixture with equal parts India; throw it all in a blender on high (adding generous helpings of pollution to taste) and presto: Mumbai.

"An inebriating mix of all the above and more, this mass of humanity is a frantic melange of Inida’s extremes. It is the country’s financial powerhouse and its vogue centre of fashion, film and after-dark frolics. Glistening skyscrapers and malls mushroom amid slums and grinding poverty, and Mumbai slowly marches towards a brave new (air-conditioned) world. But not everyone made the guest list: more than half of the population lives in slums, and religious-based social unrest tugs at the skirt of Mumbai’s financial excess.

Only once the initial shell shock of Mumbai’s chaos subsides, can one start to appreciate the city’s allure: a wealth of Art Deco and grand colonial relics; cacophonic temples; warrens of bazaars; and the odd spiritual bastion of tranquility. In Mumbai you can dine at some of the finest restaurants in the country, and work off the appetite gyrating at ultra chic bars alongside Bollywood starlets and wannabes. With a pinch of gumption, a dash of adventure, an open wallet and a running start, there’s no excuse not to dive into the Mumbai madness head-first. "

Words probably can never do enough justice to a city that is as lively and abundant as Bombay. But having lived away from this city (that at least 18 million people still call home) for several years now, words and memories are all I have to solace the heart.

But hey, a picture they say is worth a thousand words! Here's a few of those shots that make up the life, the people and the moods in the city of Bombay.

Cricket match - Azad Maidan, Fort, Mumbai

People relaxing in the evening along the waterfront - Marine Drive, Mumbai

Procession on the streets during the Ganesh Chaturthi Festival celebrations

Drummers leading the procession during the Ganesh Chaturthi Festival celebrations

Crowds swarming on the beach for a relief of the cool breeze from the Arabian sea - Juhu beach, Mumbai

Full of activity - the Sassoon docks, Mumbai

Human Pyramid being formed to the slogans of "Govinda ala re ala" - festival of Govinda, Mumbai

Source of photos : Lonely Planet Photographers

A scene from the 1988 Hindi film Salaam Bombay! directed by Mira Nair. Most of the young actors who appeared in the film were actual street children from Bombay.

A scene from the 2008 British film Slumdog millionaire directed by Danny Boyle. Some of the child actors that appear in the film are children currently living in real slums in Bombay

The World's largest Dump: Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Well, I am as baffled as can be to even start wondering what kind of stuff this garbage patch could contain. But it is definitely for real, it does exist and isn't just a few hundred square miles or something in area... it's almost twice as huge as Texas!
Read on through this excerpt from HowStuffWorks:

"In t­he broad expanse of the northern Pacific Ocean, there exists the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a slowly moving, clockwise spiral of currents created by a high-pressure system of air currents. The area is an oceanic desert, filled with tiny phytoplankton but few big fish or mammals. Due to its lack of large fish and gentle breezes, fishermen and­ s­ailors rarely travel through the gyre.

But the area is filled with something besides plankton: trash, millions of pounds of it, most of it plastic! It's the largest landfill in the world, and it floats in the middle of the ocean!

The gyre has actually given birth to two large masses of ever-accumulating trash, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches, sometimes collectively called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The Eastern Garbage Patch floats between Hawaii and California; scientists estimate its size as two times bigger than Texas. The Western Garbage Patch forms east of Japan and west of Hawaii. Each swirling mass of refuse is massive and collects trash from all over the world. The patches are connected by a thin 6,000-mile long current called the Subtropical Convergence Zone. Research flights showed that significant amounts of trash also accumulate in the Convergence Zone.

The garbage patches present numerous hazards to marine life, fishing and tourism. But before we discuss those, it's important to look at the role of plastic. Plastic constitutes 90 percent of all trash floating in the world's oceans.
Sea turtles, like this one, that live in the warmer waters of this region of the Pacific, are endangered by such garbage pollution and the subsequent habitat loss that occurs.

The United Nations Environment Program estimated in 2006 that every square mile of ocean hosts 46,000 pieces of floating plastic. In some areas, the amount of plastic outweighs the amount of plankton by a ratio of six to one. Of the more than 200 billion pounds of plastic the world produces each year, about 10 percent ends up in the ocean. Seventy percent of that eventually sinks, damaging life on the ocean floor. The rest floats; much of it ends up in gyres and the massive garbage patches that form there, with some plastic eventually washing up on a distant shore"

Mind-numbingly astonishing right! Well, the garbage that we set free had to find a way to survive if not degradable. It's right here thriving in the oceans.

... just a bit on how you could Help Support the cause!

Through the eyes of NASA

A Perfect Storm of Turbulent Gases

Resembling the fury of a raging sea, this image actually shows a bubbly ocean of glowing hydrogen gas and small amounts of other elements such as oxygen and sulfur.

The photograph, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, captures a small region within M17, a hotbed of star formation. M17, also known as the Omega or Swan Nebula, is located about 5,500 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius. The image was released to commemorate the thirteenth anniversary of Hubble's launch.

The wave-like patterns of gas have been sculpted and illuminated by a torrent of ultraviolet radiation from young, massive stars, which lie outside the picture to the upper left. The glow of these patterns accentuates the three-dimensional structure of the gases. The ultraviolet radiation is carving and heating the surfaces of cold hydrogen gas clouds. The warmed surfaces glow orange and red. The intense heat and pressure cause some material to stream away from those surfaces, creating the glowing veil of even hotter greenish gas that masks background structures. The pressure on the tips of the waves may trigger new star formation within them.

The Unveiling

On its 100,000th orbit of planet Earth, the Hubble Space Telescope peered into a small portion of the Tarantula Nebula near the star cluster NGC 2074, unveiling its stellar nursery. The region is a firestorm of raw stellar creation, triggered perhaps by a nearby supernova.

The image reveals dramatic ridges and valleys of dust, serpent-headed "pillars of creation," and gaseous filaments glowing fiercely under torrential ultraviolet radiation. The region is on the edge of a dark molecular cloud that is an incubator for the birth of new stars.

The high-energy radiation blazing out from clusters of hot young stars is slowly eroding nebula, and another young cluster may be hidden beneath the circle of brilliant blue gas.

The region is in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite of our Milky Way galaxy that is a fascinating laboratory for observing star-formation regions and their evolution. Dwarf galaxies like the Large Magellanic Cloud are considered to be the primitive building blocks of larger galaxies.

Content & Image Credit: NASA

Musée du Louvre

The Louvre Museum

The Louvre is the most visited museum in the world, with a total area of almost 100 acres, including 650,000 square feet of exhibition rooms!
Housed in the Louvre Palace, this behemoth center holds some of the world's most exquisite art masterpieces




See here for some tips for visiting the Louvre Museum

For the adventure seeker within you

For all sorts of adventurous acts that shake up the the insides of your mind & body and propel you closer to the extremes of nature, speed, force, height and most of all...danger!


Get a sneak preview of some of the coolest extreme adventure sports on this website..things you may have dreamed of experiencing...zipping through tree tops, waterfall rappelling, white-water rafting, surfing, scuba-diving, sky-diving, hand-gliding....and even extreme aerial combat!

Read further for such fun and adventures zones in NY...

Let the adrenaline rush, unleash the daredevil within you .... explore beyond the boundaries

3 words of advise:
Action, Action, Action!

In the heart of New York City...

...is a beautiful, expansive park that could very well be called the oasis of New York City!


What it means to the residents and visitors of New York City is an undisturbed stretch of land and water that hosts natural woods, a reservoir recreational activity zones, a wildlife sanctuary, walking tracks, lakes & ponds, a skating rink, a swimming pool, an outdoor theater and abundant naturalistic landscapes - all of this right in the midst of one of the world's greatest cities!

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir - view of Midtown Manhattan at sunset
















During the snowstorm of December 2009