These images are from last month, from my visit to that region in Garhwal we are now referring to as the very epicentre of the Uttarkhand tragedy. Mostly light showers, with an intermittent heavy one, trailed us as we wound along the beauteous Alaknanda and its many confluences. To give you some context, the Alaknanda is a Himalayan river in the state of Uttarakhand, India that is one of the two headstreams of the Ganges which is the major river of Northern India and the holy river of Hinduism.
A landslide caused a traffic jam and our cab driver decided to take a detour through the breathtakingly lush and mist-kissed Chamoli countryside. Who would have thought that a couple of days from when these were clicked, the skies would fall apart, cause a glacial lake to break bounds, swell rivers to immeasurable dimensions, and bring in its wake devastation of an unimaginable scale.
For those who didn’t make it back.
Puneetinder Kaur Sidhu, travel enthusiast and the author of Adrift: A junket junkie in Europe is the youngest of four siblings born into an aristocratic family of Punjab. Dogged in her resistance to conform, and with parental pressure easing sufficiently over the years, she had plenty of freedom of choice. And she chose travel.
She was born in Shimla, and spent her formative years at their home, Windsor Terrace, in Kasumpti while schooling at Convent of Jesus & Mary, Chelsea. The irrepressible wanderlust in her found her changing vocations midstream and she joined Singapore International Airlines to give wing to her passion. She has travelled extensively in Asia, North America, Australia, Europe, South Africa and SE Asia; simultaneously exploring the charms within India.
When she is not travelling, she is writing about it. Over the past decade or so, she has created an impressive writing repertoire for herself: as a columnist with Hindustan Times, as a book reviewer for The Tribune and as a contributor to travel magazines in India and overseas. Her work-in-progress, the documenting of colonial heritage along the Old Hindustan-Tibet Road, is an outcome of her long-standing romance with the Himalayas.
