Dusty Roads Beckon

God's own country, as Kerala is most commonly known, was always there on my bucket list of travel. The dilemma which stopped me from making it happen was lack of holidays each year. To cover the whole of just south Kerala leisurely, I would need nothing less than 15 days and I hate to rush up while exploring. Finally after much deliberation, I decided to break up my Kerala visit in pieces and take one portion at a time. So, this time the Republic Day weekend was brought to good use. My destination was Alleppey, Kumarakom and Cochin. I started with a houseboat ride from the jetty in Alleppey. My Air India flight acted super funny and I ended up landing at Cochin airport 3 hrs late from the schedule time. The idea was to go straight to the Alleppey city from the airport and look around the beaches and the Museum there before boarding the houseboat from the jetty. But as I was super late, I had no choice but to rush straight to the jetty from the airport. The prepaid taxi counter at

All of us live with those small little voices in our head, which constantly keep whispering to tell us how we should stay away from certain things and how we are not good enough to do a few things. Sub consciously our mind keeps brewing an unpleasant emotion, which is caused by the threat of some kind of danger, pain or harm. This emotion is popularly called 'fear' and all of us live with it in some form or the other. No matter how strong we look from outside, somewhere or the other, this emotion makes us weaker from inside and we chicken out when confronted by the biggest fear of our lives. This weekend was about conquering one such fear of mine. I was always scared of water and hence never learnt to swim until about few years back.....and let me tell you, I am a very bad swimmer. I can barely manage to swim only in the comfort and security of the pool of my apartment or some plush resort, where the water level isn't too deep and I can put my feet down and stand up at