On a recent day when going to work to our office in South Delhi’s Shahpur Jat neighbourhood, I noticed, amidst sweets and street food vendors and recent fashion shops that have been mushrooming in the area, this cute little shop called “Dubdengreen”. Inside, unsurprisingly for this densely populated neighbourhood, the space is small enough, the decorations are minimal and the absence of shining and blinking advertisement on the shelves catches the eye. This looks more like a farm house shop, so you wouldn’t be surprised to find mooing cows and chattering chicken in the backyard. A quick look around is enough to confirm the impression: grains and millets are there, fresh vegetables next to fresh fruit and dairy products. This is indeed another shop for farm goods – so how is it different? Well, this one is all about organic.

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Coming to India for vacations, internship or job? Regardless the amount of time you are planning to spend here, it is very advisable to learn at least a couple of basic phrases in Indian languages. They will make your stay nicer, your experience richer and they will even save you some money! The "language situation" in India is quite different from other countries. You have many official languages and countless of other languages. In fact, India has the most complex linguistic set up anywhere with literally thousands of languages being spoken. Nevertheless, there is one language that functions as a lingua franca across much of the country. Indians generally refer to it as Hindi!

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If you are on a special such-and-such-free diet like me, you know the kind of questions going through your mind before leaving for your next foreign destination. What will I be able to eat? How will I find the dishes that I can eat? How will I explain to people in a polite way that I can’t eat their national dish due to some never-heard-of-before condition? Of course, one answer is to stock up on all kinds of dried foods, muesli bars, packed cookies and nutritional drinks that will, under extreme circumstances, help you survive for a minimum of two weeks. But this is not what my vision of traveling and cultural discovery looks like. I’m not an astronaut. Nor I am travelling to lands that are as plain and arid as the moon. Taking precautions is good. But retreat is not the answer. So every new land is like a barely mapped territory to me, and I’m like the explorer.

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When I started yoga, I saw it as something physical, an elaborate set of postures, bends, and stretches. Most of them I found difficult if not impossible to attain. Yoga clearly seemed to be a lot about fitness, something that was also in vogue. The pictures of extremely fit, flexible women and men, effortlessly smiling while performing some complicated posture, had an intimidating effect on me. I had always been playing sports and generally liked to move around a lot, but that didn't include doing more delicate things with my own body. Yoga, I assumed, was not for people like me.

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To many European and North American visitors to India, Indian spirituality is one of the most fascinating aspects of Indian culture and reason for many to come. Visiting the ancient spiritual temples that abound all over India with their magnificent display of Hindu mythology, pilgrims who make colourful flower and fruit offerings to their preferred deity, entire families standing in line for hours just to take a quick bath under the sprinkling waters of some ancient holy source, with the ever present odour of sweet incense filling the spiritually-laden air – all these are impressions that many visitors of India seek and that have vividly enriched the memories of many travellers to India before.

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