There wasn�t much that I knew about Belgaum when we started researching it as an UpperCrust Destination, except that it was the headquarters of the Maratha Light Infantry Regiment and that Anjani and Nicky Desai have a farm there since 40 years, spread over miles and miles with hills, ponds, forests and fruit trees as part of their most cherished accomplishment, L&T not withstanding! Charming.

But there was a lot to learn about Belgaum, not just the territorial dispute over it between two states, Karnataka and Maharashtra. Though it was amusing to see how you could be passing bits of places that was now one and then the other. Mad!

Belgaum is like living in Malgudi Days. With it�s Swamy Bakery, buffaloes cooling off in streams, huge old trees, rustic old houses, ghee being prepared in thatched cottages. Laid back, happy. So nice.

There was the Lingayat people with a Lingayat cuisine, and sweets like Kunda and Mande, and a roadside snack called Alipak (not the ginger toffee), to be downed with a glass of sugarcane juice. Unique.

I am not about to forget my trip to Belgaum easily. And it�s not just because my colleagues and I almost died in a highway accident or that God saved us from being lynched by the mob thereafter, but it�s because I met the famous author Manohar Malgonkar, now 93, after almost two decades and had the good fortune to sit with him, talk to him, shoot his pictures, eat the sweetest avocados from his own garden deep in the jungles of Jagalbet, and come away with a book of his that he signed and presented to me. Burbusa, that�s what his home is called. So lovely.

Farzana Contractor