Come summer and the mind starts travelling. Especially all over India. It has much to do with thought association and nostalgic memories. During my growing years, final exams in schools finished by mid March and schools closed for summer holidays soon after, to reopen almost three months later, on June 10, even as the first of the monsoon downpours started in Bombay. It was such happiness!

St. Agnes, my school, the Convent of Jesus and Mary at Clare Road, was the biggest supporter of Lala Tours, and my parents sent me on most of the trips. Two a year, for sure, one long and another short.

Kashmir, was an unforgettable holiday, as also the one to Aurangabad to see Ajanta and Ellora Caves and the Daulatabad Fort, when I was barely eight years old. There was Shimoga Falls and the ones to Mysore and of course Goa! Kathmandu was thrilling. We went in search of hippies and saw the first discotheque of our lives with Sr Esperanca and other nuns keeping an eye on us! There was also a cruise to Singapore, with Penang, Kuala Lumpur and Sri Lanka thrown in, where we were robbed off all our US dollars, in a rather unique manner!

With travel buzzing in my mind, and going through old Busybee columns, I came across the one he wrote on Kashmir and I knew I had to reproduce it in this issue.  Honest, what a writer he was! He doesn’t have great memories of Kashmir and wanted to visit it again to erase the old ones – but never managed! “And now I will go to my grave,” says Busybee. Do read it (page 176) you will enjoy it.

Scandinavian countries are high on the happiness index and I can understand why. If I really was pushed to migrate somewhere, I would go to one of them. This came to mind because of the Swedish fika article that I was going through. Do you know what it is? A charming social custom. It’s our opening article, check it out.

Next time you are in Bangalore and you have the urge to eat some good Kashmiri food, drop in at Sarposh. The fare at the restaurant is as interesting as its proprietor, brought to the fore beautifully by Kaveri Ponnapa, among my star writers. Kaveri is quintessentially UpperCrust! Read about her on pgs 54-56.

Gautam Anand, ex ITC hotel boss, is another good writer and someone truly passionate about food, also comes up with unique subjects. In this issue he writes about Mahatma Gandhi’s visit to Buckingham Palace soon after the legendary Salt March. Dressed in his loin cloth, the Mahatma stood out in the 500-strong guest list, some of them maharajas wearing pearls as big as butterballs. The conversation between King George V and Gandhi, as one sipped on Indian tea and the other goat’s milk, veered from world affairs to food and cuisine and intermittent fasting (yes, even in those days). Gandhi was ahead of his time. He advocated growing local, eating local, including grains…

There are some wonderful people in

this issue...

Starting with our cover boy. Irrepressible, exuberant and ever-smiling, Suvir Saran is a darling. My first meeting with him was last year at a locale in The Maldives. With blue skies and blue waters surrounding us, on a sunny, breezy morning, I had the dimpled Suvir ‘Shashi Kapoor’ Saran, throwing back his mane, telling those around, “Of course, I know Farzana! I was in her very first issue of UpperCrust in 2000 when I was in New York! Well, 23 years on, we have now put him on our cover and deservedly so!

There is also Dr Sultan Pradhan, oncologist, surgeon and a terrific human being who has just given Bombay its newest hospital dedicated to head and neck cancer. He is a name to reckon with, but is quite oblivious to that fact, preferring instead

to continue looking at patients in his no-fuss, quiet manner, that he has been doing for five decades.

Lastly, there is our very own James Ferreira, who does his utmost to keep one of Bombay’s oldest and most charming heritage villages, Khotachiwadi relevant to today’s Bombay. He lives there, works from there and has now opened up his beautiful home for people to dine in. Here I am posing with him outside Ferreira House.