Krakow Notes
Krakow was a 7-hour journey by train from Berlin. The previous day, the Ukrainians had carried out an audacious strike on Russia’s strategic bombers, and there was a lot of online chatter about Putin...
View ArticleAuschwitz-Birkenau Notes
Polish Jews were the largest Jewish community in Europe before the war. Out of an estimated population of 3.3 million, close to 3 million were finished off by the Nazis. In Auschwitz, 1.1 million (of...
View ArticleWarsaw Notes
On a whim, I decided to go to Warsaw from Krakow and spent around six hours in the city (of which one was spent trying to figure out its tram lines). Warsaw is large, spread-out and has the ‘big-city...
View ArticlePrague Notes
Prague was one of the few cities of Central Europe that was untouched by the destruction of the Second World War. During the Cold War, the city became synonymous with the Prague Spring – a series of...
View ArticleVienna Notes
An astonishing trivia about Vienna is that sometime in 1913, Hitler, Stalin, Freud, Trotsky and Archduke Franz Ferdinand lived in the same city. It’s irresistible to speculate if Hitler and Stalin had...
View ArticleInnsbruck Notes
Innsbruck, nestled in the Alps, was an unexpectedly pleasant town that we ended up in. I also managed to meet a schoolmate of mine after twenty-six years, who’s been in Innsbruck for more than a...
View ArticleMunich Notes
My last stop before returning was Munich – the place where the Nazi party was birthed, where Adolf Hitler became something more than a petty local nuisance and where the groundwork for the ‘Final...
View ArticleWhat I Watched – June 2025
Sound of Music: I realized that visiting Salzburg without watching the ‘Sound of Music’ would be unthinkable. So here I was, in my 41st year, watching something that should have been done in the first...
View ArticleKing Lear
When a piece of work carries tags such as “the greatest piece of literature ever written by a single person,” expectations are bound to be sky-high. However, King Lear failed to move me. While I could...
View ArticleRoosevelt’s Journey to Yalta
It was only after reading Diana Preston’s ‘Eight Days at Yalta’ that I fully grasped the perils of flying in February 1945. Though the writing was on the wall for Nazi Germany, the war was far from...
View Article