Harsh Man Rai is someone we knew in college. Well, actually he was out of college by then, but he was one of them chick-magnet jock types, and he used to come there in the evenings to play basketball, which we, in a manner of speaking, played ourself. We recall one of the best Xavier's Sports Club teams we ever saw playing the annual season-opening Javed Khan tournament. Two goras, Marco Antonio and Joe were in the team. Harsh was too, if I remember right. They almost upset the Nagpada team that Tom Alter played for (we mentioned it a few posts ago) in a dramatic foul-filled game full of incident. Joe: You have a big mouth. Tom: Not as big as your stomach. (Joe was one of those large, corn-fed American youths.) After what the totally partisan Xavier's crowd thought was an bad referring call for a fourth foul, Marco lost his cool and fouled out spectacularly, flooring one of the Nagpada lads and slamming his palm into the backboard on the way down. Ah, the memories.
But yet again, we digress. Harsh is an hugely talented photographer, among other things, and last night, Kai Friese, editor of several magazines, our favourite in the whole world, Outlook Traveller, among them (you'd better be reading this, Kai) told us that Harsh has recently started a blog. So off we went to look at it, and we find that it gets even better. For there's a link to Harsh's Flickr stream as well, and a reproduction of Kai's Outlook piece about The Strange Saga of CNAC 58 the trip the two of them took into Arunachal Pradesh to the wreck of CNAC 58.
Go read. We shall try and persuade Kai to put some of the behind-the scenes stuff he was telling us about this story online.
An we shall ponder about coincidences. The Tom Alter memories a few days ago. A book we reviewed for Outlook Traveller last month, that had to do with China, and mentioned the flight one of the central characters took over The Hump, a phrase that stayed in our mind. A conversation with a friend about the trek our own grandpa took from Rangoon to Assam. And now this. Weird.
And we shall also remember that the reason for the post title was to make some statement along the lines of: if more excellent pros like Harsh and Kai get online, wethinks there will be some major rearrangements in the ranks of the most popular blogs. But we forgot to say it, so never mind.
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