Manish started blogging almost 5 years back and in this short time, he has contributed significantly to Hindi Blogging on internet and is counted among the top Hindi bloggers. I reached out to Manish about 3 years back and he started writing his travel tales at Ghumakkar exactly two years back, i.e. July 4, 2009 with a brilliant piece on Kolkata. It was in hindi and here is the link of the story – http://www.ghumakkar.com/2009/04/07/कोलकाता-तोमार-कौतो-रुप/ . Please read it once you are done reading the interview.

Our editor, Vibha caught up with him over email and then I had a hearty chat with him on a long distance phone. I could sense that Manish loves good conversations. I was reluctant to not eat his entire night but we did end up spending enough time talking about traveling, how our views about travel is changing as a larger society, how what you write makes a difference to the bigger issue of self well-being and so on.

The below interview may not do complete justice to what we discussed but this is my best attempt at capturing our conversation in words.

Interview

Ghumakkar: Tell us about yourself. Who is Manish?
Manish : As a netizen I am a blogger who wants to express his passion for music & travel through blogging. In professional life I am a technocrat doing consultancy for Steel Authority of India Ltd in the area of thermal & energy engineering. I am based out of Ranchi, the beautiful capital city of Jharkhand.
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Vibha, our editor at Ghumakkar, was visiting India and the selfish me wanted to utilize this to a great advantage for Ghumakkar. As some of you might know, after participating in the corporate rat race for many many years, she has moved to UK for some writing inspirations. Spending her time in the beautiful city of Newcastle, studying at University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, she has taken a great diversion from what she has been doing in recent past. Ghumakkar is blessed to have someone like her running the editorial department. So coming back to my selfish motives, I tried arranging a few in-person, face to face interactions with fellow Ghumakkars and we got lucky, since Mahesh not only readily agreed but also offered to drive all the way to Noida to meet us.

So there we were, three of us, chatting over soda-pops at Haldiram’s. It was delightful and I at least didn’t feel any strangeness while chatting with Mahesh. To me, it seemed as if I have known him for ever. His warmth won us over before we could beging to talk.

Some excerpts

Q – How did you find out about Ghumakkar ? Tell us about life after Ghumakkar.

A – I make an annual pilgrimage to Doon during my kid’s summer vacations, since my in-laws are there. Every time, we try to plan for a quick excursion to a place which is not too far from Dehradoon. It was about two years back, i.e. 2009 and I was looking for some info about Lansdowne. I could find lot of sites which had basic information and mostly mentored by travel agents and tour operators. And while searching, I came across Ghumakkar and probably read this beautiful piece by Kumkum.

http://www.ghumakkar.com/2007/12/04/lansdowne-walk-and-simply-walk/

I tremendously liked the idea and after my trip, I wrote my first story at Ghumakkar which was on Lansdowne. You can read that story by clicking here – http://www.ghumakkar.com/2009/06/21/dehradun-lansdowne-gurgaon/

After that, there was no looking back. I think Ghumakkar greatly helps one to understand and know so much of the world around. Its fascinating to read about so many of these personal travel experiences. At my workplace, people call me a ‘Ghumakkar’. Off late I have got some health issues to take care of and that driving/walking long distances has not been easy but the urge to travel has only increased. I am now referred as ‘walking Ghumakkar encyclopedia’ in the matters of travel by my co-workers. That seems like a great compliment to carry.

Q - Thoughts about our monthly Newsletters. As you know, we do two newsletter every month. One on 15th of every month which goes far and wide and another at the end of month, just for the closely-knit community of Ghumakkar Authors. Has these been helpful to you ? What we can report/cover in these newsletters to make them useful ?

A – It is a great idea. The most notable is the ‘Featured Story’ since I may not had time to read everything and getting a quick reference helps a lot. I guess it should cover more of , what I call as, ‘Highlights of the Month’ ala Sapthakiki program of yesteryear Doordarshan days. If one can get a good concise glimpse of everything then there is this 2nd chance to not miss what just happened over last 30 days.

I know that these newsletters are getting archived as well and one can access older editions to catchup.

Q – Thoughts around Photo-blogs.
A – I think just having a photo blog is not very useful for the community. Unless there is enough text to explain the context, where exactly this place is, what season, which year and so on, a photo by itself doesn’t give much. There are many sites where one can find photos but then you can not make a travel decision just by looking at the photo. We should find a way to support these photos-blogs with real experiences.

In between we also talked about on what Mahesh has been doing in his work life, how it feels to be involved in super high end Medical diagnostics tools world where a single microscope may cost in excess of INR 1 Crore. His love for Gurgaon where he now lives and his annual travel to Doon and then further.

It was a very enriching and extremely rewarding experience for me (and I am guessing for Vibha as well) and we parted on the note that next meet needs to be with more people. We decided to make our first attempt at Ghumakkar living in Noida/GZB/Indirapuram/Delhi part of NCR so if you stay at one of the places and would want to sign-up, leave a comment.

Thank you Mahesh.

All of us want to travel and most of us want to share our travel stories with friends and family. The stories happen over dinner table, over morning cup of tea or even during the commute to office. Those beautiful sights on our last trip to Himalayas or the fun we had at Goa are always waiting to be unfolded on the first opportunity we get and the satisfaction which comes in the form of oohs, and aahs make our day. After all, we live for each other and happy experience are meant to spread further and farther.

At Ghumakkar, we try hard to make the whole process easier and while we try our best to provide you an easy way to keyboard them, its never easy enough. Looking at an unfinished story amid drafts by a fellow author is not at all a rare sight and that is what prompted us to think hard on what can we do more. Most often, its the pictures but then there are a ton of other things like putting the right categories, marking the destination on the map, inserting the “more” tag, writing your bio and the list goes on. All of this is what we call as the ‘necessary tax’ and this allows your story to look best, categories allow visitors to find your story in a structured way and the map-location tells them easily on where that place is.

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Vibha in a conversation with Patrick Jasper.

Section 1 – About Patrick

[Vibha] We know you by two names “The Other Patrick” and “Patrick Jasper.” Tell us more about the person behind these names.
[Patrick Jasper] Ha Ha. Yes, thats right. When I started writing and more specifically commenting on stories at Ghumakkar, I would sign them off by saying ‘The Other Patrick’, because Patrick Jones was already there and it would have been confusing to have two Patricks. .

Talking about the real Patrick, I am a Tamilian who belongs to Kanyakumari and have stayed most of my life there. I am a banker by profession and that is my trigger for being at various places. I am currently at Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh and before that I worked at Mumbai, Maharashtra. My banking profession gives me opportunities to be at various places and I could not have asked for more.
I am married and my 6 year old son, Jonathan, keeps me on my toes for travel and everything else. That is what ‘the other Patrick’ is all about.

[Vibha] You have been traveling for quite some time now. When did it become more than a hobby for you?
[Patrick Jasper] I think I got introduced to travel during my college days. Every couple of months, we would take off and go for a mini trek. I believe the change-over from casual traveling to serious traveling happened after I purchased my car, a fiat Palio. That gave me enough mobility to explore and to be more independent and I utilized every bit of that new found independence.

[Vibha] Recently you completed a trek to Sar-pass. How did you motivate yourself to come out of an urban lifestyle and move into this kind of strenuous stuff?
[Patrick Jasper] I would give the credit to my college days for this. As I was telling you that we used to do these short duration treks, mostly 2 to 3 days, or hikes. I was an active member of ‘College Trekking Club’ and we would do these in the areas of Kodaikanal, Mysore etc.
After college, I got into a job and then later got married and my parenthood kept me away from these sojourns, but that desire was quietly sitting there.
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When you write a new story at Ghumakkar, it greatly helps to associate all the right and relevant categories. The question is that how does one figure out the right-and-relevant ones. More so, when you are a new author and still finding your way around on how to upload pics, how to add more tag and so on.

Here’s an attempt to explain the category structure which we use at Ghumakkar and we are hoping that this might make your job a little easier.

Categories at Ghumakkar follow a hierarchy, so there are top-level categories, then there are sub-categories and then there are sub-sub-categories. For example, there is a category called “StatesOfIndia”, which has a subcategory called “Rajasthan” and then at a lower level we have “Ajmer” or “Jaipur” or something else.

StatesOfIndia -> Rajasthan -> Ajmer

So, as a first step, lets see what are the top level categories. These are

- International
- StatesOfIndia
- Theme
- Hotel

At a 2nd level the sub-categories are
- International -> Asia
- International -> Europe
- International -> North Americas
- International -> South America
- International -> Africa
- International -> Australia

If you go down one level down, you would find
- International -> Europe -> Italy
- International -> Europe -> United Kingdom
- International -> Europe -> Holland
- International -> Europe -> Germany

and so on.

Same is the structure within ‘StatesOfIndia’. You would have observed that for India, we are at a much granular level. For example
StatesOfIndia -> Karnataka -> Bengaluru

Whereas for International, we are only at country level. Thats because we get a lot of domestic stories. It might change in future but as of now, for International , granularity till ‘Country’ level is sufficing.
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