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Today is the first day of autumn in the tea gardens of Assam. The garden workers do a small Puja, where they offer their prayers to mother nature. It is the start of pruning season. In another month or two, the tea bushes will stop sprouting leaves. They will need their rest, and to conserve energy to get ready for next season. A third of the garden will be pruned, and the whole garden will hibernate until March, when spring will bring the new buds to the bare bush. Today is also the end of Durga Pujas, a 10 day festival that...

For about a third of the year, Avantika and I call Calcutta our home. I have tried many times to explain to my friends and family back in the States what Calcutta is like. The city houses such a diversity and activity, I find it difficult to grasp on to a core idea from which to explain the place. And I am not sure any one person can. Fortunately, in this age of social media I do not have to rely on my own descriptive faculties. Many of Calcutta's citizens host active Instagram accounts. When taken individually, each account provides...

We landed in Colombo, to a welcome of heavy showers and dramatic lightening. We came to this paradise island to celebrate two second anniversaries: 2 years of being married, along with 2 years of having our US business running. A squared  anniversary. From Colombo, we galivanted across the country, exploring millennia+ old ruins, searched for leopards, lay on the beach, and tasted lots and lots of delicious tea overlooking steep mountain sides. Day 1: Colombo - Polonurwa After a meeting with a tea company in Colombo, we set out on our adventure across Sri Lanka. We drove up to the...

February starts quietly at Chota Tingrai. The evenings are cool, the factory is silent. Even the monkeys seem off on other adventures. The tea bushes are not fans of the cold nights and cloudy mornings. The unpruned plants curl their leaves as if they shiver. The sections of pruned bushes look like they are at home in a New England forest with their bare branches. No frogs, no snakes, just annoyed cows and goats roaming the garden, trying to sneak a sweet morsel of weed from under a bush before being chased off by a garden guard. The people don't...

The first time I had masala chai, and I mean real masala chai, was in a Calcutta gully behind a Durga Puja Pandal celebrating women's handicrafts as I felt the soft drops of the slow drizzle. The chai wallah poured us cups as we huddled under the foot-wide awning of his stall. The tea didn't taste watery, or overly sweet. Rather, the beverage was thick, with a sharp note of spicy ginger, backed with the warm black tea only slightly diluted by the earthy clay of the cup. A Chai Wallah in Calcutta. Photo by Goutam Roy for Al Jazeera...