Life as I find it

Guess who I am just chatting with? Heh. As though you can. I am chatting with Manisha Bhattacharya - an old friend. When I say, old, I mean it - we used to park our dinosaurs next to each other - that’s how we met.

Time and tests took us away and we lost contact and made contact sporadically. Both of us with our own struggles and demons. When I left Mumbai for Manali, she was in Mumbai. When I returned to Mumbai, she moved to Goa…… and no, its not about either of us forgetting to use deo. It was fate (drumroll)

And fate brings us back together. Today, as we chatted, I discovered that Manisha has discovered the internet like I did, and is a newbie blogger, with the same talent for stomach-clutching-roll-on-the-floor humor that she has in life. Naturally, such things are addictive, and I’m now in the process of convincing her to join me here.

Together, we shall sweep the cobwebs of age and disuse on this blog and hijack it to do ….. well whatever it is that two strong, self-assured women do when they come together - we shall discover that as we go along.

Yeah, its wishful thinking, but how much better can it get? Without wanting to do exciting stuff, we may as well sit there and stagnate.

This is something I’d really want to go and see for myself:

LONDON (AFP) - Potholers have discovered the country’s deepest cave beneath a hillside in central England, using an account by an 18th-century underground explorer, which only recently resurfaced.

“It’s like the inside of a cathedral — just magnificently beautiful,” said Morland Sanders, who was the first non-potholer to abseil down the shaft.

“It’s an incredible place, awesome,” he told The Guardian newspaper Tuesday.

Local potholer Dave Nixon found an underground entrance into the cavern, in the Peak District in Derbyshire, after discovering an account by an obscure 18th-century academic in the University of Cambridge library.

In a paper written in 1793, James Plumtree described a network of caves found after descending into a lead mine near a local fissure known for centuries as the Devil’s Arsehole.

But a rockfall had apparently blocked access to the caverns, and it took potholers three years to hack their way through.

“It wasn’t a matter of stumbling, it was a lot of research and a lot of hard work,” Nixon told the BBC, which has made a television documentary about the discovery.

After having broken through underground it became obvious that the cavern stetched upwards to near the surface, and a man-made shaft was dug from the hillside into the gaping hole.

The new entrance from ground level can be used by abseilers to reach the bottom of the cave, saving a five-hour underground journey.

Titan is nearly 60 metres (200 feet) deeper than the previous record holder, Gaping Gyhll in the Yorkshire Dales in northern England.