October 15, 2023

Sunday, 10:30 PM

Zostel, Bundi, 

Rajasthan

As planned, I decided to take a leisurely tour of Bundi today. There are lots of Mahals and forts of historical importance here, but not much else. To be honest, it was pretty boring to see these forts even though they are historical places and have their own importance, but for a wildlife photographer like me, there is not much there. But what’s particularly disappointing is that these Mahals, forts and boalis are not as well-maintained as one might expect. We could certainly do better at keeping them clean even though I understand it might not be as easy a task due to the sheer expanse of these places.  

Before that, in the morning, I edited the short and met a group of birders, who had come to meet me from Kota, Rajasthan. The owner of the Zostel property we are staying at is also fond of birding; so he told us about a few good locations for birding.

I also met a tourist from Denmark and we talked for a while. He told me quite a bit about how cool Denmark is, which I am well aware of, as is about everybody else in the world. The Danes give the government as much as 55% of their income in income tax and are the second happiest people in the world, closely preceded by the Finnish. We, in India, pay a maximum of 30% of our income in income tax and are 132nd on the same happiness list, trailing behind Pakistan at 117, Sri Lanka at 123 and Bangladesh at 91. But don’t worry about the connection between income tax and happiness, for there is none. It’s not like you pay more to the government and it makes you happier by turning the happiness knob somewhere. But it might have something to do with the free education and health security the governments provide in the Scandinavian countries from the greater amount of money they collect in taxes.

Anyway, back to Bundi. We flew the drone a bit and things looked pretty good from high up there. Then we came to the property suggested for birding by the Zostel owner, who also accompanied us to the place, and it was indeed as good as he had told us it would be. We did get a few decent pictures. Since I was out for most of the day, today’s Vlog editing was monitored mostly by the off-site team, and the Vlog was almost ready for upload by the time I returned to our place of stay here. And there was a chosen footage missing from the Vlog, which meant that the video had to be re-edited and rendered afresh, which is pretty time consuming. And for that reason we are late with the upload, again! Are we ever going to get this right? We’ll try again tomorrow!