About Me

5I am a marketing professional stuck between my lust for reading and traveling.

Things you might be curious about:

1. My Website and online persona Beedi Queen was born as a quirky name that a friend had used for me when I told him a story about a 110-year-old grandmother in our village whom I always obliged with a packet of Beedi, which was the only thing she ever asked of me. Beedi is a rural substitute for a cigarette, made of tendu leaves and tobacco. My brand name BEEDI QUEEN does not mean that I consume, or endorse smoking Beedis.
2. I hail from Assam. My parents were born in a sleepy village called Hailakandi near the border of Bangladesh. My native language is Sylheti. I am sure you never heard that language. It is a raw, coarser dialect of Bengali.
3. I work full-time as a Product Marketer in Chennai. I manage to travel by clubbing together leaves and holidays. I do not take any unnecessary leaves at work except for the sole purpose of travel. I manage this blog during the weekends that I do not travel, or at late nights after work.
4. I am a writer and I am working on my first novel.
5. I have a dream to travel to all the countries in the world.
6. I have a goal to inspire you, my reader to travel more, read more and live more.

To travel with me virtually and to get reading recommendations, follow me on Instagram.

My upcoming travel plans for 2017:

1. Trip back home in North-East in June end during Eid. I would be traveling to Hailakandi via Meghalaya, and hope to do cross-country crossing into Bangladesh.   July update: I could not cross over to Bangladesh due to some last minute hassle in the visa procedure. You can submit the docs only in Delhi, Calcutta or Agartala embassies. With no online visa process available, it is a cumbersome thing for Indians.
2. Travel to Indonesia in October.
3. Travel to Sri Lanka in December holidays.

Apart from these major ones, many weekend trips which are as yet unplanned, within India.

My Reading goals for 2017:

52 books in 2017.

Progress meter – I have read 45 books as on August end.

	Books	Author
1	The Wasted Vigil	Nadeem Aslam
2	The Cement Garden	Ian McEwan
3	Boats On Land	Janice Pariat
4	Fried Green Tomatoes on a Whistle Stop Cafe	Fannie Flagg
5	When Breath becomes Air	Paul Kalanithi
6	Regeneration	Pat Barker
7	Laburnum for My Head	Temsula Ao
8	The old man and the sea	Ernest Hemingway
9	Legends of Pensam	Mamang Dai
10	The Book Thief	Markus Zusak
11	Metamorphosis	Franz Kafka
12	The White Tiger	Aravind Adiga
13	84, Charing Cross Road	Helene Hanff
14	Animal farm	George Orwell
15	A handmaid’s tale	Margaret Atwood
16	The Blaft book of Mizo Myths	Cherrie Lalnunziri Chhangte
17	Legends of Khasak	O.V Vijayan
18	The Beach	Alex Garland
19	One part woman	Perumal Murugan
20	Unaccustomed Earth	Jhumpa Lahiri
21	To the lighthouse	Virginia Woolf
22	A room with a view	E M Forster
23	Interpreter of maladies	Jhumpa Lahiri
24	The inheritance of loss	Kiran Desai
25	These hills called home	Temsula Ao
26	Notes from a small island	Yann Martel
27	LIfe Of Pi	Bill Bryson
28	Seahorse	Janice Pariat
29	The Vegetarian	Han Kang
30	The Ministry of Utmost Happiness	Arundhati Roy
31	Ghachar Ghochar	Vivek Shanbag
32	The Reluctant Fundamentalist	Mohsin Hamid
33	One flew over the cuckoo’s nest	Ken Kesey
34	Em and the big Hoom	Jerry Pinto
35	Men Without Women	Ernest Hemingway
36	In Other Words	Jhumpa Lahiri
37	Anne of Green Gables	Lucy Maud Montgomery
38	Train to Pakistan	Khushwant Singh
39	The Catcher in the Rye	J. D. Salinger
40	Kissing the Demon	Amrita Kumar
41	Foundation (1951)	Isaac Asimov
42	Best of Guy De Maupassant	Guy De Maupassant
43	Looking for Alaska	John Green
44	Foundation and Empire (1952)	Isaac Asimov
45	bird by bird	Anne Lamott