“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson in Travels with a Donkey

Few of us have the panache to put in our papers, free ourselves from our desks, and take off on a half-year-long trip along the coastal necklace of peninsular India. This richly-flavoured travelogue combines adventure, serendipity, food, and sheer joie de vivre. The narrative irresistibly draws us in as benevolent observers of the many facets and foibles of humanity.

Living out of a backpack, in budget lodgings, and eating bananas as a staple, only add to the heady challenges that stimulate the spirit of wanderlust of this maverick-explorer. The tour diary, starting from the remote north-western coastal tip and climaxing, rather precariously, way above sea-level at the potentially sinister Indo-Tibetan border, is an engrossing chronicle of discoveries about the desires, views, tribulations, joys, and sheer zest for living, of the teeming millions of India.

Thrown in for good measure, in a refreshingly tongue-in-cheek style, are recipes for some of the gastronomic delights offered in the places traversed. Itinerant sidelights about people of all classes and creeds - fishermen, seafarers, rickshaw-drivers, priests, salesmen, radicals, typical and atypical families, and all the rest - create a colourful kaleidoscope that is quintessentially India. This book is as enjoyable and energising as a good cup of chai...