2Tripping Feet

Taking flight on the first of January is a quiet act of rebellion. While the rest of the world was nursing its collective hangover, I was actively seeking altitude. Kodaikanal — the Princess of Hill Stations, a title it wears with considerably less fuss than its more famous siblings — offered exactly what the moment required: no agenda, no performance, no itinerary that couldn't be abandoned at the first sign of interesting weather. A minimalist escape designed, above everything else, to reset. The Approach The journey up sets the tone before you arrive. A four-hour drive from Coimbatore via Palani means navigating a route of progressively tightening hairpin bends — the kind that demand your full attention and reward it with views that keep changing register, from the flat Tamil Nadu plains to dense forest to the sudden, complete envelopment of mist as you pass Poombarai, the last village before the clouds close in around you. Kodaikanal announces itself not with a skyline or a ...

Jaipur feels like a past life I haven't finished living yet. Some cities host you. Jaipur convinces you that you once belonged here. After a decade or so of solo travel, you learn a fundamental truth about travel: most cities treat their history like a museum exhibit. Kept behind velvet ropes, carefully dusted, strictly hands-off. It wears its history the way a Rajasthani woman wears a lehariya scarf — wrapped tightly, unapologetically, around everything else. The past here is not preserved. It is inhabited. And the longer you spend in this city, the more you understand that this is both its greatest gift and its most pressing problem. My relationship with the Pink City began in 2014, what was supposed to be a standard travel assignment that has since become an annual pilgrimage I cannot seem to talk myself out of. There is something about Jaipur that gets under the skin in a way that defies clean explanation. Certain cities host you. This one claims you. When the arid Raj...

I should confess upfront: I am not a natural pilgrim. As a solo traveller — and an Indian solo traveller at that — I have always been wary of religiously driven tourism. Faith, in my household, was something you carried on the inside and wore lightly on the outside. Being respectful was considered the highest form of spirituality, full stop. I was taught basic mantras to keep the nervous system in check, and that in moments of crisis you turn to prayer rather than to less constructive alternatives. But never at the cost of your fundamental responsibilities. I was allowed to skip temples. Never school. Never the library. And yet, for all of that, I have a persistent habit of ending up in places saturated with what I can only describe as deva energy — places that hum with something older and larger than the present moment. Perhaps, as I have come to suspect, they simply like it when I drop by. Kashi was next. The City It was Christmas of 2017. A direct flight from Mumbai to what...

When your daily rhythm is dictated by the relentless, frenetic pulse of a metropolis—where the clock acts as a merciless taskmaster—the sheer, unhurried ease of Udaipur is baffling. You arrive bracing for the typical, chaotic thrum of a developing Indian urban center, but instead, you are greeted by a cadence that is deliberate, calm, and deeply nourished. There is a version of Udaipur that exists in wedding films and travel brochures: all sunset silhouettes and marble archways, the Lake Palace floating on still water like a mirage that forgot to dissolve. It is, of course, entirely real. But the city underneath that surface—the one that reveals itself slowly in narrow alleyways, temple courtyards, and the sharp scent of marigold garlands at dawn—is the one that stays with you long after the photographs have been filed away. Rajasthan is famously a dry, torrid state, yet it holds within its arid borders some of the most magnetic, vibrant cities on the subcontinent. Its true charm lies ...