It is the simplest fact of Indian life: there are too many Indians.

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

If people are driving you around to look at animals, that's wonderful. That's educational, but it's not necessarily enlightening and you're not finding out much about yourself.

I greatly enjoyed Tom Reiss's The Orientalist, for its mingled scholarship and sleuthing, and for so elegantly solving the puzzle of one of the Twentieth Century's most mysterious writers.

I don't want to be the honored guest. I want to be the invisible person.

It might be said that a great unstated reason for travel is to find places that exemplify where one has been happiest. Looking for idealised versions of home-indeed, looking for the perfect memory.

The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.