Much before I was spoilt for choice by in-flight entertainment options, I’ve enjoyed a dubbed version of The Transporter with a Hindi-speaking Jason Statham just as much as a double-header of Hungama and Hulchul on bus rides. As a broke college student with adventurous dreams but limited means, the movies played in the bus quickly became my favourite part of travel.

Lavasa’s story is not just a story of an environmental disaster or an economic nightmare, it is a cautionary tale of the failure of human hubris and a reminder that it may be easy to build a perfect city, but it is damn near impossible to buy its heart.

While trekking in Ladakh, I find myself buried waist-deep in debris. This is it, I tell myself. This is how I’ll go out, amid the oversold beauty of this high-altitude desert, as a slight disappointment to my mother and no book contract. I leave behind a flimsy legacy of FabIndia kurtas and Nicobar dresses.

For my generation, travelling has become the catalyst that we believe will magically propel us toward enlightenment. It’s essentially our version of the tree Siddhartha sat under to become Gautam Buddha.

Hungary can be satisfying to the soul, palate, and the pocket. The Hungarian Forint, unlike its Euro cousin, also plays well with our rupee.

Travelling isn’t a leisure activity anymore. In 2019, it is a competitive sport. And social media is where the games are played. But this pressure to be constantly travelling, irrespective of deadlines and limited leaves, is sucking the joy out of wanderlust. Maybe some weekends are meant to just Neftlix and Chill.

A new study holds tourism responsible for nearly a tenth of the world’s carbon emissions. It’s made me question my own rapacious record with mindless travel, brainwashed by propaganda that only a well-travelled life was worthwhile.

As ice descends on the barren land of Ladakh, all we have are photographs to keep us warm for the next six months.

With no reservations and no equipment, we embarked upon a Himalayan trek in Uttarakhand in search of a screenplay. What we found instead, was an ending.

Bullet riders and road trips are like Indian politicians and black money – all talk and no action. After using it to ride to and fro from their office all week, their grand weekend voyages amount to a grocery shopping trip to the marketplace.

My boyfriend and I love having sex in the wild. We now plan to make an eco-porn video – to raise donations and help the environment.

Discovering travel in my early 20s was truly a great thing. It allowed me to see beyond the confines of culture, tradition, food, and gender, but after a decade of globetrotting, the places, the people, and the people of the places, all start to feel like carefully curated prototypes of each other.

How does a perennially loud, judgmental, scene-creating Indian tourist magically metamorphose into the Adarsh Indian Abroad?

After spending a night camping at Alaska’s Denali National Park, I realised that not all adventures need to be perfect.

In Shillong, time is set aside to take naps and dream. These dreams are then interpreted and bets are placed on archery.

Frank and Monika Eggert celebrated their honeymoon by participating in the world’s toughest mountain biking race in Himachal Pradesh – and proved that love makes people go crazy.

While mandatory adventure sports and sharing a room with 15 people wasn’t ever my idea of a good time, hindsight has transformed school camps into a bittersweet memory, cherished and embarrassing in equal measure. When you pit a bunch of seventh graders against Mother Nature, the outcome is always memorable.

In Himachal, I overheard some foreign tourists, who agreed on a few basic things: Indians do yoga and India is where one goes to find oneself. Twenty metres away, I sat like a lump, not attempting any ancient fitness routine or worshipping Kali. Instead, I contemplated my own Indianness.

Road trips are not about open-air convertibles and flying scarfs. They are about co-existing with cramps in stuffy cars that turn seemingly normal friends into tantrum-throwing monsters.

I went on a trip alone and realised that 10 minutes of “me time” was all that I needed.