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.

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.

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.

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.

I moved to Goa restlessly in search of a new turf. I’d always dreamt of a life full of travel. But after eight years, Bangalore is the home I have chosen to return to.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Discomfort. That’s all your experience is supposed to boil down to when you’re a solo woman traveller. No one asks a guy who is travelling on his own whether he felt uncomfortable on his solo trip.

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.

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.

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

On a road trip to Rajasthan, when I heard Bullet Baba’s story, I sniggered. I probably shouldn’t have.