Pico Iyer’s Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of The World (Vintage Departures) is probably one of the best travelogues I have ever read. Perceptive, poignant, funny – Iyer never sounds like a tourist who’s just passing through the country. Like a citizen of the world he
talks of places much like a reader talks of a favourite, well thumbed book.
And now this article in the Times talks of how Iyer’s great-grandfather might well have been one of the pioneers of “foreign tourism” in India. Reportedly, many decades before Iyer was even born his grandfather had penned a travelogue for the Indian traveller to Europe; a continent he sustained great risks and even ostracism to visit!
Now if that’s not called a ‘travelling gene’ I don’t know what is!