the English explorer Richard Burton told the story of an Englishman finding his new wife unconscious on the marital bed, having chloroformed herself. She had pinned a note to her nightdress which read: 'Mama says you're to do what you like.

We all have our patchwork ideas of India, our notions and opinions and prejudices–often fallacious and absurd–of this enormous, disparate country, which, as I take pleasure in reminding newcomers, bigger in population than all but its own continent: Asia. It is a place onto which foreigners have projected their own exotic fantasies and fears, their explanatory and simplifying schemata. And they never seem quite to make up their minds–as they swing from one extreme to the other–whether this country is of great wealth or of appalling poverty, of spiritual renunciation or of unabashed materialism, of fasting or of gluttony, of erotic sophistication or of sexual puritanism, of corruption or of moral superiority. They probably fail to admit that it might be all these things, and even more so, everything in between.

a good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving" Taoist dictum quoted by Sam Miller