Love bug

LET'S TORQUE

I'm constantly falling in love whenever I'm travelling. No, I'm not taking about flipping for women wherever I go, although perhaps that would be nice as well. I'm referring to my tendency to become instantly enamoured of some of the places I go to.

It started with my very first trip to Dwarka, in the middle of a tremendous monsoon. I remember standing on top of Dwarka's lighthouse, looking over the sea, and thinking that I wouldn't mind living here. I then went to the delightful Himachali village of Pragpur, where I met a tourist-guide dog and decided that this was where I needed to settle down.

Moving on from there, I took one look at the Neemrana fort hotel and knew that I had found my retirement home. Naturally, a few months later all thoughts of Neemrana were forgotten when I rolled into Kaziranga, where I decided that a life as a wildlife warden was the one for me.

This despite the fact that the local police had made life fairly hairy for me (it's a long story, trust me). Four days later, up in Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh, I made up my mind that I wasn't ever going to leave. A week after that, I was in Kolkata, the city where I grew up, and I felt an overwhelming urge to move back there.

My next port of call was Salzburg, in Austria, where the dazzling countryside had me in a trance-like state. From there I went to Vienna, whose architectural splendour and sinful sacher torte almost had me becoming an illegal alien.

A while later I found myself in Ooty, where I had studied at boarding school. I was so overcome with nostalgia that I almost quit and became a teacher at the school. I drove to Rameswaram a little later, where I became completely taken by its sheer desolation and thought that it'd be the perfect place to get away from it all.

Nothing, however, comes close to the sensation I felt when I was in Paris. It is by an enormous distance the world's greatest city, and I would commit murder if it meant I could go back there. And to think Srini's there as I write this.

pablo@business-standard.com