A TASTE OF SLOW TRAVEL

Zac O'Yeah talks of a time when travel writing was a means of discovery and why he thinks railway food is underappreciated

- Avantika Bhuyan

In a world of social media, where you are bombarded with images from people's travels, and where the only writing seems to be confined to hashtags and captions, there is something rather soothing about Zac O'Yeah's latest book, Digesting India: A Travel Writer's Subcontinental Adventures With The Tummy. It harks back to the good old times when travel writing was about slow journeys, memorable encounters, subtle observations, tongue-in-cheek humour, deep dives into a destination...

The book, published by Speaking Tiger, is essentially about discovery-the essence of a good travel memoir and a rare commodity in writing these days. An engaging read, Digesting India encapsulates the journeys of the Indian novelist of Scandinavian origin through the cultural and culinary landscapes of India. The different chapters-A Town Called Beershop, Looking For Malgudi, Where Teatime Is Anytime are populated with quotes and anecdotes about O'Yeah's favourite novelists, whose books act as companions on his many adventures.

You end up looking at a destination not just from his perspective but from that of the authors too. In Regal Repasts and Partaking Of The Past, for instance, he walks the roads of Ujjain, perhaps prompted by E.M. Forster's visit in a tonga (horsepulled cart) in the winter of 1912-13. By juxtaposing the past ancient and mediaeval cooking practices, Mahatma Gandhi's version of food asceticism, the emergence of coffee houses with the present, O'Yeah adds a new dimension to the way we view travel. Edited excerpts from an interview with Lounge:

How has the experience of writing on travel and food changed in the age of social media?