A Collage of Temporal Journeys

Pallavi Aiyar's book, Travels in the Other Place, has no ambiguity about the subject at hand.

- By SHEILA KUMAR

A neat meld of memoir and travelogue, she takes us aboard her personal train, opens the compartment doors to us, tells us of trips into the land of Books, into the barren wastes of Illness, shows us how Language is a unifying force in the end, rues that Pedagogy contains traps into which all of us fall, shares that her Indian passport continues to be a ball and chain. In the Reporting chapter, she gives us insight into politico-social accounts she's filed from across the world, and circles back to travels in the 'other place,' a place containing both significant loss of Hair and bottomless wells of Grief.

Life, the author avers, is a collage of temporal journeys. All you need is to be equipped with cognitive empathy. And then, she goes on to show how this philosophy has held her in good stead in her sojourns.