“Nothing LIVES INSIDE ME as much as the PLACES and the PEOPLE WHO SPEAK FOR and from the SOUL”

Whenever foreign friends are heading towards India, I urge them towards Varanasi.

- PICO IYER

It’s not always a peaceful place, I warn them, or quiet or cosy, but it's essential. I'd never steer anyone away from the palaces of Rajasthan or the waterways of Kerala, let alone the cobalt skies and dzongs of Ladakh, but Varanasi shakes the soul as few other places on the planet can do.

To see visitors streaming through the narrow alleyways, singing as they carry loved ones to be cremated, to watch the faithful bathing in the holy river as the sun comes up and to realise that the city of death is a city of joy beautifully complements for me all the mosques and gurdwaras and other sacred places that make South Asia such a pulsing epicentre of devotion.

Looking back on fifty-one years of constant travel, I'm startled at how much it's images of faith—and the faithful—that keep rising up. I see lean souls in Ethiopia, clad in white robes and carrying next to nothing, walking for weeks across the empty highlands to pray at sites associated with their ancient Christian tradition; Christmas has never meant more to me than when I marked it in Addis Ababa, with the faithful singing hymns through the night, gathered around candles, and priests inside churches reciting from their palm-sized Bibles. I see the pilgrims at the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa, glimpsed in three consecutive decades, prostrating themselves from dawn to dark outside one of the last monuments of their culture and religion.