Welcome to Perpetual Motion

Perpetual Motion is a novel based on extended travels in India and Nepal.

It will be published in short posts, two or three per week. To get every update as soon as it’s out, please subscribe.

It’s not a journal, not a guidebook nor a collection of tips and funny anecdotes. Based on a real-life experience, combined with the writing and the form of a novel, it’s a story where travel is a crucial element without restricting it, that tries to go beyond the constant moving, the novelty and the dazzling colors, and to probe deeper. It’s the story of someone that at one point in life decided that the best thing to do was to go, not knowing when he would return.

Focusing on personal experiences and encounters, rather than what places to visit, it begins in Mumbai and follows on a slow journey to the South of India with stays in the states of Goa, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, then up along the East Coast, stopping in Orisha, Jharkhand, Bihar, all the way into the Northeast states of Shillong, Imphal and Nagaland, and finally to Delhi. Then the journey proceeds to Nepal, through the plains and the Himalayas, and back to India to the Northern States of Himachal Pradesh and Ladakh.

This post will be updated with a table of contents listings all the posts that have come out in their reading order.

Table of Contents (so far)

Mumbai

1 — First impressions

2 — The rush and the quiet

3 — Why I travel and go to the movies

4 — Public and private rituals

5 — A city within a city

6 — The highs and the lows

7 — A cup of coffee and the battle for your life

8 — Alone in the big city

9 — A sentimental journey on the night train to Goa

Goa

1 — Naked bodies and naked truths

2 — The socialist poet and the casual conservative

3 — A spicy date turned sour

4 — Colonial delights and pains

5 — To move or to stand still

Gokarna

1 — A Russian colony deep in the Indian Jungle

2 — The beach and the jungle

3 — Meet the Russians

…