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and compulsive traveller. Photographer and raconteur. There are many sides
to Kunal Sinha, 34, not quite obvious beneath the stereotypical “serious
Bengali” persona and the gleam of thin-rimmed scholarly spectacles.
The balcony of his quiet Chittaranjan Park home in Delhi is an oasis of
green. The living room is equally soothing in shades of blue. But the
artifacts collected from all over India and its south-east Asian neighbours
belie the restful ambience—a silk screen wall-hanging with striking
oriental motifs, a little silk umbrella, masks of the Indian tribes, a
Burmese harp. Somebody in this house is restless, a continual wanderer.
Sinha’s travelogue, An Ordinary Traveller (Srishti)—livened
by photographs taken by him—is the flashback form of his youthful
wanderlust (which he makes clear is unlikely to ebb), beginning with his
first trip to Nepal as a carefree singleton to include on its way more
sedate trips like the one to Kumaon, mother and wife in tow.
Born in Varanasi, Sinha’s travel-tuned genes probably came from
his father, a professor at the Banaras Hindu University who never let
go of the once-in-four-years leave travel e writer in Sinha had an innocuous
budding: a daily journal begun on his first trip in the concession and
took his family, quite literally, from the Himalayas to Kanyakumari. Thbreathtaking
Nepal mountains made friends ask why he didn’t publish what he calls
tales of “an ordinary, non-heroic person in extraordinary places”.
Sinha’s writing is crisp and precise, sometimes bordering on the
staccato but with flashes of vivid imagery that startle you with their
intensity. From an impromptu party at 10,000 ft in the Nepal Himalayas
to dining with prostitutes in Rangoon, Sinha’s travel spectrum is
certainly broad. But it is the Andamans and Ladakh which come alive, his
favourites for their “pristine, elemental and isolated beauty”.
Who are his travel heroes? Eric Newby, who walked the Hindukush, and Bruce
Chatwin and his motorcycle. Any aspirations to be like them? “I’m
content to be an ordinary traveller, an ordinary writer,” he says.
And so take the road less travelled.
—Shuchi Sinha
 
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CURRENT
ISSUE APRIL 8, 2002
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