Patiala to Tokyo

The city gives one the feeling of being at home.
We must take the feeling of being at home into exile.
We must be rooted in the absence of a place.

Simone Weil

My first trip outside of India was in 2004 and to Japan, the country which would become my home. I landed at Narita Airport on a cold winter evening, the day had set and it was already dark outside. The impressions were limited but then everything was new and made an impression. My visit was short, lasting just under a week. But I was back in the summer that year, my employer asked me to move here for a longer duration.

I came here with three years of stay in my mind but the three years stretched to five , then to ten and twenty one years later I am still in Japan, changing my nationality in 2025 with a realisation that I might never go back.

I came to Japan from Bangalore but lived in different cities before that. Patiala was my hometown for 24 years , I left after graduating college and work took me to Hyderabad, Bangalore, Pune, Mumbai with brief stints in New Delhi and Chennai.

I moved to Nagoya in Central Japan and spent 3 years there before moving to Tokyo. Moving for work was the only constant those days and there was no expectation of a long stay.

Once I left my hometown it was difficult to accept any place as a home, there was something impermanent about every city I stayed in, whether it was for a few months or years.

I have lived in Tokyo for 18 years now, became a Permanent Resident of Japan in 2016, bought a home and then became a Japanese citizen in 2025. It took time to adapt to the city, to accept it and be accepted in return. There is the comfort of anonymity of a large city and there is also a parallel dissonance in standing out. The city makes you faceless, it also reminds you that you have a face, different from others.

The city gives me a home but it also reminds me a home is more than land deeds, ownership documents or a name plate that hangs outside your door. A home is about the feeling that you belong, despite the differences that seem to draw you apart.

Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary down a pinched line of geography into oblivion.
But a travel book is the opposite , the loner bouncing back bigger than life to tell the story of his experiment with space.

Paul Theroux
The Old Patagonian Express

Patagonia is an apt reference here as it was the first travel book I read. The account of solitary travels through the wilds of Patagonia stirred a desire to travel and to write about it. Later, I would know that some part of that wonderful journal was embellished did not diminish it in any way.

The bug of travel was however still unknown, life was sedentary, the daily subway commute, an occasional weekend hike, and an annual trip to India, more duty than travel, were the limits of my world.

A few years down the line, when I began traveling for work, short, eventful trips with dazzling glimpses into cultures unknown, did the real experience start to dawn. My first trip to US experiencing the excesses of Texas, or going to London and making a pilgrimage to the Highgate cemetery, the grace of Karl Marx, walking the streets of Berlin and finding the bullet marks from a war fought seven decades ago.

The came 2020 , a dizzy blur, what we thought was impossible became possible, dreams of travel turned into nightmares of not being able to travel. The utter stillness of everyday life and the disaster that was unfolding across the wold, the unknown fear and the fears of the unknown made me realise how I loved travel.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
Alfred Tennyson
Ulysses

This website started in 2020, when the world stopped in unfathomable fear but sitting in our cocoons, time in hand, fear in the heart and a longing for what seemed impossible, travel. What once brought us close, sickened us and the invisible enemy leaped over our connectedness and brought all to a still.

I traveled to India in the winter of 2021, a few days after entering into the fifth decade of my life. The memory of an almost deserted Narita airport patrolled by a robot, the empty counters, boarding the plane behind stifling masks and shields, taken off only for meals still stands out.

Landing in New Delhi a few hours later, just a few months after the devastated by the virus and finding very little signs of caution was astounding. I returned to Tokyo month later, chastened, a bit humbled and astounded. It was later that year, after we turned empty nesters, the only child traveling to another continent thousands of kilometres away did I start traveling again.

Travel returned, not with a vengeance,but in tiny sputters, starting and stopping and starting again. April 2023 was when all restrictions for travel to Japan were removed, I remember the feeling of exhilaration, at the Mumbai International Airport, opening the app on my phone, required to enter into Japan, for filling in travel details and a message popping up saying the input was no longer required. My gates out of Oran were finally open!

With the gates open I plunged back into travel with a vengeance, I visited Holland earlier, the windmills at Zaanse Schans, the medieval architecture of Hoorn, the beauty of Haarlem or the compact streets of Amsterdam.

I climbed Mt Fuji for the 10th time in the summer of 2023, visited the Batu Caves in Kuala Lumpur and went back to Fukuoka sampling its excellent food after a decade. I drove to Urabandai in Fukushima prefecture on October 7th, the date that would set in motion catastrophic events that affect us even today.

The year 2024 was when I went to Barcelona and experienced the stamp Gaudi’s stamp across the city. I went to Niigata city and took the ferry to Sadoshima island, less than a 100 kilometres from the coast but a totally different world.

The summer of 2024 I was back in Canada taking the 1000 island boat trip from Gananoque. I went to Vietnam a month later, a country of contrasts, the dour face of Ho Chi Minh city during the day and the transformation of the city at night.

I went to Stonehenge in Fall that year and ended the year close to Nagoya, the city where I lived when I first landed in Japan.

2025 started ominously, place crashes across the globe. I went back to Shanghai, my first trip after Covid and realised how much I loved the food there.

The month of March was when I took a trip that left an impression or possibly a scar that refuses to go away. Auschwitz reminds you of the excesses of evil and the limitless human capacity to inflict and tolerate it. It was an experience that took time to sink in and refused to go away.

The year is still half done and wars haunt us endlessly. Travel restrictions still exist in different parts of the world but the desire to explore the world out there will overcome and free us from all that binds!