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The sweetwater lake at Arambol is fifteen minutes walk from the main beach, around the headland, through a section of trail that passes under a cliff and along a narrower stretch of sand before the lagoon appears. The lake sits directly behind the beach, separated from the sea by a narrow strip of sand and some cashew trees, its water fresh where the sea is salt. There are people doing yoga on the bank. There is a man playing a flute. There is a woman reading something thick and paperback. There are the kind of travellers who have been in Arambol for three weeks and have lost track of what day it is, and they are not, on balance, unhappy about this. Representational image. IndianRepublic.in Arambol is the northernmost significant beach in Goa, in Pernem taluka, approximately 50 kilometres from Panaji. It has been a fixture of the backpacker circuit since the original hippie trail found its way to this stretch of coast in the 1970s and decided to stay. What makes Arambol different from ...

Mumbai does not sleep. This is not a metaphor or a tourism tagline — it is a logistical fact about a city of over twelve million people in which the local train runs until 1 AM and the vada pav stall on the street corner near Dadar station is open at 3 AM and the fishing boats leave the harbours before dawn and the dabbawalas begin their rounds at 7 AM and somewhere in between all of this the city that works all day also finds time to be, at night, the most energetically social city in India. Representational image. IndianRepublic.in The geography of Mumbai nightlife is specific. Bandra — the suburb that has been the creative centre of the city since Bollywood moved its studios nearby in the 1970s — is where the bars and restaurants cluster most densely: Waterfield Road, Chapel Road, the Carter Road promenade, Hill Road toward Linking Road. The demographic is young, the music is loud, the beer is cold, and the sea air from the Arabian Sea that runs along Carter Road is available for fr...

The boulders of Hampi look like they were placed there by someone who ran out of patience. They are enormous — some the size of houses, some larger — balanced on each other and on the hillsides above the Tungabhadra river in arrangements that the eye keeps expecting to resolve into an explanation. The explanation is geological: these are granite outcrops from one of the oldest rock formations on earth, shaped by millions of years of erosion into the rounded forms they now have. The ruins of the Vijayanagara Empire are built among them and between them and occasionally using them as walls, as though the architects decided that the boulders were already doing most of the structural work and the temples and palaces needed only to fill the gaps. Representational image. IndianRepublic.in Hampi was the capital of the Vijayanagara Empire — one of the greatest kingdoms of medieval South India, at its peak in the 15th and 16th centuries a city of perhaps half a million people and among the weal...

What remains of Nalanda is not nothing. That is the first thing to establish. The ruins of the Nalanda Mahavihara — the monastic university complex that functioned for several centuries as one of the most significant centres of learning in the ancient world — cover approximately fourteen hectares of excavated archaeological site in Bihar's Nalanda district, and what has been uncovered represents only a fraction of what the original complex contained. The excavated ruins include the remains of temples, monasteries, lecture halls, libraries and the residential cells of the monks who studied and taught here. The bricks are red. The scale is considerable. The silence is specific to places where something large happened and then stopped. Representational image. IndianRepublic.in Nalanda at its peak — roughly between the 5th and 12th centuries CE — attracted students and scholars from across Asia. The Chinese monk Xuanzang visited in the 7th century CE and described a complex of ten thou...

The boat is the correct way to see Varanasi. Not the gali walk, not the temple queue, not the rooftop cafe with the Ganga view — the boat, at dawn, moving slowly along the western bank while the city wakes up on the ghats above you and the light arrives from the east across the water. Representational image. IndianRepublic.in The ghats of Varanasi number 84 along the western bank. Each has a name, a presiding deity, a specific function and a specific population at specific hours. The boat covers all of them in approximately ninety minutes at a leisurely pace, and in those ninety minutes you see the complete social and spiritual life of the city laid out on the steps above the water: the early morning bathers at Dashashwamedh, the dhobis washing laundry at the dhobi ghats and slapping the wet cloth against the stone in the specific rhythm of a very old occupation, the wrestlers at the akhara ghat warming up in the pre-dawn light, the burning at Manikarnika that has not stopped and will ...

 Most people who visit Delhi go to the Red Fort and the Qutb Minar and the Humayun's Tomb and take their photographs and leave having seen the containers without the contents. The contents are in the museums. The museums are where Delhi keeps what it has accumulated across the centuries of being successively the most significant city on the subcontinent — and most visitors walk past them entirely.  This piece is a corrective. Representational image. IndianRepublic.in The National Museum on Janpath — ten minutes from Connaught Place — is among the most significant repositories of Indian art and archaeology on the subcontinent. The collection runs from the Indus Valley Civilisation to the Mughal period and covers Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, Islamic and tribal traditions in galleries that reward a full day. The dancing girl bronze from Mohenjo-daro — cast more than four thousand years ago, twelve centimetres tall, wearing only bangles and a confident expression that has outlasted ever...

The Taj Mahal opens at sunrise and the first hour is unlike the rest of the day. Before the tour buses from Delhi have arrived, before the group photographs have begun at the reflecting pool, before the site has reached the volume it will reach by mid-morning — in the first hour, the Taj is quiet enough that you can hear the birds in the garden and the fountain and your own footsteps on the marble. The light at sunrise arrives from the east and hits the white marble at a low angle, and the white marble at that angle does something with the light that it does not do at any other time of day. The colour changes — ivory, then pink, then gold, then the blinding white of a Mughal noon. If you arrive at opening and leave by 9 AM you will have seen something that the postcard has not prepared you for. Representational image. IndianRepublic.in The Taj Mahal was commissioned by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in 1631 as a mausoleum for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, who died in childbirth. Construction t...

The Golden Temple feeds approximately one hundred thousand people every day. Free. No questions about religion, nationality, caste or anything else. You queue, you receive a tray, you sit on the floor of the langar hall with whoever is sitting next to you, and you eat dal, sabzi and roti served by volunteers who have been doing this since before you arrived and will be doing it after you leave. The langar — the community kitchen of the Harmandir Sahib — has been running continuously since the sixth Sikh Guru, Guru Hargobind, formalized the practice in the early 17th century. It is the largest free kitchen on earth in terms of daily meals served. Representational image. IndianRepublic.in The Harmandir Sahib itself — the Golden Temple — sits in the middle of the Amrit Sarovar, the pool of nectar from which Amritsar takes its name. The temple is connected to the marble parikrama surrounding the pool by a causeway called the Guru's Bridge. The structure is covered in gold leaf applied ...

The flight from Billing to Bir takes approximately forty-five minutes if you do not try to extend it and considerably longer if you do. You launch from Billing at 2,400 metres, which is the take-off site, and you land in Bir at 1,400 metres, which is the landing site, and in between you are doing something that the human body has no evolutionary preparation for — floating above a Himalayan valley with the Dhauladhar range on one side and the Kangra valley opening below you and the air doing what Himalayan air does at altitude, which is to be completely indifferent to how unprepared you are for it. Representational image. IndianRepublic.in Bir Billing hosted the Paragliding World Cup in 2015, which established its international credibility in a way that prior reputation had not. The take-off site at Billing is one of the highest paragliding launch sites in the world at 2,400 metres, the thermal conditions are consistent through the season, and the flight path over the Kangra valley give...