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India moves approximately 500 million people by air every year and considerably more than that by rail. The numbers are large enough to be abstract until you are standing at the wrong end of a queue at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport in Mumbai at 11 PM with a connection to make, or until you are trying to board the Rajdhani Express at Howrah Junction during Durga Puja and the platform looks like the entire city of Kolkata has decided to travel simultaneously. At that point the numbers become entirely concrete. Representational image. IndianRepublic.in This piece is a reference point to fifteen airports and fifteen railway stations — the ones that matter most for anyone moving through India, whether they are arriving from abroad or navigating the subcontinent from within. Passenger figures are from the Airports Authority of India, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation and ACI World. Railway data is from Indian Railways published sources. THE 15 AIRPORTS 1. Indira...

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...