Moebius Trip: Digressions form India’s Highways

The author has been driving her jeep around India for 15 years. Blessed with a rare historical sensibility, including an eye for architectural detail, she ventures off-road in search of lost temples, sculptures and cosmological sites from Madhya Pradesh to Kanyakumari and Gujarat. One thought, one reflection leads to another as she contemplates the cultures and mythologies that produced these marvels, and the more recent cultures and mythologies that have left them to neglect and desecration. Her inner and outer journeys unfold each other. Along the way, she meets the people who make India what it is: an incense-wallah who dropped out of engineering college because he fell in love with scents, a young woman from an archaeological museum who helps Giti find a yogini temple, a passing driver who leaps out of his truck to change Giti’s tyre when her hands get too cold to function. The author’s passion for architecture, sculpture, mythology, iconography and artistic heritage are infectious. A travelogue unlike any other, this book is at once a road journal, a collection of musings and a cry for respect and preservation of one of the world’s oldest civilisations.