Travelling alone in India

My experience of travelling on my own has been an enlightening one. Solitude is a wonderful teacher, a friend who shows you things you would miss in the company of many, a friend who holds a light to hidden things. Detailed observations of people, places, histories, recipes, faces, facts and your opinions can be entirely overlooked in group travel. Flexibility and an empowering feeling of freedom and self-awareness become companions. Your foibles and strengths, the roller coaster of your moods, the full array of your feelings between melancholy and joy, rage and tranquillity- travel in India seems able to coax these in to life in a way unsurpassed by any other experience. I decided to travel on my own on this my sixteenth visit to the land of my parents, to really absorb India, to feel its heat on my face, to breathe its dust, to journey on old trains and rusty buses, to ask questions of locals, to live with them and their families, to not miss anything. In a country of over a billion people, the lone traveller, can never really be alone.