By Nimish Dubey How do you reach the center of the earth? And while on the subject, why on earth (pun intended) would you like to travel down the bowels of the planet? Well, both questions were answered in spectacular style by Jules Verne when he wrote A Journey to the Center of the...
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By Nimish Dubey Few events have generated as much interest (albeit morbid) as the 1996 disaster on Mount Everest when several climbers perished in an attempt to make the summit. One of the main reasons for this interest is the fact that it inspired arguably the best mountaineering book in terms of narration, Into...
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By Nimish Dubey Jon Krakauer added a whole dimension to mountaineering and travel literature when he wrote Into Thin Air in 1996, describing the disaster that claimed the lives of eight climbers on Mount Everest earlier that year. A dozen years later, eleven climbers died on the second highest peak in the world, K2....
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By Nimish Dubey There have been many books written on the Indian capital. Some have veered to the utterly academic, others to the spiritual, yet others to the role of a simple “see-this-do-that” travel guide and some (alas a very few) have just looked the city through the eyes of a resident. Sam Miller’s...
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By Nimish Dubey Most people become famous by being the first to do something. Or doing something a certain (record) number of times. And yet one of the most famous names in travel history is a man whose greatest achievement is surrounded in mystery. George Herbert Leigh Mallory was one of the best climbers...
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By Nimish Dubey For most people, ascending Mount Everest, the tallest mountain on earth, remains the ultimate travel fantasy. For years, Everest had been most travellers’ holy grail, notwithstanding the risks involved (many people died in their attempts to conquer the peak). A major accident in May 1996 that claimed the lives of eight...
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By Nimish Dubey Of all the journeys that have been undertaken, few have been as tragic as the “race to the pole” between Britain’s Robert Scott and Norwegian Roald Amundsen. Both Scott and Amundsen were reputed explorers and each wanted to be the first human being to set foot on the South Pole. It...
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Contributed by Nimish Dubey It’s a book that is considered a literary classic, has sold millions of copies, inspired film directors to convert it to celluloid and even has an animation series named after it. And yet, for most people, it does not really figure among great travel novels, simply perhaps because they had...
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By Nimish Dubey Ask someone about reading travelogues and it is a fair chance that they will head off and start looking for books by the likes of Mark Shand, Bill Bryson and Sir Ranulph Fiennes. And there is nothing really wrong with it as these are perhaps the masters of modern travel literature....
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