AD Who would have thought that driving could be safer than flying? It isn’t actually, and certainly not in India, where a life is lost every four minutes in a road accident. The pandemic, however, has turned everything on its head. With the virus still lingering, a lot of people find it safer to spend long hours (even days) on our highways, risking life and limb, rather than sit next to a stranger on a short flight. Compared to a plane, a car is your own private space, your bubble on wheels and it’s this form of isolated travel that only a car can offer, which has unwittingly rekindled the romance of the road. Driving is, indeed, the new flying.
AD Can you really complain about being served a meal by the personal butler of the ethereal Maharani Gayatri Devi? Or, for instance, about being able to see the entire Milky Way while laying in the sand dunes in the dead of the night? I could go on with such examples, but if there’s one thing you really need to know about life-altering experiences in Rajasthan, it’s simply that you will never run out of them. Comforted by this very thought, I cheerfully bid goodbye to three of my esteemed colleagues as they rose up from the ground in a very large basket, a bunch of propane burners shooting angry flames inches above their heads into a ginormous hot-air balloon. To give chase in an Audi Q8 was certainly no less spectacular a way to explore the outskirts of Jaipur and, in any case, I wasn’t quite in the market for a new propane-styled hairdo.