I have travelled the subcontinent in northern India and later in Pakistan, and in the Himalayas. I followed a dangerous dream (for someone who lives on "Kipling Road") of a transit through the Khyber Pass along the Grand Trunk Road. I have most recently explored Sri Lanka, including its ancient capital of Kandy (where the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic guards the only earthly remnant of Buddha), the clever hydrologic gardens and elegant art of Sigiriya, done at the time when Europe was in the Dark Ages, and Colombo, the colonial British capital, and currently the battleground of the civil war of terrorist nerves between Hindu Tamils and the Buddhist majority.
The mixture of religions and cultures in India, the world's largest democracy, and one of the few nations divided into regions according to linguistics, makes it a fascinating study that cannot be exhausted in multiple lifetimes. In rural India, on watching colorful sari-clad women walking gracefully under their head-carried loads of cattle dung, I had concluded that they demonstrated life that was simple, harsh and beautiful.