A very popular New Yorker essay had said, in 2023, a line that is often true: “Although people like to talk about their travels, few of us like to listen to them.”Travel is tedious, needs preparation, has us sleeping on lumpy beds and depletes our savings. Sometimes it involves visas, which, in turn, involve a reckoning with one’s whole life, abilities, laziness and the proto-imperial unfairness that sustains the system. At the end of it all, the least you can do is talk about it. But gone are the days when people had only their books and scheduled shows to learn of the world. Now they know everything about every place. They have seen all the Reels. Pallavi Aiyar solves this problem in her latest book by taking the idea of travel and using it to share her self with the reader. Aiyar, a career journalist, the writer of a popular Substack and a columnist for The Wire, extrapolates, as many have done, the idea of travelling from the geographical sense into one of experiences. ‘Travels in the Other Place: Pursuing the Self in Eight Acts,’ Pallavi Aiyar, Tranquebar, 2026.In Travels in the Other Place: Pursuing the Self in Eight Acts, Aiyar compiles her reading, her notes, her life as a mother, a journalist, a daughter, a patient of cancer, a wife, and as a curious traveller into a fun and easy-to-read volume, despite the weight of some of the topics she covers.What are the eight acts through which Aiyar pursues her self? They are Books, Illness, Language, Pedagogy, Passportism, Reporting, Hair and Grief, which also function as chapter names. If a traveller’s perspective is a deceptive one because they are only passing through an area, then Aiyar has mitigated this niggle by doing the next best thing – spending large amounts of time in the regions she is travelling to. She quotes freely from her reading, observes with steady attention the reactions of the Spanish health system to her cancer, revels in the mistakes that involve the learning of a language, and hands her reader her life. Pallavi has spent two decades reporting from across India, China, Europe, Indonesia and Japan. She has been country and continent correspondent in some of these places, and bureau chief in another. These are roles and countries with undeniable gravity. Also laden with seriousness are the events of her life, including illness, loss, migration, and brushes with systemic racism. To have lived through one’s life as its chief protagonist and to still not accord it a moustachioed heaviness is a skill, and one that Aiyar has dollops of. The US memoirist Mary Karr had once said that the emotional stakes with which a memoir writer bets with could not be higher, and so, props must be given to Aiyar for being up for the gamble and presenting a largely funny and occasionally deep retelling of parts of her remarkable life. The narration is chatty and removes from the reader the onus of empathising. We are instead left to laugh at Aiyar using the word for ‘soup’ to mean ‘sugar’ for her coffee in China. Because of its cautiously limited ambition, the book defies critique. It aims to deliver no enormous message outside of the one already manifesting in the author’s lived life. There is no big didactic overture. Aiyar never asks the reader to emulate her life. She recognises privilege, acknowledges the loopholes of it, and seems adequately accepting of her limitations without needing to be self-effacing. Aiyar’s findings are scattered across the book, not as gigantic truths but as her own everyday learnings. There is a humility in her presentation of herself which almost elides over her deep struggles but stops just short of doing so. This keeps the volume frothy, although I feel like it might have been a good idea to let a lot more of Aiyar – and a little less of the people she was reading – shine through on the pages. And yet, the generous incorporations from the people whose writing came to Aiyar’s aid at various times, during her various travels, make the book more holistic than a simple memoir could, and a simple memoir this is not.In an important chapter on travels into the world of Reporting, Aiyar is open about the preconceived notions that had affected her own reporting on pesantren, Indonesia’s madrasas, as she visits one. This section is a worthy sequel to Aiyar’s hilarious book Babies and Bylines: Parenting on the Move which, as the title suggests, has her laughing at herself as she tries to report and mother at once. The book is noteworthy in another aspect as well. It must be awfully difficult to write about people who you know as your children and friends but whom the world outside may only know as famous people, or not at all. Aiyar navigates this difficulty too, as she writes about her mother, Gitanjali Aiyar, the iconic news presenter on Doordarshan. Her recollections of her mother are warm and piercing, and form some of the most poignant parts of the book.