Go West Odyssey - How I Saw America in 19 Days

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Visiting a foreign land for the first time is very exciting. Especially when it is the USA, with its vast and varied topography, a unique and vibrant culture and places of great historical and spectacular value the visit becomes exhilarating indeed.

NS Rajan, an officer of the Indian Revenue Service (IRS) (Retd.), recorded detailed observations and experiences of his six-month visit to the US in the Summer of 2011. The first part chronicles his long walks and discoveries in New York City. The second part is a detailed diary of his cross country, coast-to-coast road trip covering nearly 8,000 miles in 19 days, driving end-to-end through 18 states and passing through two more.

Rajan takes you on a joyride through the massive landscape of America, capturing the variety of the land, its people and the way of living in the US. His ruminating accounts create a riveting picture of the various American states, with the panorama changing all the time.

The book does not purport to be a 'guide' to the US. The firsthand accounts of the places Rajan visited, peppered with his humour and witticisms, and also useful information about their importance and history, make Go West Odyssey a delightful and handy reference book for first time visitors.

A WhatsApp message popped up on my phone. It was from my cousin A Antara who lives in Delhi, India. "You must read Go West Odyssey. It is a pictorial travelogue about the great American east to west coast full circuit road trip in nineteen days." Antara knows I love to travel, do off- grid camping, biking and photography. The author NS Rajan was looking for a picture of the Moab Fault, which he didn't have in his album and Antara, who was editing the book, thought of reaching out to me. Also, she felt as an avid reader, I would find this book interesting.

'Wow, sounds exciting!" I thought. I always find it fascinating to experience a familiar place through the eyes of a traveler. It is a technique Rabindranath Tagore suggested in his memoir and it works wonders for me to discover new beauty and nuance in a familiar street, sight or object.

The next minute, I loaded the PDF in my iPad and started reading. Rajan's travelogue documents his nineteen days road trip from New Jersey all the way to Los Angeles, California and back. He and his son drove through the historic heartland of Illinois, Indiana; drove past the great lake of Michigan, Minnesota, Mount Rushmore and the Bad Lands of South Dakota and the breathtaking Yellowstone National Park of Wyoming. They experienced the out of this world geological formations in Utah, the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, the deserts of Nevada, the haunting beauty of Mono Lake, the magnificent Sierra Nevada Mountains, the picturesque Pacific Coast of California, the World Heritage Site of the Grand Canyon at Arizona, the sin city Las Vegas, San Francisco. Hollywood - the list goes on and on. I have been to most of these places but over a span of many years. It was refreshing to see how much of the US can be experienced in such a short time. Rajan's adventure rekindled my desire to pack my bags and be on the road again.

At every location, Rajan has captured the travel experience truthfully without any attempt to glorify any aspect, which makes it very real and authentic. I see the same approach in his photographs. No staged shots, no copycat landscapes - Rajan's photos are an extension of his candid travel experiences. I love them. They are a great addition to this book.

The other thing I admire about Rajan is his prolific attention to detail about the places he visited. This book is full of information.

It is said there is a book in each one of us, waiting to be written. Well, that should mean millions of potential writers. But the catch is that one should have a flair for writing and, more importantly, have a subject that would be of interest to other readers. More importantly, one should have sufficient material and the background to write on that subject. This explains why there are so few writers.

The great writer Somerset Maugham began one of his short stories titled 'Salvatore' with the line, "I wonder if I can do it". He then proceeded to write a story about the life of a humble fisherman living on the island of Ischia in Italy, a simple life of goodness, which unfortunately turned complex. Maugham ended the story by saying that he had wondered if he could arrest the attention of the reader for a few pages, writing a simple story about the character of Salvatore as a man who possessed nothing but an invaluable quality, "the rarest, the most precious and the loveliest that anyone can have" - the quality of goodness. The reader, attracted by the opening line, would read through to the end, and Maugham, indeed, did succeed.

Such writers are masters, not only in the art of storytelling, but also in the way they weave webs of mystery and enigma wrapped in arresting words in just a few pages, even when they are writing about mundane themes, and sometimes, not even about a specific subject. Their narration has the power and the flow to keep the reader glued to their lines, regardless of what they are writing on.