Prologue I’ve read many travelogues on India, from some who describe it in glowing terms, and others who describe it with horror.  Yet they both experienced the same country.  It is a place of unimaginable opposites.  You feel yourself wanting to leave, vowing never to return, and then within the same hour you want to toss your passport and stay forever. The compression of so many intense conflicting emotions into the small space of a day leaves you at night lying in your hotel room exhausted and drained, yet feeling more alive than ever.  I want to describe India with a clarity that conveys what it is really like, but I find myself scratching out each laboriously crafted paragraph.  Words only seem to limit a boundless India.  You’ll find incredible kindness, warmth and beauty along with cruelty, confrontation and ugliness.  Everything is there. India is every page written in every book, every moment lived in every life, all compressed and laid out before you. My entries here are meant to provide a few of my experiences and observations.  Mark Twain travelled India and remarked, “So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraodinary country the sun visits on his rounds. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked.”