Author: Giti Thadani
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2003
Language: English
Pages: 181
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0143029606
Description
A travelogue unlike any other, Moebius Trip is at once a round journal, a collection of musings and a cry for the respect and preservation of one of the world’s oldest civilizations.
At the end of the clearing, an old banyan tree grew out of the remains of an earlier round stepwell. A little further on was another lake. This must have been an oasis of multiple delights. Over a thousand year later, it was as if I could still be intoxicated by the tranquility and protectiveness of this enclosed yet open valley. The sun starts descending, and its light changes the gorges colors to a golden red, blending them into the sandstone remains.
Giti Thadani has been driving her jeep around India for fifteen years. Blessed with a rare historical sensibility, including an eye for architectural detail, she ventures off-road in search of lost temples, sculptures and cosmological sites form Madhya Pradesh to Kanyakumari to Gujarat. One thought, one reflection leads to another as she contemplates the cultures and mythologies that produced these marvels, and the more recent cultures and mythologies that have left them to neglect and desecration. Her inner and outer journeys unfold each other.
Along the way, she meets the people who make India what it is-an incense-wallah who dropped out of engineering college because he fell in love with scents, a young woman from an archaeological museum who helps Giti find a yogini temple, a passing driver who leaps out of his truck to change Giti’s type when her hands get too cold to function.
Giti’s passion for architecture, sculpture, mythology, iconography and artistic heritage are infectious. A travelogue unlike any other, Moebius Trip is at once a round journal, a collection of musings and a cry for the respect and preservation of one of the world’s oldest civilizations.