Anyone who travels will tell you that when a destination beckons, it's difficult to ignore its pull. Places call out to us offering no rationale why we want to visit them. The journey begins with the whiff of a conversation, a chance mention of a place, the coincidental meeting of likeminded travellers. Suddenly a life develops all of its own.

Women, I believe, have always responded intuitively to travel. I also believe this urge sometimes comes from past lives lived in distant lands. Call me fey, but on a trip to Cairo I was amazed to find myself giving confident directions to the Al Azhar Mosque and Khan el Kahlili Market, insisting the driver change routes twice. He was confused until he figured I was taking him from an old forgotten route that was no longer used. I did not know from where this knowledge came to me. The driver refused to buy that it was my first trip to the city!

Often we are relegated to being vicarious participants in someone else's journey or remain armchair travellers, as many women were when travelling was deemed unsuitable for them. It did not deter my grandmother. She sailed alone to England in 1929, in a Parsi-style sari, all she ever wore at Oxford. Bitten by the travel bug, thousands of miles away from her native Lahore, she travelled across the continent whenever she could. We had old diaries of hers charting meticulously her various trips in neat copperplate. One I remember was to see the northern lights in Norway and her descriptions of the Aurora Borealis were read to me when I was three, by my enthusiastic older sister who had just mastered the art of reading .There are many such grandmothers whose journeys deserve telling.

Even the armchair traveller is a traveller, for who can muzzle the travels of the mind that can run riot, become almost frenzied in its imagined adventures and absorbed by its own travelling glory? The expanse of the mind is limitless and other people's anthologies, travelogues and diaries are all at our beck and call to fire our mind's journeys.
But now more than ever, for an entire generation of women, travel is a heady drug of choice. We are choosing to indulge in it more either solo or in groups bound by a similar passion. Going on a holiday or a journey is making a tacit pact with yourself. You agree to be immersed in an experiential surround that may bring about a certain residual recklessness. Food we had rejected becomes manna, clothes we wouldn't dream of wearing back home become the garb of choice, and the flirtations we could not possibly condone become deliciously permissible.

Travel is the most powerful way to connect, to change the experiences of daily life. It is also to dance with the risk of knowing you may come back and find yourself changed beyond measure. You may feel the confines of the old life are too restrictive to contain your new spirit. Or then you may return to the comforting cocoon of the familiar, to finally know, like in The Namesake, that coming home is the best journey of them all.
Sometimes you may find, as Frances Mayes says so poignantly in her book, Bella Tuscany that, 'home is actually a far away place'. My mind wanders greedily picking up stories of travellers - Pico Iyer, Norman Lewis, Jan Morris, Harold Stephens, Santha Rama Rau, Michael Palin - jealously wanting to do all that they did and more. I travel, soaking in sights and sounds and stories, selfishly wanting to be alone with my experiences. To anyone who cares to listen, I will talk of the moonlight over Bagan in Myanmar, the sight of the Sphinx in Cairo, the beauty of Halong Bay in Vietnam, walking on every tilt of the leaning tower of Pisa before it was shut to footfalls, seeing the spectacular Oregon coastline, gasping at the first sight of Himalayas, walking through the New Forest in England.