The Road to Agra

By B.M. Cooke

A dark but illuminating take on the Indian subcontinent, Ben Cooke travels through with his trademark acerbic wit and sly perception to give an account of the contradictions of this land with a black twinged humour.

• Language: English
• Publisher: B.M. Cooke
• Release date: Jan 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463800409

B.M. Cooke

Ben Cooke, 32 years logged. Part-time writer, photographer, engineer, libertine, philosopher and historian, full time vagabond. Addicted to wandering, addicted to wondering. Has recently returned back to his 'home' country of Australia after twelve years and 130 countries of travel to not-so-casually knock off a PhD in political science and give his parents a moment's peace.

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The Road to Agra

...a bundle of contradictions held together by strong but invisible threads

Jaharwal Nehru, on India.

It is an incredible thing to be within a country and have that culture so immersed in what you're doing that you forget about the world outside it. I love the feeling of having only a fleeting memory of what things are like back home, how people live, the monotony and the excess that seem to thrive there in equal measure. You can sit in a market in the middle of India and delude yourself that that is all that there is in the world, that this is the extent of the human existence, and revel in it. In the contrast of two opposing dynamics, two opposing ways of life. If I can hold onto that feeling for only an instant, then I have found the experience I have sought; to be removed from everything I know, the culture I’ve left, and be cast asunder into another, fully immersed in it and its daily motions. I want to get back to Australia in some distant future and then feel exactly the same, as if I was delving into something I don’t recall, some unremembered past, a new culture, all over again. You know that the feeling wont last, of course, but you will remember the feeling long after the