Oct 2025
There are trips that are planned meticulously, with spreadsheets, colour-coded maps, and backup hotels bookmarked just in case.
This was not one of those trips.
Ours began with exactly one confirmed booking — Kuno National Park — and a vague confidence that roads, temples, and forests would somehow arrange themselves around it. Everything else was left to chance, optimism, and the dangerous belief that “हो जाएगा” is a legitimate planning strategy.
The cast was set,
- Safari – The aptly named, TATA Safari, that has munched more miles in a year than some of the cars in the city combined. It also prides itself in
- Moyanak – A contentful Bengali heart with long dark black locks flowing reminiscent of a rock-star. However he sported a big square frame glasses reminding me of Irfan Pathan’s from the movie Namesake. Calm, almost to the point of being drugged and zoned out. But pull a bird’s conversation ( an avian one ) and he jumps out his hibernation and converses with his rosogulla fragrant Hindi. His seat preference for the car was fixed, rear-seat with one motive, to doze off while in motion.
- Shashwat – If Moyanak was calm, grace, Shashwat was the big curly headed, Siddhartha (Buddha) eyed vagabond. But not chastised by the lust for food or travel. And he talks, for long stretches, weaving conversations that jumped effortlessly from infrastructure reliability to road conditions, from safari economics to why a detour made existential sense. He didn’t merely suggest plans; he generated momentum. A casual “why not?” from him had a remarkable tendency to become a confirmed booking within hours.
- Me / Rutu – observer, looking deep into what people are saying and how and why. A nascent birder off late wanting to know more about birds and impressed by Moyanak’s depth of bird understanding.
The plan, if it could be called that, was to drive toward central India, work remotely when civilisation allowed it, visit Maheshwar, Omkareshwar, and Ujjain, and then disappear into Kuno’s forests. From there, we would see what happened. Somewhere between highways and dirt tracks, between temple bells and alarm calls, the trip stopped being about destinations and started becoming a sequence of encounters — cheetahs that refused to pose, leopards that did, hyenas with impeccable timing, and birds that never waited for us to be ready.
By the end of it, waking up at 4am felt normal.
