Detours: Songs of the Open Road is a book that’s guaranteed to trigger wanderlust. Its author Salil Tripathi is a well-known writer and columnist based in London, who has written a travel column for close to a decade, since 2007. This book is more than a spin-off from that column, though, and packs in more than your typical travel book.

Tripathi’s career spans many decades and cities. He has been a foreign correspondent in Singapore and Hong Kong, as well as London, and is the Chair of Pen International’s Writers in Prison Committee. He is also a senior advisor to the UK-based Institute of Human Rights and Business. He brings, then, a unique perspective – at once global and Indian – to his writing, along with an eye for detail and a passion for human rights.

Each essay in Detours – whether it’s from Paris, Cairo, Bogota and Medellin, or Istanbul, Barcelona and Shanghai – brings the reader closer to what’s happening on the ground. You can smell the smells and see the sights… and also get a crash course on the respective city or country’s most famous literary inhabitant (whether it’s Hemingway or Garcia Marquez, Hemon or Achebe). Inevitably you will close the book, sighing that you’re missing out on life.

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend reading this in one stretch, but more as a leisurely dipping into when you have the time to savour and appreciate the anecdotes and tangible take-aways from each city.

The 30-and-odd essays are woven around themes – “War And After”, “Words and Images”, “Loss and Remembrance”. I’m not sure that was strictly necessary, but then that could be more to categorise the travel experiences than to leave the reader grasping for connections. The final section is intense, as reading about loss often is. Tripathi discusses losing his wife Karuna, touching upon their travels together and revealing how it felt to go back to places they had visited together. Excerpts from a conversation with Tripathi:

How did you shortlist the places you did – and did you have to re-visit your memories, or the articles you’d already written to work, on this collection?
Detours emerged from my column in Lounge, Mint's weekend magazine. When I started the column, the editor Priya Ramani and I had decided that the column would be about unusual places, but seen through the perspective of the history, literature, or culture of each place. My work at human rights organisations and in journalism does tend to take me to places where people don't go normally, such as the Niger Delta, war-affected regions of Bosnia, and so on.

But you can't think of Nigeria without Wole Soyinka or Ken Saro-Wiwa or Chinua Achebe; nor Bosnia without Aleksandar Hemon or Ivo Andric. So the places chose themselves.

The column has been running since 2007, when Mint was launched, and some of the travels have taken place during the past eight years. There are some older travels in the book too, where I have relied on my memory, my notes, and my photographs.

I should add, however, that the book is not a collection of columns alone – each column was only about 900 words, while the shortest chapter is at least 2,000 words, and the longest exceeds 7,000 or so.

Nilanjana Roy, who commissioned the book when she was at Tranquebar as its editor, rightly said that a collection of columns simply won't work as a book. And Sudha Sadanand, who steered the project, helped give the book its structure.

You weave something extra into each port of call, either cultural or historical. Did you want to make this more than a travel book?
Yes, when I decided to do a travel column, I did not want to write about the hotels to stay at, the food to eat, the things to see, the shops to visit, and whether one needs a visa. Such information is rather easy to get hold of these days. I wanted to write each piece as though I'd be telling you a story, and why the place moved me sufficiently to tell you about it. So culture, history, art… they were always essential to the book.

At any point did you feel like you were forcing a connection? Is that something you were wary of?
I tried not to force a connection. I did connect the dots, though. So, many years ago in Bhopal I had listened to Tomas Transtromer reading from his poems – this was way before he won the Nobel. And when I was in Sweden, I did think of including something about Sweden and its culture, beyond the obvious Bergman. And it so happened that the poems fit in well.

Likewise, when I see San Francisco I usually think of Vikram Seth (and, to some extent, Czeslaw Milosz and Jack Kerouac). But Seth comes first to my mind – maybe because of my Indianness? So that chapter became a series of sonnets.

As a journalist and writer, what is the biggest change you’ve seen over the past decade vis-a-vis India’s interest or focus on international affairs? Are we becoming more insular at one level?

I think there is interest in international affairs, but from an Indian perspective. When bombs go off in Brussels, inevitably the interest is on the Jet Airways employee whose photograph became the international icon of the tragedy, but among Indian readers, it is her Indianness that's important. Likewise, the interest in Sri Srinivasan, the judge who was on the short-list of judges considered for appointment at the American Supreme Court.

At the same time, Indian media remains insular; it has little interest in broader issues beyond television headlines. I don't think that's unique; Americans are insular too, and I suppose it is inevitable with large countries. But the unusual thing about the Indian insularity is the sense of inferiority – when media abroad presents India in a way that people in India don't like, all hell breaks loose.

Linked to that question: Sitting here in India we tend to view current affairs through an American prism (so does most of the world, increasingly). Is this something Indian editors are aware of but unable to do much about, or is that just the nature of the beast?
I think the smarter Indian editors are indeed aware of it, and in an ideal world, they'd devote resources to have informed correspondents abroad, who would write about those places with the seriousness the topics deserve. There have been fine Indian correspondents abroad – Aman Sethi did well out of Africa; Pallavi Iyer has been excellent from Asia; Chidanand Rajaghatta has covered the US well for years; Shrabani Basu in London where I live, Nirupama Subamanian from Sri Lanka and Pakistan, and Shobhan Saxena from Brazil have all written engagingly about the places where they live in ways that would interest Indian readers. I'm sure I've left out many other fine correspondents, and the names I've cited are illustrative, certainly not exhaustive.

How important is it for us to have alternative viewpoints?
Extremely! We can never assume we know everything, and we can't rest on the assumption that knowing the barebones of two sides of an argument is sufficient. The world is too complex and one can't conclude based on limited information – a little knowledge is dangerous!

You share a lot of personal anecdotes – I’m so sorry to hear about your wife, even years on, these are obviously bittersweet memories, especially going back to places you’ve been together. Is this something you were wary of sharing with readers? Or did it feel like an important part of the travel diaries of sorts?
It was a hard part to write, certainly. But it could not have been any other way. Journeys make us what we are; and to some extent, the journeys I write about are also the journeys my life has taken. My younger son – who is studying for his PhD at 23, so not so young – told me that the book is like an autobiography, and to some extent he is right. But it is not an autobiography, because there is a lot about my life that I haven't written here, and for which this book is not the appropriate medium.

To some extent, writing about the journeys in the final part of the book (to which you have referred) has shown how one copes with an enormous tragedy, and how the love of friends – and of books and art I write about – helped us (me and my sons) come to terms with what happened. And to that extent, that is a journey, too. So yes, it was an important part of the project.

But it wasn't pre-ordained – I didn't begin by deciding that there would be 30 chapters, divided in three parts. That happened.

What are your top three favourite places to have travelled to?
That is a tough question! I've always liked Paris; I like Northern New England a lot; and I do like going again and again to South Africa. There are other places too, but you asked for three!

Anywhere you haven't been yet, that you'd love to go... and write about?
Yes, plenty of places! Patagonia, Russia, Morocco, Prague, China – there's a lot I haven't seen, and which I'd like to....

Amrita Tripathi is not related to Salil Tripathi, but is a freelance journalist and the author of The Sibius Knot and Broken News.