When Rahul Jacob left India for the first time at the age of twenty-one, for graduate studies in the US, he was too nervous to sleep on the layover in Tokyo. Twenty years on, and thousands of air miles later, this is his collection of stories. These essays were published as travel articles in London’s Financial Times where Jacob is the travel, food and drink editor. His writing transports us to the frenetic pace of midtown Manhattan, sadness even amid the paddy fields of Balli, and to the midnight music of Dakar. He also writes about the joys – and trials – of living in London. This collection is a celebration of cities such as Cairo, which he sees as being at the crossroads of all the issues confronting the world today, and Hong Kong, a metropolis so efficient it seems like a Hotel. He returns to the simplest journeys, those of our childhood. Right to Passage is a hymn to the delights of travel.

‘He is a mix of cosmopolitanism and innocence, of authority and vulnerability. He is so conversant with East and West that he dissolves the distances between them.’—Pico Iyer

‘Rahul Jacob is that rare Indian who is interested in cultures and countries to our East as well as to our West; and that rarer Indian, who can laugh at himself. This is a marvelous book.’—Ramachandra Guha

‘An exhilarating new voice in travel literature—Jacob is not only one of life’s natural cosmopolitans, but a writer of fresh and wonderfully infectious enthusiasm.’—Jan Morris