Editorial
January 2005, volume 29, No 1

Samit Sawhny’s All the World’s a Spittoon is an account of a maverick Indian’s atypical journey. The author’s unconventionality comes to the fore in his choice of the title itself. Why a spittoon? Sawhny refrains from making a clean breast of it. But then he might as well claim that he had earned the right to call the world a spittoon, having ejaculated his spit in the remotest regions of the planet during his cross-continental travels. The subtitle ‘Travels back to India’ is not tongue in cheek but sums up more succinctly what the book is all about. In the prologue Samit Sawhny writes—”after five years following a financial career path in London, I opted for a change—I decided not to renew my UK work permit, to return to India instead”. His decision is not a vote against London; he insists that he loves that city. Nor is it a vote for India, he confesses that he had utterly no idea what he would do once he made it back to his motherland. What is it then? Sawhny seems to suggest that in part his decision was eccentricity, in part simple and plain wanderlust and in part it stemmed from the fact that he was itching to do something different and for that he goes to such a fantastic length as deciding to return to India not the way all the Singhs, Patels, Kapoors, et al. do which is by plane, but by road, in a journey crisscrossing countries of Scandinavia, Russia, Mongolia, China, Tibet and finally Nepal.

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