Your book, A Blue Hand: The Beats in India, chronicles the time that Allen Ginsberg and a few of his fellow Beats spent traveling in India in 1962 and 1963. Of all the countries to which Ginsberg could have escaped after publishing Howl, why did he choose India?

The idea of going to India came largely from Gregory Corso. He wanted to go because the great love of his life, a girl named Hope Savage, had seemingly disappeared there in 1958. For years, he badgered Allen that they go to India to find her, something I also tried to do. (Corso was too scared to go by himself and in the end chickened out.) Allen had his own reasons for pinning his hopes on India, imagining that only there might he come to find what he had been looking for all his life, that India would both cure him of his demons and fill his troubled heart.

How do you think Ginsberg's decision to escape to India colored the popular view of India as a travel destination?

India hadn't really figured much in the American literary imagination until Ginsberg traveled there and brought it back with him to America, just in time for the 1960s. He brought back the big beard, the Oms, the beads, the kurta pajamas, the performance art of Gandhian politics. Though Mark Twain had spent a good deal of time on the sub-continent, it was Ginsberg's letters home describing his experiences that seemed to ignite the imaginations of young Americans looking to hit the Karmic road, immersing themselves in all the gods, the ganja and the Ganges with reckless abandon. In this book I hoped to show that Ginsberg was, in fact, a very serious traveler. Unlike many of those who followed him, he wasn't in it simply for the drugs or as an escape from his disappointment with postwar America.

The Himalayan city of Rishikesh owes a lot of its current popularity to the time that the Beatles spent there in 1967-68. Where should one go and what should one see to retrace the earlier experience of the Beats in India?

While Rishikesh and Dharamsala, another popular seeker destination, also figured in the Beats' journeys, it was Calcutta and Benares that had the most profound impact on Ginsberg. It was in Calcutta that he was introduced him to the strange and rich culture of Bengal. Benares completed all that he began to learn there. I think both these places are great and wonderful cities, but if there is anything to take away from my book, it is that India is filled with surprises and the best journeys have no set itinerary.

Do you think the India of today still holds the promise of an alternative cultural experience like the India of the 1960s?

Without a doubt.