For most of my working life, the stethoscope sat around my neck like a second skin. It listened to murmurs, wheezes, and silences; it also listened to my own exhaustion. Medicine gave me purpose and an identity nearly impossible to separate from the white coat. Yet, somewhere along the way—almost quietly—I began collecting a few lives outside the hospital: small adventures, odd detours, and hobbies that had nothing to do with ward rounds, but everything to do with staying human.

This chapter is a scrapbook of those escapes. It begins with a family trek to the Himalayas—an expedition fueled by thin air and the kind of foolish optimism only first-timers carry. It moves to a travel mishap in a Chinese airport, a place where time dissolved, Google refused to cooperate, and a stranger’s kindness became the only functioning compass we had.

Then comes the unlikely story of late-onset cycling: brevets, punctures, headwinds, minor humiliations, and the quiet thrill of discovering that the body, even after sixty, can still offer surprises. Along the way, I return to old comforts: the books that have kept me company for decades, the cricket that shaped my youthful imagination, and a personal project of documenting my GMC Nagpur batch of 1973—because while memory is a fading ink, stories, once written, stay.