The truth is, I was born in a vast and magnificent nation that I have explored roughly the way one explores a buffet

The truth is, I was born in a vast and magnificent nation that I have explored roughly the way one explores a buffet – enthusiastically circling the same familiar dishes while completely ignoring three-quarters of the spread, you know? Yet, this has never once stopped me from directing strangers to places I have never set foot in myself. If anything, it has made me more emphatic.

My logic is that by sending other people to metropolises one has not had the time to visit, one can perform a sort of advance reconnaissance, which would be conducted entirely by these unsuspecting tourists, and someday, one could perhaps follow their footsteps. I have been telling myself this for the past 30 years!

Then came the name changes of the most popular cities and townships in India, and my already questionable credibility as a tourism suggester collapsed instantly.

I had just about made peace with the first round of Bombay becoming Mumbai, Calcutta morphing into Kolkata, Cochin into Kochi and Bangalore turning into Bengaluru, mostly phonetic corrections, I was told, when the second wave arrived.

And almost overnight Allahabad, the elegant, historically-layered judicial capital of the large state of Uttar Pradesh became Prayagraj. The reasoning this time was quite compelling – because Prayag is Sanskrit for “place of sacrifice,” which, given my travel advice, felt rather apt.

This city sits at the Triveni Sangam, the sacred confluence of three rivers – the Ganges, the Yamuna, and the Saraswati. Ancient Hindu texts, including the Mahabharata, describe it in language so luminous that it makes one wonder why one has not visited it already.

People who bathe there go to heaven, who die there are liberated from the cycle of rebirth, and who live there are guarded by the Gods, it is believed. Personally for me, liberation might end up becoming the most likely outcome.

In 1574, the Mughal emperor Akbar renamed it ‘Illahabad’ after visiting it to suppress a rebellion, but the British later anglicised it to Allahabad. Now it is Prayagraj once more, history having come full circle, possibly just before election season. I make no further observations.

The city also hosts the Kumbh Mela every 12 years, which happens to be the largest human gathering on earth.

Here, if melodramatic scenes from Bollywood movies are to be believed, families separate with extraordinary regularity. The stories are almost always about two brothers invariably getting lost in the crowd, raised by strangers (one becoming a principled police officer, the other a charming criminal), and spending the entire duration of the film running-time not recognising each other, until identical tattoos on their forearms reunite them, and save the day. Phew!

I have never been to Prayagraj. Not in its current avatar or its previous one. However, I have been regularly recommending it to tourists for years.

“I’m visiting India in February,” an elegant lady informed me recently in Lisbon.

“Go to Allahabad, sorry, Prayagraj,” I said authoritatively.

“Where the Kumbh Mela happens?” she asked.

“Same one,” I nodded.

“I want my three sons to experience real India,” she confided.

“Get their names tattooed on their wrists,” I told her.

“Are you sure?” she sounded alarmed.

“You will not regret it,” I twinkled.

Read Nickunj Malik’s last month’s article: Towards Alta