Savage Pilgrim

You did everything right. Built the career, hit the milestones, ticked the boxes. So why does something still feel missing?

Anupam Mukerji was the man behind Fake IPL Player, India's first viral sensation. Successful. Known. And quietly certain that the satisfaction he'd been promised was never coming. So he walked away, and spent eight years looking for what was missing.

He tried the silence of Ramana Maharshi, the ghost of Neem Karoli Baba, ayahuasca with a shaman, acid on a Himalayan ridge. And then a race for the Goa border, a corrupt cop closing in, and someone else's life in the back seat.

The wisdom that stuck came from people he met on the road. An old man literally living under a rock by the Ganges. A sugarcane seller going home for good. A dealer in Ladakh who'd made his prison cell a monastery.

What does a man do when he's seen through the false but can't yet reach the truth? He slipped into excess. He plunged into a rabbit hole dark enough that his cats became the only reason to stay alive.

He came back with no guru and no method. Only one thing he couldn't unsee: that he'd spent his whole life supplying a drug he never chose to take.

Savage Pilgrim is a funny, uncompromising account of a search for meaning that became an obsession he couldn't put down.