A reporter at large

Among Western reporters who have covered Asia for the past several decades, Tiziano Terzani stood out as a towering figure in every sense of the word. His very appearance commanded attention.
Tall and robust, he sported a flowing white beard and a ponytail and always dressed in a khadi kurta and pyjama, also impeccably white.
One ran into him whenever he came down to Delhi from his cottage at the foothills of the Himalayas, where he spent the last years of his life after discovering the seductive charms of Indian spirituality.
He never failed to give the impression that he had stepped out of one of those ''exotic'' novels that were in vogue in Europe a century ago.
Their heroes abandoned a placid if comfortable existence back home to search for wealth, fame, love or spiritual grace in the enigmatic East.
Tiziano too had fled his native Florence to escape the smugness and arrogance of its inhabitants.
As he explained in his books and conversations, his compatriots assumed that they were the fount of all knowledge and values and that beyond the confines of Europe lay a wasteland.
They showed no interest in, let alone any empathy for, the disinherited of the world.
It is precisely a passionate curiosity about the oppressed and marginalised cultures and peoples that attracted Tiziano to Asia.
For more than forty years, he ''covered'' the entire region for various European publications from his base, first in Singapore and then in Hong-Kong, Beijing, Tokyo, Bangkok and finally Delhi.
In a highly personal style, he chronicled the war in Vietnam (he was present during the fall of Saigon), the dramatic developments in China, Japan''s rise to pre-eminence, and the many turns and twists in Indian politics.
But the radicalism that marked much of this writing gradually gave way to an overweening contempt for it.
He had witnessed how revolutions and wars staged in the name of liberty and equality and justice had devoured their own children. He had had enough of politics and history.
So Tiziano embarked on another journey. He would tell stories of how ordinary people coped with chaos and violence and deprivation.
At the same time, he decided to explore the vast expanse of Indian metaphysics, mysticism and spirituality. The ''inner itinerary'' now held him in thrall, especially after he learnt that he was stricken with cancer.
But Tiziano was no hermit. His reporting instincts never quite deserted him. At a moment''s notice he would rush to cover another war, another doomed revolution.
The dispatches he filed from strife-torn Afghanistan won him much praise even from those of his peers who never really trusted his political acumen. Some even suspected that once in a while he blurred the boundary between fact and fiction for heightened effect.
Soon after the terrorist attacks in the United States, Tiziano wrote a piece, his last major foray in journalism, in an influential Italian newspaper arguing in substance that terrorism could not be extirpated unless you addressed the causes that led to it.
It sent another well-known Italian journalist, Oriana Fallaci, into a fit of rage. She countered with an article, later expanded into a best-selling book, in which she claimed that the roots of terrorism must be traced to Islam itself.
Tiziano died - or rather, as he would have said, fled his body - in Tuscany on 28 July. Those who were privy to his yarns, which he recounted fluently in several languages, will not easily forget this warm, elegant, large-hearted Florentine.
He had fled places, people, doubts and certitudes alike, to find the one thing he cherished above all else: freedom from the delusions of a transient world.