New Delhi, Jan. 9 -- There's a peculiar kind of financial ruin nobody warns you about: when a career in travel writing collides with a passion for literature and history. This costly combination results in every assignment becoming an elaborate excuse to chase ghosts from books and movies. The assignment is to test-drive a Porsche in Berkshire on the outskirts of London, and you end up standing by a curve in Dorset in the south-west, over a 100km away, where British army officer T.E. Lawrence, known as Lawrence of Arabia, crashed his motorcycle in 1935. They hand you a Skoda Yeti in Prague, and while the sensible journalists circle the suburbs, you're tearing across borders, hunting down prisoner-of-war camp Stalag Luft III in Poland wher...