Avinash Tiwary Reflects on Solitude During Solo Trip to Thailand

MUMBAI — Actor Avinash Tiwary, who is vacationing in Thailand’s Koh Phangan, reflected on the emotional complexity of solo travel, saying it can teach people that being alone and being loved can exist at the same time.

Tiwary shared a series of photos and videos on Instagram from Koh Phangan, the Thai island known for its Full Moon Party, wellness retreats, yoga scene and digital nomad community.

The 40-year-old actor said his repeated solo trips have gradually shifted from planned adventures into something closer to a way of life.

“This is my tenth solo trip. Maybe twelfth. I have stopped counting. The first ones were adventures I chose. Now they are mostly the shape of my life… friends with their schedules, family with theirs, mine somewhere in the middle, the only person reliably available being me,” he wrote.

Tiwary described the fleeting connections that often come with traveling alone.

“You walk into a new place. You meet someone at a bar. They become a friend for an evening, sometimes two. Then they move on, or you do, and the friendship doesn’t survive the geography. The next place, the same,” he wrote.

The actor said he was in a place where the music was good, the water looked beautiful and people around him were dancing happily.

“My body has not missed a beat in an hour. The light is doing something on the water. The dancers are happy. I am happy. And this is exactly the part that always returns…. I am also entirely alone,” he wrote.

Tiwary made clear that he does not see that feeling as loneliness.

“I want to be clear: I am not lonely. There is a difference. I am held by more love than I have ever been held by my family, friends, strangers from places I will never visit. The love is real, the love is here. None of it is in the room with me right now,” he wrote.

He said solo travel had taught him a strange lesson about love and solitude.

“Solo travel teaches you this strange thing …you can be filled to the top with the love of an entire life and still be the only person standing in the place where you are standing,” Tiwary wrote.

The actor said the feeling has changed over time as solo travel has become more familiar.

“The first solo trips were exciting. The third was different. The seventh felt like a habit. By now, somewhere in every trip, my mind says quietly: next time, friends. Next time, not alone. It says this even when nothing is wrong. It says it especially when everything is right,” he wrote.

Tiwary said solo travel can stop feeling like a choice when the people around someone are busy with their own lives.

“The thing nobody warned me about: at some point, solo stops being a choice and becomes a way of life. The schedules around you don’t line up. The people you love are also tired, also working, also somewhere else. You stop asking. You learn to enjoy your own company so well that the enjoyment becomes its own kind of solitude,” he wrote.

He concluded that he does not have a clear answer for the feeling and is not sure it is a problem that needs to be solved.

“What I have is the observation. That being alone and being loved can completely co-exist. That a body can dance while a mind sits still. That the things we end up calling our life are sometimes the things we never quite chose…” he wrote.

Tiwary was last seen in Ginny Weds Sunny 2, directed by Prasshant and co-starring Medha Shankr. The film is a spiritual sequel to Ginny Weds Sunny and follows a solitary wrestler whose life changes after a young bachelorette challenges his assumptions. (Source: IANS)