travelandleisureindia.intravelandleisureindia.in 6563
Predictably, travel arouses a swathe of responses:
the world can repel or inspire refl ections. For some,
like Gandhi or Darwin, travel provided intellectual
and moral reasons to empathise with others; for some
others, like Sayyid Qutb or Pol Pot, the world inspired
justifi cations to murder in name of religious purity and
class consciousness. For most of us who fall somewhere
between these polarities, travel forces our minds to adapt,
to rethink, to re-evaluate our prejudices and to recalibrate
our passions in ways far removed from conventional
education. Travel, in other words, is a form of learning
by other means.
Remarkably, in the education curricula of our country,
travel rarely fi gures. An odd picnic during the school year
is the most that one might experience. Beyond that, for
large sections of India’s poor and middle class, the world is
reduced to one’s city, one’s family, and nowadays whatever
the television channels proff er. The wide world and its
wonders mean little.
Predictably, the idea of India—whether as a
geographical or cultural space—is increasingly lopsided in
the minds of many. The less privileged know little beyond
their own areas, or what they see in Bollywood movies.
But the children of the elite of India’s major cities know
more about Manhattan or London than they do about,
say, Bhubhaneshwar or Thiruvananthapuram. Many
parts of India are virtually foreign to their young minds,
through no real fault of theirs. Who wants to think about
Dantewada when there is a jet plane taking off to Dubai?
Our collective consciousness slowly fragments along
familiar lines of global capital fl ows and worldly aesthetics.
Should this matter?
In a heterogeneous democracy like ours, where
resources and geographies are diff erent, where peoples
and cultures change with every district—it is paramount
that we are able to see past our immediate environs.
The overbearing tyranny of small disaff ections dictates
our public discourse. The acrimony in our Parliament
and media is emblematic of our inability to listen to, far
less agree with, each other. Technology has amplifi ed
marginal dissonances. We may know more facts about
others, but our discourse suff ers from Asperger’s
syndrome: the terrible inability to empathise.
Our collective challenge is then how we do off er,
to the generations of Indian who follow, opportunities
to recognise our collective destiny? Lester Pearson, the
late Canadian Prime Minister, said in his Nobel Peace
Prize Lecture, “How can there be peace without people
understanding each other, and how can this be if they don’t
know each other?” To him, and to others, knowledge of
the other was critical to demystify, to get past clichés and
to learn to treat each individual according to the ‘content
of their character.’ The best way to do this is to travel.
Why not explicitly encourage such personal
explorations as a matter of public policy? World travel may
be limited by the high level of resources required and theT
o travel is to wilfully leap into the unknown—
to give up the assured security of home for the
exigencies of the world. This is true whether
one journeys from home to a nearby town to
see a mela, or to another continent in search of
work. Over time, the world and its mores seep,
imperceptibly, into our lives and into our minds.
We inch closer, howsoever marginally, to become—
as the Greek philosopher Diogenes fi rst called
himself—a ‘citizen of the world.’