Skip to main content

Travel



Whenever I think of travel, Tennyson’s Ulysses will spring to my mind. “Much have I seen and know – cities of men / And manners, climates, councils, governments,” says Ulysses. That’s just what travel does: make us see and know cities, manners, climates, etc.

I loved travels. My years in Delhi were filled with much travel. I accompanied students on the annual educational tours and treks and during holidays my wife and I visited quite a few places like Darjeelinng, Gangtok and Shimla. I enjoyed both kinds of travels: with students and with my wife.

Travel broadens our perspectives by opening our eyes and souls to new realities. Though I was very much aware of the Gorkhaland struggle in Darjeeling even before I visited the place, the visit filled me with sympathy for the Gorkhas. I listened to their views and watched their hardships. I wondered why political leaders failed to understand their people’s woes and find relevant solutions. Why should the genuine aspirations of thousands of people go ignored for decades particularly in a democracy?

The answer to that question will provide a clue to why I stopped travelling in the last few years. In the current political situation in India, travelling is quite unsafe. Far from broadening your mind and ennobling your soul, your travel may get you eliminated physically from the face of the earth.

Mob lynching has become a national pastime in India. In the recent incident of lynching which happened in Mewat (Rajasthan), the people who killed a man for taking home the milch cows he had bought boasted that they had the support of their MLA. Brutal murders are sponsored by various governments in India today.

You can be killed for taking your cow home. You can be killed if you are seen with a child; you will be labelled as a child-lifter. You can be killed for walking with your wife or daughter in a park; there is the ubiquitous moral police lying in ambush behind the bushes in the park.

India’s Prime Minister is travelling all the time though the travels do not seem to broaden his mind or ennoble his soul a bit. Right now he is in Rwanda with a gift of 200 cows. Cows can travel safely in India and may even go abroad with no lesser a personality than the Prime Minister himself.

When will India be once again a country where people will be free to travel without fear?

Let me wind up with some nostalgia from my travels in strange lands when there was nothing to be afraid of.
 
Can i dare to pose like that today?
 
Can I dare to make friends with a child today?
PS. Written for in(di)spire Edition 231: #Travel


Comments

  1. dee NambiarJuly 25, 2018 at 5:22 AM

    So true political climates have been hampering free and fearless travel in several countries. As long as we have heads of state who just will not condemn hate crimes be it against religions and races, we'll see no light at the end of the tunnel. :(

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 25, 2018 at 5:59 AM

      There's a clear political motive behind the assaults and lynching. We live in very pathetic times when rogues are heroes and heroes are projected as villains.

      Delete
  2. Adventrue valleyMarch 13, 2020 at 1:17 PM

    Amazing Information and post for reading.Book on adventurevalley.in for high adventure trekking in Manali. Enjoy breathtaking views of peaks and valleys while trekking in Himachal Pradesh

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Lights of December

The crib of a nearby parish [a few years back] December was the happiest month of my childhood. Christmas was the ostensible reason, though I wasn’t any more religious than the boys of my neighbourhood. Christmas brought an air of festivity to our home which was otherwise as gloomy as an orthodox Catholic household could be in the late 1960s. We lived in a village whose nights were lit up only by kerosene lamps, until electricity arrived in 1972 or so. Darkness suffused the agrarian landscapes for most part of the nights. Frogs would croak in the sprawling paddy fields and crickets would chirp rather eerily in the bushes outside the bedroom which was shared by us four brothers. Owls whistled occasionally, and screeched more frequently, in the darkness that spread endlessly. December lit up the darkness, though infinitesimally, with a star or two outside homes. December was the light of my childhood. Christmas was the happiest festival of the period. As soon as school closed for the...
14 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 1

Inside St Francis Church, Fort Kochi Moraes Zogoiby (Moor), the narrator-protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s iconic novel The Moor’s Last Sigh , carries in his genes a richly variegated lineage. His mother, Aurora da Gama, belongs to the da Gama family of Kochi, who claim descent from none less than Vasco da Gama, the historical Portuguese Catholic explorer. Abraham Zogoiby, his father, is a Jew whose family originally belonged to Spain from where they were expelled by the Catholic Inquisition. Kochi welcomed all the Jews who arrived there in 1492 from Spain. Vasco da Gama landed on the Malabar coast of Kerala in 1498. Today’s Fort Kochi carries the history of all those arrivals and subsequent mingling of history and miscegenation of races. Kochi’s history is intertwined with that of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, the Arbas, the Jews, and the Chinese. No culture is a sacrosanct monolith that can remain untouched by other cultures that keep coming in from all over the world. ...
6 comments
Read more

Schrödinger’s Cat and Carl Sagan’s God

Image by Gemini AI “Suppose a patriotic Indian claims, with the intention of proving the superiority of India, that water boils at 71 degrees Celsius in India, and the listener is a scientist. What will happen?” Grandpa was having his occasional discussion with his Gen Z grandson who was waiting for his admission to IIT Madras, his dream destination. “Scientist, you say?” Gen Z asked. “Hmm.” “Then no quarrel, no fight. There’d be a decent discussion.” Grandpa smiled. If someone makes some similar religious claim, there could be riots. The irony is that religions are meant to bring love among humans but they end up creating rift and fight. Scientists, on the other hand, keep questioning and disproving each other, and they appreciate each other for that. “The scientist might say,” Gen Z continued, “that the claim could be absolutely right on the Kanchenjunga Peak.” Grandpa had expected that answer. He was familiar with this Gen Z’s brain which wasn’t degenerated by Instag...
11 comments
Read more

Five Microtales

1.        Development             Chamar, Lohar, Mehtar and many others stood at a distance, along with their families, and watched their huts being pulled down by a bulldozer. They were asked to leave the place where they had been living for decades. “The government has taken over this land for development works,” an officer said. Chamar, Lohar, Mehtar and the others spread their bedsheets under a flyover over which flew opulent vehicles of development.   2.        Impersonation             The old woman went to the Women’s Welfare office. She wanted to register herself for the Prime Minister’s monthly welfare scheme for the old and unemployable women. She placed her thumb on the scanner for Aadhar authentication. “Not matching,” the officer said. She was arrested for trying to impersonate. Sitti...
8 comments
Read more