Travel as Redeemer

One of those good old travels

 Eric Weiner's article, 'Are We Born to Wander?', in the Feb issue of the National Geographic stirred my dormant nostalgia for travel. I have always loved travels and had planned certain exotic trips before the epic pandemic descended on us all with unprecedented vengeance. As soon as there was some relaxation to the lockdown, Maggie and I made some short trips which were of course nowhere near the 'leaps of faith' that Weiner describes in his article. Something is better than nothing. A stride if not a leap. 

The pandemic has dampened my aging spirit quite a bit. Weiner's article consoles me because it quotes the example of James Hopkins, a friend of the author living in Kathmandu. Hopkins is a Buddhist who was contented with his meditations and chanting and lighting of lamps. But now he looks haggard and dejected. He longs for the "old 10-countries-a-year schedule": visiting ten countries in a year. The pandemic has left a crack in the contemplative armour that the Buddhist had built up over the years. 

If I can't make those trips to lands of the ineffable, to the inevitable uncertainties of new places, to the borders of my tepid imagination, I would have loved to make some short trips at least. But my government throws bizarre uncertainties on my path: mounting prices of everything from my modest car's fuel to the cooking gas in the kitchen of a humble restaurant. I know we shouldn't look at travel that way. "If we stopped to do the cost-benefit analysis, we'd never go anywhere," says Weiner. In spite of everything, we do travel. Travel is in our genes. 

Age has not withered the travel bug within. I still remember some of those old travels. In the younger days, they were usually routine affairs like travelling by Indian railways from Cochin to Guwahati. Some of those journeys took a whole week instead of the scheduled 3 days because of some strike (bandh, hartal, riot, etc) in Assam. The very first journey of mine with Maggie (just after our wedding) kept us in New Jalpaiguri railway station for two whole days because of one those bandhs called by one of the numerous political outfits in Assam. Finally when we arrived in Shillong, the place of my work, Maggie had aged by a couple of years. That is one of the gifts of travel in India. That is also part of the great leap of faith that travel essentially is. 

Later Maggie and I made some exquisitely memorable journeys. Shimla, Gangtok, and Darjeeling are a few of them. Though we had spent five excruciating years in a hill station (Shillong), these hills were able to enchant us with their unique charms. Shillong doesn't beckon us at all. But the other hills do. That's another fact about life. The experiences given by certain places leave aftertastes that even leaps of faith cannot redeem. 

Redemption. That's what travel is essentially about. Travel redeems you from yourself. Travel forces new perspectives on you. New paradigms. A new heart and soul. I long to pack my bag once again.