The Delights of Travel

On the way to Kupup, Sikkim

One of the greatest delights of life is travel. My whole life has been a protracted travel, in a way. I started working as soon as I graduated and the place where I managed to secure a teaching job was Shillong, 3500 km from my home. The train journey lasted nearly four days. It could extend indefinitely depending on the hartals and bandhs called by various political organisations on the way, particularly in Assam which was passing through a turbulent phase in those days. I touched seven states of India during each of those annual journeys, learnt about the politics there, and the cultures of the people.

Travel isn’t about reaching your destination; it is about the journey that teaches you, transforms you.

Later, as a middle-aged man, I shifted to Delhi. Again long train journeys (until our school offered to foot part of our flight bills). This time our train passed through a few other states. Apart from these annual journeys were the many trips I made with my wife or with my students. I loved them all for various reasons.

The first reason was the potential for discovery and exploration that each journey offered. One of the most memorable journeys was the one which Maggie and I made to Gangtok and Darjeeling. It was a celebration of many events in our life one of which was the fifteenth anniversary of our wedding. That I had just turned a quinquagenarian was another. [For some of my original posts on that journey, click here.]

Gangtok was a clean hill station quite unlike Shillong and most other places in India that I had ever visited. That is what still remains on top of my memory. The people were very friendly. Most of them were struggling to eke out a living one way or another and tourism was perhaps the leading way. Gangtok has its own iconic landmarks like the Indo-China border and the Nathu La Pass which was unfortunately closed when we visited. We saw China’s territory from atop a mount more or less like Moses saw the promised land of Israel from Mount Nebo in Jordan.

I dreamt of a world without borders as I stood on that peak. I longed for wings that could take me beyond humanmade borders. What do nations mean, after all, if we are all part of just one species? Why should there be such perversions as nationalism and wars?

Absurd questions, I know. The dragon across the border is the reality. It creates worse dragons this side by and by. That’s how the species is. A paradox as gargantuan as the Himalayas are. The greenery is always distant however close you may get to it. The loose boulders that keep slipping away from each other are the reality at hand.

Darjeeling made that clearer than anything else. It was a place of unhappy people. If the people of Gangtok concealed their sorrows beneath amiable smiles, the Gorkhas of Darjeeling wore their discontent on their sleeves. Right from the young Gorkha lad who drove us from Gangtok to Darjeeling by a Tata Sumo to the other one who drove us back to the Bagdogra airport, every Gorkha we met in those couple of days was a discontented person, man or woman.

Discontentment over territory. Gorkhaland was written on all signboards in Darjeeling and Gorkha-dominated areas, though the region belonged to West Bengal. The Gorkhas didn’t want Bengalis though both belonged to the same species. It wasn’t much different from the attitude of the Indians towards the British in the days of the Raj.

I was all too familiar with that attitude by virtue of having lived a decade and a half in Shillong. The tribal people of the Northeast had just that attitude to the Assamese people. While Bengalis bossed over the Gorkhas in Darjeeling, the Assamese did that to the tribals in their state. Asa result, Assam was eventually split into many smaller states. Similarly, an autonomous district council was formed in the Darjeeling area for the Gorkhas.

Are the Gorkhas now happy with their own governing bodies? Are the tribals in the various states of the Northeast happy with their own states? There are at least 40 insurgent outfits active currently in the Northeast, spanning six of the region’s eight states. Manipur, as you know I’m sure, has the highest number of such groups.

I would like to travel in Gangtok and Darjeeling once again to see the difference from then and now. Are the Bhutias, Lepchas and the Nepalis of Sikkim contented with their lot? What about the Gorkhas of Darjeeling with their own autonomy? Well, I think I can guess the answers already. But seeing those answers can be a particularly paradoxical pleasure of travel. That seeing will transform you too. 

Maggie watching the Kanchenjunga from Darjeeling

PS. This post is a part of Blogchatter BlogHop. #BlogchatterBlogHop