Why I travel

My motivation to travel, I mean spend your own money for vacation to distant places, is mixed with all kinds of confusion. I am almost always not sure why I want to go to someplace, where I end up anyway, later savoring it as a part of my personal history. Yet when I am in the process of travelling, that is constantly experiencing a kaleidoscope of sweet chunks of life, I enjoy. I take photographs hoping to capture the essence and don’t write about it. I almost always read up on the places I would visit, its history, culture and so on hoping to have a greater understanding when I am actually at the place, but it never happens. On my head, I just carry a junk load of information and images from the photographs that I have seen over the internet, that is all.  How can you understand a place when you are just taking a fleeting glance of it or can you? I just end up, doing a match-up of the things I visit with the information loaded into me hoping to etch the trip more thoroughly in my psyche.

Yet, everyplace has its own power and charm and that cannot be captured, duplicated and reproduced for mass consumption. Probably it is for this reason, even today, in the age of information, people travel. To gather, feel and relish the pearls of very life as lived out in a diverse environment. There was a time when human beings hardly ever traveled from the place of their birth, only in search of food and at the most a few miles. Only the daring ventured out, not only to forage for food but in hope of a life that is far better than they have been given to by their birth. Then there were the traders who almost always traveled far and wide in search for a better deal, profit, exotic stories. If they survived and when they came home, loaded, they would be the local stars, source of all new things for the inquisitive, variation seeking human mind. Even in my early childhood, growing up in a lower middle class family of a developing country, I faced the similar situation.

Every now and then, somebody who traveled some places be it the Ellora caves , the Taj Mahal or Egyptian pyramids would be a hero to me. This man has seen the things with his own eyes , the very objects we see as photographs in books and magazines or in movies. He was hero. Had it been a previous generation or two before me, he would have been an absolute hero, being the only source of information as no books or movies were there, only narration and hand drawing.

The very first time I travelled was for work. I had to leave the city I grew up to travel to a different city within India, Hyderabad. India is like Europe, each state in India is like a country, completely with its own language, culture and idiosyncrasies.  I found myself for the first time looking at conversation instead of participating in the dialogue, searching patterns in the written curves of alien language and savoring on the hot food of Andhra thali. I grew up in Kolkata , a cosmopolitan city and knew almost everything about Telegu‘s and have also experienced the culture to an extent but never like this. It humbled me , my urban, cosmopolitan , sophisticated attitude. I felt I grew, started to appreciate the world we share and embraced the vulnerability of the unfamiliar.

It is then I started travelling, connecting to the narcotic hum of possibility that starts breathing when I juxtapose the cool midnight air of Leicester Square, London with the stones of Qutub Minar, Delhi. I read about them , seen pictures, movies,  every one of them yet when you stop in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris and next at Golconda Fort, next at Konark Temple, Orissa , India you start feeling the act of motion. The art of being ’on the road’, always, at least intellectually, deepened my life.  I did not travel just for scenery or for the food , for the history ,culture, for the people but for everything . The whole, the good the bad and the ugly .

I travel for inspiration. When you are inspired what do you do? Jump with joy, smile or keep quiet, walk away. I can do any number of things still I would feel an incredible mental simulation urging me to say aloud that this is life and I am alive. I still remember one day of the early morning sunrise on the beaches of Bakkhali, Kolkata , WestBengal, India. As the sun slowly rose from the horizon turning the sky red, like any other day , but on that day I was there , standing as usual with other tourists, I felt a deep happiness rising through my spine whirling and turning and merging with the deep red color of the sea water. It was the brief moment that I remember , it was the same fleeting moment when I was looking at Michelangelo’s painting through my binoculars in Vatican , Rome or standing in Key West sea shore , Florida watching a teenage couple dancing away a fine evening on the swinging Cuban drum beats,at Ellora, looking at the majestic rock cut temple. Yes I took photographs. Lots of them, but they cannot and will not be able to bring these feelings, maybe remind me of them.

I travel for uncertainty. Like the commuter bus that I ride to work every day my life in general is bound by rules and predictability. A structure that do not allow sudden drafts of whispering breeze , it is for this, I have to step out into the world of events that can occur at random. Travel. Travel for pleasure. Travel for freedom, complete total final and absolute. I felt it , the essence of unknown when in one evening I got lost in the streets of Tokyo , when on a sudden turn of events in a zoo we witnessed the birth of a giraffe and always when walking down the streets of Kolkata , India , my favorite city, the people , the colors, food ,light ,dust ,always discovering new things.  I see what I see, I do not arrive to see.

I travel to indulge in my addiction to aesthetics. The beauty , the intoxication of it , I still remember one of most fascinating moment of  my life watching the setting sun on Grand Canyon. It was like music of gorgeous light be played on the rocks of the canyon, at a very grand scale. I remember the lamp , the beauty of evening Ganga Puja on the Varanasi Ghat, India, candle like structure of Bryce Canyon, a beautiful girl painting on cobbled street corner in Sienna, Italy, fall colors at the Kancamgas Highway in New Hampshire, the sound of Buddhist humming at Asakusa temple, Japan or the feel of soft white sand and blue waters of Bahamas. So many of them, like rag pieces, they hummed, murmured and drugged my aesthetic sensation over and over. It was hallucinatory, allowing me to float on the smile of the truth.

I travel to love. As Tagore put it beautifully ‘You live the world you love it.’  I love the world and want to love it more with all my integrity, passion and emotion. The world is an endless mystery and to love it I will need to discover it and so I travel. From walking barefoot on the green grass lawn of leaning tower of Pisa , to enjoying sumptuous cooking at Lucknow restaurant, to talking to an astronaut at Kennedy Space Station I would like to embrace the life of the world dancing on the edges of time . A passionate embrace of love of this simple reality is the only fulfillment of my life.

For all of the above etches a celebration of journey of the world into my mind. I create memories. I travel to create memories of my own.  The recollections, which I can think over and over again like the notes of various ragas enriching my various moods and transcending, merging my soul to the eternity of life and universe.