Giving Up The Mask

Travel preoccupies a growing population on the globe. We are in the moment of travel. It is a fashion, a necessity, a ritual. Yet its meaning remains strangely elusive.

We have lost the sense of home or we search for it frantically, because we are compulsive travelers. Diasporas, immigrant communities, expatriate mini-countries and newer cultures are emerging simply because we have the travel bug deep within us. There is no world without travel and there is no travel without the world we inhabit.

The non residents travel back, the Western travelers travel, the occasional and the professional tourists visit. Yet few of us reflect on why and how we travel, even when we are stranded in this world, either in our lives as immigrants or at airports.

Travel is as old as we are. Travel made this world. It still makes us. Travel made nations possible and it was travel that made boundaries and borders both a boon and a blessing. How could we not think about travel?

Travel, by its very definition, is an arrogant gesture. It is the impulse to travel that made colonialism possible. It was not the means to travel as naïve experts have you believe. There was certainly, in the history of the world, a moment when the West became Western. Among other things, it was this appetite to travel with arrogance.  The West traveled for spices, sugar, and cocoa, but rarely for discovery. That was accidental; the purpose became domination.  Let us not forget the monumental difference between Chinese travelers like Huen Tsang and Fa-Hein and the British colonials. The former came to India with curiosity and respect.  The latter dominated the land for over 150 years.

There is nothing natural about travel. We learn to travel. We travel because we have the leisure, the discretionary income and an outlook that sees other lands as places to be devoured.  We travel abroad to collect souvenirs, to take photographs and return to our cozy surroundings.  There are countries, cities and provinces that live mainly on travel. It is an industry now. Can you imagine how gorgeous and “historic” Agra would be, if it weren’t for the sole purpose of entertaining visitors to the Taj Mahal?

To understand the contemporary arrogance in the industry called tourism, look no further than magazines like Travel and Leisure or Conde Nast Traveler for uppity gestures of travel that are now normalized in our culture.

Then there is this justification that our money helps the natives, that the money travelers spend makes things better for them, even if in small measures. This is patronizing toward those we visit. It is a rationalization of the privileged and the powerful and an excuse for not altering any structural disparities so their economies and lives could be less dependent and more integral to their traditions and values. The world may seem flat from this side. From the other side, the travelers’ money strips away dignity, tradition and lives that would be a lot more peaceful and progressive.

Travel could make us mature and more patient toward the world and each other.  British-born Indian traveler Pico Iyer says we travel to lose ourselves abroad so as to find home again.  Each moment abroad brings us home in an enlightened way as the very idea of home is changing.

Travel requires, above all, great and sincere humility. It is not empathy or pity that is often embedded in gestures toward the natives, but a sincere humility, realizing that there is a world beyond our own, that it lives by standards and rules unknown to us, and that perspectives are all constructed depending on where we stand. What we are witnessing is not something “weird,” but rather something different, like a book whose language is to be understood. Travel is about encounters between perspectives. Travel is demanding. It requires that we break our inner shells.

The central purpose of travel is not to seek luxury at the expense of others, not to enjoy the fruits of our privilege, but to discover humility and trust and to connect with others.

We travel because we are condemned to return home.  In the meantime, shed all the pretenses, give up the masks and see the world on its terms.