WANDERING TRAVELLER

Bhavnagar and Lucknow, two cities that weren't on my travel map... But for personal and professional reasons, I found myself in these two cities within the first month of the year itself. It was like stepping into a different world altogether. A world different from the one I live in Mumbai... The roads were cleaner, the infrastructure was better, and the cities just generally seemed a happier place to live in. I'd heard stories of small-town India... Of narrow-mindedness, poverty and uneducated literacy. But I was pleasantly surprised to see that so many of those stories were just that--stories. They're as archaic as the stereotypes of big-city living. If I hadn’t actually been to these places, I wouldn't have known...

Finding myself in these cities made me think about all the places I've been to and how they've enriched my life. If I hadn't travelled the way I had, would I be a different person today? Undoubtedly so. Travelling has made me a better person, a more evolved mind than I would have been otherwise.  

Travelling has been a passion and a part of my life for a very long time. There is an innate need to see the world… The many similarities and the stunning differences. One of the things I learned was that while our geographies and cultures might be diametrically opposite, human beings are the same everywhere. The core of mankind if universal. We all want the same things… Our desires, goals, fears, victories are pretty much the same the world over. Our expression and way of handling situations may differ, but emotions don't. A child in India is the same as a child in America... The same things give them joy and make them cry… The only thing that separates the two are boundaries on a map. But when you're in a plane in the skies, thousands of metres above the ground, you forget about maps and boundaries. You see earth like god meant it to be... Vast, unending and unbroken. Being in that plane has taught me that differences are made in our heads, not hearts… Every country that I've been to has been as welcoming or unwelcoming as I feel in my own country and city. Some people are friendly, some are rude. Some welcome you with open arms, some try to cheat you. It's the people that are good or bad, not countries and certainly not cultures. A person is a product of his or her conditioning and childhood influences. Travelling has made me realise how heartless and ill-informed most generalisations are.

Another thing I've learnt because of travelling is the ability to survive, and be happy, with very few worldly possessions to call my own. It gave me the courage to beat odds and survive. If I could live out of a suitcase in a small hotel room hitchhike my way around an unknown country, I could start from scratch in my own city if the need ever arose. Travelling taught me fearlessness. It levelled the playing field.

Travelling also changed my relationship with wealth. Very often, as we move up and ahead in life, we tend to restrict our experiences. Everything must be just so. We won't board the plane unless it's business class, won't check in the hotel unless it's a five star, won't drink single malt unless it's of 25-year-old bottling... The list is endless. My love for travelling has taught me to discard these rules. Should money be allowed to dictate your life? If walking in Hyde Park gave me happiness when I was a poor NDA dropout, why should the parameters change now that I'm something more? Traveling taught me that happiness is not a function of money… While travelling, I've met people who've shown me how to live it up whether I have 10 dollars or 1000.

I've met some truly amazing women while travelling. Some I dated, some I've forgotten and some of them I'm still in touch with. Somehow when you travel, you leave the world you inhabit behind and enter a new world... It's like wiping the slate clean, if only for a shirt period of time. When you travel, you leave behind your existence and the baggage that goes with it. There are no expectations and no history. There's no past, no future, just the present. Because there's no agenda, nothing to gain from these brief interludes in time, somehow, I feel we're more ourselves on these journeys than we can ever be while living our everyday lives. I've had some wonderfully honest and meaningful conversations with the women I've met while travelling… And some of them have remained friends beyond the few days that we spent together. In their own unique ways, they've enriched my life. And even the ones I'm not in touch with, I've cherished them long after they've gone.

We live in a large world, but we live in small world too. Sometimes, even big cities with their big parking lots and looming buildings can start to suffocate you. I find that when I feel that way, travelling is the only antidote. It makes me feel at peace with the world. Sometimes our jobs, responsibilities and simply the act of living starts to feel too difficult. Everything seems graver, more magnified and larger than life. When I travel, it puts things into perspective. It makes me see my problems in a new light. It makes me realise that every day, people across the world grapple with problems as big as and far bigger than mine. Travelling has taught me to never take myself too seriously. When I meet people from far corners of the world, I realise that life and everything around it doesn’t revolve around me and me alone. Sometimes you need a little distance to see the bigger picture... To see that you're just a tiny speck in a spectacularly vast universe.

Whenever I come back from a trip and give all my bills to my accountant, he always reminds me that if I’d saved up the money instead, I could have bought myself a one-bedroom apartment in Kandivili, or maybe a much fatter bank balance. His advice always makes me smile. When I die, do I want to go looking at the walls of that one-bedroom in Kandivili, or do I want to go thinking about the continents, the countries, the people and all the experiences? No number of zeroes in my bank balance can compare to my bank of memories… So see you soon in another city… Which one? I don’t know yet! :)