As I type this, I’m sitting in a plane, shortly after take off from Delhi. Somewhere far below, I imagine friends rolling through Rajasthan in a car. How I wish I was with them, instead of jostling for elbow space with the gentleman next to me who clearly cannot decipher what disgusted looks mean. In this cramped seat inside a high-pressure tube occupied by 200 people, I cannot help but be struck by the contrast between being transported and travelling.
Only a couple of days ago, I’d found myself listening to another old friend saying, ‘Yaar, if travelling is taken care of, life is 70 per cent sorted.’ He meant, of course, that we should see as many places as possible and do that as often as possible. However, on this beautiful patch of the Earth that everyone calls India, the notion of travelling is still rather trashy, both in intent and in what people leave in their wake. India is a land of tourists, not travellers.
I’m wondering why it was that ‘white people’ moved across the world, colonising whatever they could. Why couldn’t Indians do it, too? Yet another friend had an interesting thing to say about it: ‘Everything is god. We cannot climb mountains because they’re gods. We cannot sail the seas because they are bigger, wetter gods. Our ancestors probably made everything divine so that they could avoid travelling. They were too scared of travelling, so they made everything a pilgrimage. They raised a culture that missed the point.’ He did have a point, in all probability. Everywhere you see laziness and profit, you will find the largely stupid human idea of divinity.
How things have changed today. People are getting out more, fuelled by the simple but powerful need of experiencing more. Increasingly, they’re doing it for little more than the need to be out in the world and to be a real part of it, away from their comfort zones. Imagine if our country was one of travellers, not tourists. Why do I make this distinction? Because travellers evolve an empathy in themselves; it’s what happens after you see more of the world. Travellers are interesting; they regard the world with minds more open than their eyes will ever be. ‘I was there’ is the end of a tourist’s story. ‘I was there’ is only the beginning of one told by a traveller. And there is hope for India yet.
You see, we are all travellers, whether we like it or not. Even if you accomplish the highly enviable task of not moving an inch for an entire day, you will still cover around 29 km per second at roughly 107,300 kph, on this vehicle that performs endless circles around the sun. Think about it for a minute.
India is a land that holds many a motorcycling adventure within its boundaries. There is no end to the terrains, cultures and weathers that await the traveller; each time he or she goes to a place will be different from the last. In all probability, the place hasn’t changed, but the traveller’s perspective has. It’s an endless cycle on a motorcycle, which is why I’m all for more people riding out to explore the world on two wheels. It also makes for a smaller cross section to hit, especially coming the other way in a corner. More than anything else, though, there’s quite nothing like jostling for elbow space with the wind.
