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Memoirs
Wanderlust
by
Attreyee Roy
Chowdhury
When I was about to embark on my maiden voyage, my dear father had a few
words of advice, “Don’t take books with you. Keep your eyes and ears
open and alert. Make the most profitable and fruitful use of your keen
mind. Look out of the window. It will become your window to the world.
And, last but not the least, pay close attention to the person sitting
next to you. Talk to him, ask him all sorts of questions. He will be
your best source of information.”
Globe-trotting. Wandering. Now that’s something everyone would love to
do. Traveling across the length and breadth of different countries –
studying the cultures, lifestyles, food habits prevalent in each. What
better way to broaden your horizon, increase your store of knowledge?
Tempting as it may sound, this is one luxury not all of us can afford.
Especially if we happen to be students. The “real thing” may be out of
reach for most people. But there is one option that comes quite close to
it – Browsing through travel books and magazines and watching travel
documentaries. Traveling is important I think for every student – even
if it is the arm chair-type. For nothing confines the mind more than the
borders of a city. Perhaps it should be made compulsory.
The seeds of wanderlust were sown after I had read Bill Aitken, Pico
Iyer and other confirmed wanderers. Suddenly, I was free, unencumbered
and was transported into another world, another way of life. The veil
over my eyes had been finally lifted. I had the gift of vision again. I
fancied leading a Bohemian lifestyle at Greenwich Village or better
still, wandering from one place to another with no roots of my own. And
this passion for traveling developed into a magnificent obsession. Like
my love affair with Paris.
Like all affairs, my affair with Paris has gone through many stages. It
began in Calcutta at the precocious age of nine – an impressionable age
no doubt. At that age, I decided that I was going to be writer or perish
in the attempt. It may have started with the reading of Jules Verne’s
Around the World in 80 Days or by sensing something in the general
climate of the time that made me feel that no artist could consider
himself fully prepared for his life without eating a croissant for
breakfast in the capital of France.
As I grew older, my appetite for the unseen city was whetted by the
tales of returning travelers. A college friend recounted how he had
picked up a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses in a Parisian bookstore and
had lain on his bed in a cheap hotel near Saint Germain-des-Près for 28
hours without sleep, food or drink reading the book until he had come to
the last thunderous “Yes”. This incident seemed to prove that there was
something magical and all embracing about the city. Later, an artist
friend of mine also regaled me with accounts of every play he had seen
in Paris, every concert he had listened to and every art gallery he had
visited.
The opportunity to do so came at a later date and true to feeling Paris
captured my heart and soul.
Having penpals the world over seemed to accentuate my thirst for
novelty, excitement and adventure. I also became intellectually curious.
For example, I had this friend who was of Lebanese extraction and had
grown up in a small town in Tennessee. These aspects of her life
fascinated me. I wanted to know all about how her father stowed away on
a boat as a young boy to come to America.
It is a fact that traveling makes a person less narrow-minded. It
broadens our horizons, satisfies our enquiring minds and compels us to
develop an interest in our fellow human beings living miles away. I
realized that it was mandatory for me to acquaint myself with the
outside world. Living in a closed, sheltered environment stifled my
natural exuberance and curiosity. I had to look beyond. I had to venture
out. I found myself asking incessant questions about everything –
sometimes bluntly and sometimes with finesse.
English is fairly well spoken everywhere – enough to communicate, anyway
– but the real communication I found, was non-verbal. It didn’t much
matter what people said; it was the passion behind their words, or the
lack of passion; sometimes their silences were more revealing than their
outbursts. Their laughter and intimacies with each other, which
eventually included me, drew me into their worlds, their viewpoints,
their concepts of life, death, happiness, their sense of honor, their
system of what was important and what wasn’t – The Americans, French,
Germans, Italians – made me realize how limited and narrow my horizons
had been all my life.
From the 16th floor of a Bombay skyscraper, the world can seem a very
different place from what it really is. One’s version of the truth is so
much clearer when one has only one view of it. As I traveled, I began to
learn that truth is relative. I had always believed what was right was
right, period. That what I had been taught was wrong was simply wrong.
That the truth was tidy and indeed easy to understand once you’d been
taught to understand what the truth was. But that, alas, is not what I
found. The more I saw and traveled, the more I had to reject everything
that had conditioned my moral ethics while growing up in India.
I began to get more of a distant, objective view of myself. I understood
more of me while attempting to understand others. And it made me more
compassionate, more lenient to a fault, not only for others but for
myself as well.
The more I traveled, the more I realized that fear makes strangers of
people who should be friends. But things did not become simple once I
had established a rapport with the natives. It seemed the more I learned
about people, the more confused I became. Often I contributed to my own
confusion by staying long times in places soaking into whatever the
“thing” was. As though by becoming someone else for a time I would
understand something of how they lived, ate, thought, but I was still ME
when it was all over. So, nothing, not even close proximity could bridge
the gap. Maybe the fundamental differences between people magnify their
attraction. Opposites attract, as the saying goes.
As for myself, traveling has done me a lot of good. To put in a
nutshell, it has worked wonders. Being away from home in the quest of
distant lands also gave me a chance to look at myself with a jaundiced
eye. I have also become more confident and, simultaneously, more relaxed
and at ease with myself.
November 12,
2006
(First published in The Indian Express (Mumbai edition) on 28th
November 1994).
Image under license with
Gettyimages.com
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The Week of November 12, 2006
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Chinese President's Visit to India: Much Ado
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History grants Nitish Kumar an opportunity in
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Pakistan's Military Dictator Besieged by Dr.
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Status: Nemesis of Fools, Smarts and Nations by
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Reaping the Peace Dividend in India's North East
by Col. Rahul K. Bhonsle
A Panoply of Orchestrated Fraud by V.
Sundaram
Buddhism and Quantum Physics by Christian
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Are We Really Civilized? by TA Ramesh
Anger of Varunavrat by VK Joshi
Shaking up the Structure by Zofeen T Ebrahim
Wanderlust by Attreyee Roy Chowdhury
Khat e Kabuliwala: Inside an ancient temple near
Mazar-e-Sharif by Rajesh Talwar
Following the Coast by Naiya Sivaraj
Pachmarhi, Nature's Gift to Madhya Pradesh by
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If You Can't Slap 'Em, Snap 'Em by Elayne Clift
Women Presidents Pack a Punch by Ambujam
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The Politics of Hair by Nilanjana Biswas
Murky Meat Factories by Alka Arya
Sex Workers' Bank - Healthy Returns by
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A Louder Voice by Rodrick Mukumbira
Reneging the Blue Billion by Priyadarsi Dutta
Strange are the Ways of God by Arya Bhushan
The Witty Side by Melvin Durai
How to Deal With - Analytical Physiologist Disorder
by Michael Levy
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