Why Do We Travel?

(reproduced from where I originally wrote it — on the Linger Facebook page)

What takes us places? The pretty vistas, and weather? Or is there more? What makes us curious to go explore?

I think it’s wonderful to try and understand what happens there — what people do for a living, for a life, and how their lives flow with seasons, with harvests, with festivals.

It’s delightful to know what birds migrate in and out of there.

Or what foods used to grow, and grow now. Have the food habits changed? What do they eat from there in the season that you’ve never heard of, or not really tasted elsewhere? How do they pronounce it? What changes did the road bring? And then the internet?

What languages do people speak there? Who was there before who you see now came to be? Why do the songs, and the musical instruments, sound like they do? What other lost arts were there?

Isn’t it amazing to see how people live in coexistence with the flora and the fauna of the place?Which, by the way, has so much to explore. Its own variety, its own history. Its own changes with the rains and the snow and the harsh summer.

What’s the relative status of the women there? How does politics work? Community? What are their strengths, beliefs, delights, worries, issues, anxieties?

How do they express all this?

Do they talk to the birds?

What do the children think and say? How do they think of folks from elsewhere? Do they like school? Bollywood?

What is the main occupation of the people there? What were these 500 years ago? What is the idea of India? What are families like? What are their myths, and superstitions?

Why are the buildings the way they are? Wind? Rain? Materials? Professions? What shaped them? How’s that changing? In a good way?

There’s so many answers to find. So many questions to chase. One leads to another. Spinning and threading together stories.

Isn’t travel about those stories?

Sameer