Being a millenial comes with its own pros and cons. From being born in mid/late 80s when the technology boom had not yet hit us, to growing up and becoming literally slaves to our mobile phones and laptops. We have had opportunities that our previous generations couldn't even dream of and (at the very least) the chance to have a quality of life that they could hardly, if ever, hope to afford. Small wonder then, that our hobbies and interests have also evolved from simplistic joys like reading at home to now travelling extensively to the places we read about or opting to attend music festivals in different countries to experience the music itself -these being only a few examples among many, many more.
Like most others of my generation, I enjoy travelling immensely. Travelling was more of a compulsion rather than a hobby growing up thanks to my father's job, but somehow I grew to enjoy the experience and continue to do so till date. But more than the different places, the varied sights and sounds, the amazing food and some extraordinary music that I have experienced during the course of my travels, what stays with me most, always, are the people I meet.
By people, I do not mean just the local people I met, but also the people I met at airports or bumped into in trains or the drivers that took us around. I have been extremely fortunate to have run into some of the most kind and interesting people I know while in transit, and almost all of them I have never met in my life again...but the conversations we had still linger, my interactions with them are still fresh in my head, and I hope these never blur.
As an eighteen year old travelling alone to Delhi to tackle the imposing DU admissions, my co passenger on the flight was a young woman who was switching careers and leaving behind all that she knew to kickstart her dream venture in Delhi. What started as a cordial conversation soon snowballed into how our hopes, dreams and aspirations give us the courage to do things we never thought we are capable of. I never met her again, and I have no clue whether her venture worked out, but that one conversation opened my eyes to just how resilient we can be.
Years later, while stuck at the airport lounge due to a perpetually delayed flight, I was getting visibly irritated as this was the first time I was going home after months after having joined a Medical College in an alien city where I didn't know a soul, nor understood the language. A middle aged lady gently sat me down and started talking to me. I had to half guess what she was saying as my Bangla was still rudimentary, at best. My flight that was to depart at 10am, finally left at 4pm, but by that time, I was chatting comfortably with her and her two little girls. We stayed in touch and their home became a home away from home during my college years.
Imagine striking up a conversation in a train to Khajuraho with an American gentleman in his sixties who was then on his fourteenth visit to India. His story was mind boggling, to say the least. He first visited India as a Medical tourist years ago to get a procedure done, and on that trip, he also decided to go see the usual famous monuments in India like the Taj Mahal and the Khajuraho Temples. Struck by the abject poverty around Khajuraho, he ended up financially adopting an entire village. Every year, he now visits India at least twice a year to make sure the needs of the village are fulfilled. From buying bicycles for all the kids so that they don't have to walk to school miles away, to actually sponsoring the digging up of the only large well in the village, to sponsoring the education and foreign language classes of young boys so that they find jobs as tourist guides, his love for this land shone bright in his eyes. He was funny, talkative and very, very amusing with him trying to impress us by translating words into Hindi or telling us how the malls in Gurgaon and Delhi are "thugs" and "chors" as he preferred the paranthas and dahi at the Delhi taxi stand to the overpriced frozen yoghurt he once tried in some mall! His commitment to his cause was unpretentious and matter of fact, and he didn't think he was doing anything really extraordinary. Here was one man, making a huge difference in that sleepy village's life...a village thousands of miles away from his home in San Diego, nonexistent to even its own countrymen.
These are but a few of the wonderful people I met during my travels, and there are many more such stories and anecdotes that I could spend days writing about. From the chaivallah at the top of the Triund hill in Himachal who rues the arrival of noisy tourists who ruined the peace of the hills, to the cab driver in Krabi, Thailand who at first was reluctant to take us around because we were Indians and in his experience, Indians misbehave with cab drivers; from the boatman at Babughat in Kolkata who had his own tales to tell to the Malayali driver in Diu, who insisted on telling us why he worked so far from home...the list keeps going on.
And yet, it is these human stories that are my catalyst to want to travel more and more and meet more such people and know more of their lives and experiences. Each of them, unknowingly, has contributed in the way I perceive life today and I look forward to more of the same. By and large, travelling for me is less about the DSLR pictures that one posts on social media, and more about observing and meeting new people and listening to their interesting and sometimes bemusing take on life. This, for me, is the biggest takeaway from any travelling experience.
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