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Travel for travel's sake

The accusation that writer V S Naipaul makes against Indians is that they are inward-looking. He means that we don't observe the outside world

Only around 5 per cent of all Indians have a passport, so the vast majority of us have never been abroad and never been exposed to a different cultural space. Photo: iStock
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Only around 5 per cent of all Indians have a passport, so the vast majority of us have never been abroad and never been exposed to a different cultural space. Photo: iStock

Aakar Patel
There is a little jewel of a quote that appears on ads for channels like Discovery that you may have seen. It reads, “We travel to find ourselves.” It’s taken from Pico Iyer and the full quote is: “We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. 

And we travel, in essence, to