1-7) Why we Travel आपण प्रवास का करतो

                 1.7 Why we Travel 

ICE BREAKERS

     Share your views on how travelling can be a hobby.

     Discuss in the class the benefits of travelling and complete the web.

Travel 

Teaches 

You

To be careful and cautious

To prepare / organize To be prompt and quick

Make a list of your expectations when you travel to some new place:

(a) Food should be delicious and available whenever hungry.

(b)

(c)

(d)

Discuss in the class the various types of travels. Add your own to ones given
below:

Solo 

travel

Culinary 

travel

 Siddarth Pico Raghavan Iyer, (born 1957) at Oxford, England  is known as Pico Iyer. He is a British –born American essayist  and novelist and is best known for his travel writing. He was  awarded the famous Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts 

in 2005 and has won the accolade of Honorary Doctor of  Humane Letters by the Chapman University. He has authored  several books including Video Night in Kathmandu(1988), The   Lad yand The Monk (1991), The Global Soul (2000) and The  Man.  within My Head (2012). He is working as an essayist  for Time since 1986. He also publishes regularly in The New  York Review of Books and The New York Times and other renowned .publications

        In his classic essay ‘Why we Travel’, Pico Iyer explores the reasons for his passion 

To travel and shares them with the readers. He quotes famous writers and puts forth his  own observations while probing into his own instinct to travel. Enormously interesting,  the extract is equally inspiring for the readers who are looking for the adventures in  their lives.

      Why we Travel

        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 become young fools again-to slow time 

down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. The 

beauty of this whole process was best described, perhaps, 

before people even took to frequent flying, by George 

Santayana in his lapidary essay, “The Philosophy of 

Travel.” We “need sometimes,” the Harvard philosopher 

wrote, “to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, 

into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in 

order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and 

to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no 

matter what.”

Few of us ever forget the connection between “travel” 

and “travail,” Travel in that sense guides us toward a 

better balance of wisdom and compassion - of seeing the Guess the meaning : 

riches are differently dispersed

George Santayana: George 

Agustin Nicolas Ruiz 

de Santayana y Borras 

(December 16, 1863 – 

September 26, 1952), was a 

Spanish philosopher, essayist, 

poet and novelist.

lapidary: relating to the 

engraving, cutting, or 

polishing of stones and gems 

(of language- elegant and 

concise.)

solitudes : a lonely or 

uninhabited place.

running some pure hazard: 

accepting a risk or danger

Guess the difference:

• travel and travail world clearly, and yet feeling it truly. For seeing without 

feeling can obviously be uncaring; while feeling without 

seeing can be blind. Yet for me the first great joy of 

travelling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs 

and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I 

knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle. 

Though it’s fashionable nowadays to draw a 

distinction between the “tourist” and the “traveler,” 

perhaps the real distinction lies between those who leave 

their assumptions at home, and those who don’t. Among 

those who don’t, a tourist is just someone who complains, 

“Nothing here is the way it is at home,” while a traveler 

is one who grumbles, “Everything here is the same as it 

is in Cairo - or Cuzco or Kathmandu.” It’s all very much 

the same.

But for the rest of us, the sovereign freedom of 

travelling comes from the fact that it whirls you around 

and turns you upside down, and stands everything you 

took for granted on its head. If a diploma can famously be 

a passport (to a journey through hard realism), a passport 

can be a diploma (for a crash course in cultural relativism). 

And the first lesson we learn on the road, whether we like 

it or not, is how provisional and provincial are the things 

we imagine to be universal. 

We travel, then, in part just to shake up our 

complacencies by seeing all the moral and political 

urgencies, the life-and-death dilemmas, that we seldom 

have to face at home. And we travel to fill in the gaps 

left by tomorrow’s headlines. When you drive down the 

streets of Port-au-Prince, for example, where there is 

almost no paving your notions of the Internet and a “one 

world order” grow usefully revised. Travel is the best way 

we have of rescuing the humanity of places, and saving 

them from abstraction and ideology.

And in the process, we also get saved from abstraction 

ourselves, and come to see how much we can bring to the 

places we visit, and how much we can become a kind of 

carrier pigeon - an anti-Federal Express, if you like - in 

transporting back and forth what every culture needs. Iovereign : supreme and 

effective

Guess the difference : 

• provisional and provincial

complacencies: satisfaction 

of one with oneself or one’s 

own achievements

abstraction: something that 

exists only as an ideafind that I always take Michael Jordan posters to Kyoto, 

and bring woven ikebana baskets back to California.

But more significantly, we carry values and beliefs 

and news to the places we go, and in many parts of the 

world, we become walking video screens and living 

newspapers, the only channels that can take people out 

of the censored limits of their homelands. In closed or 

impoverished places, like Pagan or Lhasa or Havana, we 

are the eyes and ears of the people we meet, their only 

contact with the world outside and, very often, the closest, 

quite literally, they will ever come to Michael Jackson 

or Bill Clinton. Not the least of the challenges of travel, 

therefore, is learning how to import - and export - dreams 

with tenderness.

By now all of us have heard (too often) the old Proust

line about how the real voyage of discovery consists not 

in seeing new places but in seeing with new eyes. Yet one 

of the subtler beauties of travel is that it enables you to 

bring new eyes to the people you encounter. Thus even 

as holidays help you appreciate your own home more-

not least by seeing it through a distant admirer’s eyes-

they help you bring newly appreciative-distant-eyes to 

the places you visit. You can teach them what they have 

to celebrate as much as you celebrate what they have to 

teach. This, I think, is how tourism, which so obviously 

destroys cultures, can also resuscitate or revive them, how 

it has created new “traditional” dances in Bali, and caused 

craftsmen in India to pay new attention to their works. 

Thus travel spins us round in two ways at once: It 

shows us the sights and values and issues that we might 

ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us 

all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty. 

For in travelling to a truly foreign place, we inevitably 

travel to moods and states of mind and hidden inward 

passages that we’d otherwise seldom have cause to visit.

On the most basic level, when I’m in Tibet, though not 

a real Buddhist, I spend days on end in temples, listening 

to the chants of sutras. I go to Iceland to visit the lunar 

spaces within me, and, in the uncanny quietude and Michael Jordan : 

an American former 

professional basketball 

player

Kyoto : once the capital of 

Japan, now is a city on the 

island of Honshu

ikebana: Japanese art of 

flower arrangement

impoverished : reduced to 

poverty

Proust : a French novelist, 

critic and essayist, one of 

the most influential authors 

of the 20th century (10 July 

1871 - 18 November 1922)

subtler : more difficult to 

graspemptiness of that vast and treeless world, to tap parts of 

myself generally obscured by chatter and routine.

We travel, then, in search of both self and anonymity - 

and, of course, in finding the one we apprehend the other. 

Abroad, we are wonderfully free of caste and job and 

standing; we are, as Hazlitt puts it, just the “gentlemen 

in the parlour,” and people cannot put a name or tag to 

us. And precisely because we are clarified in this way, 

and freed of inessential labels, we have the opportunity to 

come into contact with more essential parts of ourselves 

(which may begin to explain why we may feel most alive 

when far from home).

Abroad is the place where we stay up late, follow 

impulse and find ourselves as wide open as when we are in 

love. We live without a past or future, for a moment at least, 

and are ourselves up for grabs and open to interpretation. 

We even may become mysterious-to others, at first, and 

sometimes to ourselves-and, as no less a dignitary than 

Oliver Cromwell once noted, “A man never goes so far 

as when he doesn’t know where he is going.”

There are, of course, great dangers to this, as to 

every kind of freedom, but the great promise of it is that, 

travelling, we are born again, and able to return at moments 

to a younger and a more open kind of self. Travelling is 

a way to reverse time, to a small extent, and make a day 

last a year-or at least 45 hours-and travelling is an easy 

way of surrounding ourselves, as in childhood, with what 

we cannot understand. Language facilitates this cracking 

open, for when we go to France, we often migrate to 

French, and the more childlike self, simple and polite, 

that speaking a foreign language educes. Even when I’m 

not speaking pidgin English in Hanoi, I’m simplified in a 

positive way, and concerned not with expressing myself, 

but simply making sense.

So travel, for many of us, is a quest for not just the 

unknown, but the unknowing; I, at least, travel in search 

of an innocent eye that can return me to a more innocent 

self. I tend to believe more abroad than I do at home 

(which, though treacherous again, can at least help meHazlitt : an English essayist, 

drama and literary critic, 

painter, social commentator 

and philosopher (10 April 

1778 - 18 September 1830)

impulse : a sudden strong 

and unreflective urge to act

Oliver Cromwell : an 

English military and political 

leader (25 April 1599 - 

3 September 1658)

educes : brings out or 

develops something latent or 

potentialto extend my vision), and I tend to be more easily excited 

abroad, and even kinder. And since no one I meet can 

“place” me -no one can fix me in my risumi – I can 

remake myself for better, as well as, of course, for worse 

(if travel is notoriously a cradle for false identities, it can 

also, at its best, be a crucible for truer ones). In this way, 

travel can be a kind of monasticism on the move: On the 

road, we often live more simply (even when staying in a 

luxury hotel), with no more possessions than we can carry, 

and surrendering ourselves to chance.

This is what Camus meant when he said that “what 

gives value to travel is fear”- disruption, in other words, 

(or emancipation) from circumstance, and all the habits 

behind which we hide. And that is why many of us travel 

not in search of answers, but of better questions. I, like 

many people, tend to ask questions of the places I visit, and 

relish most the ones that ask the most searching questions 

back of me: “The ideal travel book,” Christopher 

Isherwood once said, “should be perhaps a little like a 

crime story in which you’re in search of something.” And 

it’s the best kind of something, I would add, if it’s one that 

you can never quite find.

I remember, in fact, after my first trips to Southeast 

Asia, more than a decade ago, how I would come back 

to my apartment in New York, and lie in my bed, kept 

up by something more than jet lag, playing back, in my 

memory, over and over, all that I had experienced, and 

paging wistfully though my photographs and reading and 

re-reading my diaries, as if to extract some mystery from 

them. Anyone witnessing this strange scene would have 

drawn the right conclusion: I was in love.

When we go abroad is that we are objects of scrutiny 

as much as the people we scrutinize, and we are being 

consumed by the cultures we consume, as much on the 

road as when we are at home. At the very least, we are 

objects of speculation (and even desire) who can seem as 

exotic to the people around us as they do to us.

All, in that sense, believed in “being moved” as one 

of the points of taking trips, and “being transported” by risumi : a risumi is a special 

kind of resume that has been 

written with an ISO 8859-

1/14 character set and then 

sent through a mail that 

drops the high bit.

crucible : a situation in 

which people or things are 

severely tested

monasticism : resembling 

monks or their way of life 

living alone

Camus : Albert Camus 

( 7 November 1913 - 

4 January 1960) was a 

French philosopher, author 

and journalist

Christopher Isherwood 

: (26 August 1904- 4 

January 1986) an Anglo-

American novelist, 

playwright, screenwriter, 

autobiographer, and diaristprivate as well as public means; all saw that “ecstasy” 

(“ex-stasis”) tells us that our highest moments come 

when we’re not stationary, and that epiphany can follow 

movement as much as it precipitates it. 

When you go to a McDonald’s outlet in Kyoto, you 

will find Teriyaki McBurgers and Bacon Potato Pies. 

The placemats offer maps of the great temples of the 

city, and the posters all around broadcast the wonders 

of San Francisco. And-most crucial of all-the young 

people eating their Big Macs, with baseball caps worn 

backwards, and tight 501 jeans, are still utterly and 

inalienably Japanese in the way they move, they nod, 

they sip their Oolong teas - and never to be mistaken 

for the patrons of a McDonald’s outlet in Rio, Morocco 

or Managua. These days a whole new realm of exotica

arises out of the way one culture colours and appropriates 

the products of another.

The other factor complicating and exciting all of this 

is people, who are, more and more, themselves as many-

tongued and mongrel as cities like Sydney or Toronto 

or Hong Kong. I am, in many ways, an increasingly 

typical specimen, if only because I was born, as the son 

of Indian parents, in England, moved to America at 7 

and cannot really call myself an Indian, an American 

or an Englishman. I was, in short, a traveler at birth, for 

whom even a visit to the candy store was a trip through 

a foreign world where no one I saw quite matched my 

parents’ inheritance, or my own. Besides, even those who 

don’t move around the world find the world moving more 

and more around them. Walk just six blocks, in Queens or 

Berkeley, and you’re travelling through several cultures 

in as many minutes; get into a cab outside the White 

House, and you’re often in a piece of Addis Ababa. And 

technology, too, compounds this (sometimes deceptive) 

sense of availability, so that many people feel they can 

travel around the world without leaving the room-through 

cyberspace or CD-ROMs, videos and virtual travel. 

There are many challenges in this, of course, in what it 

says about essential notions of family and communitycstasy (ex-stasis) :

Discuss the pun implied by 

the writer.

Teriyaki : a Japanese dish 

of fish or meat marinated in 

soya sauce and grilled

inalieanably : in a manner 

that makes it impossible for 

something to taken away.

Oolong teas : dark coloured 

partly fermented China teas

exotica : strikingly different 

or colourful, belonging to 

distant foreign countriesand loyalty, and in the worry that air-conditioned, purely 

synthetic versions of places may replace the real thing-

not to mention the fact that the world seems increasingly 

in flux, a moving target quicker than our notions of it. But 

there is, for the traveler at least, the sense that learning 

about home and learning about a foreign world can be one 

and the same thing.

All of us feel this from the cradle, and know, in some 

sense, that all the significant movement we ever take is 

internal. We travel when we see a movie, strike up a new 

friendship, get held up. Novels are often journeys as much 

as travel books are fictions; and though this has been 

true since at least as long ago as Sir John Mandeville’s 

colourful 14th century accounts of a Far East he’d never 

visited, it’s an even more shadowy distinction now, as 

genre distinctions join other borders in collapsing.

Travel, then, is a voyage into that famously subjective 

zone, the imagination, and what the traveler brings back 

is - and has to be - an ineffable compound of himself 

and the place, what’s really there and what’s only in him. 

And since travel is, in a sense, about the conspiracy of 

perception and imagination, the two great travel writers, 

for me, to whom I constantly return are Emerson and 

Thoreau (the one who famously advised that “travelling 

is a fool’s paradise,” and the other who “traveled a good 

deal in Concord”). Both of them insist on the fact that 

reality is our creation, and that we invent the places we 

see as much as we do the books that we read. What we 

find outside ourselves has to be inside ourselves for us 

to find it. Or, as Sir Thomas Browne sagely put it, “We 

carry within us the wonders we seek without us. There is 

Africa and her prodigies in us.”

So, if more and more of us have to carry our sense of 

home inside us, we also - Emerson and Thoreau remind 

us-have to carry with us our sense of destination. The 

most valuable Pacifics we explore will always be the vast 

expanses within us, and the most important Northwest 

Crossings the thresholds we cross in the heart. The virtue 

of finding a gilded pavilion in Kyoto is that it allows youin flux : undergoing constant 

frequent changes

Sir John Mendeville : 

the supposed author of 

‘The Travels of Sir John 

Mendeville,’ a travel 

memoir in French which first 

circulated between 1357- 

1371

ineffable : too great or 

extreme to be expressed in 

words.

Emerson : Ralph Waldo 

Emerson (25 May 1803- 

27 April 1882) was an 

American essayist, lecturer, 

philosopher and poet.

Thoreau : Henry David 

Thoreau (12 July 1817- 

6 May 1862) was an 

American essayist, poet and 

philosopher.

Sir Thomas Browne : Sir 

Thomas Browne (19 October 

1605- 19 October 1682) was 

an English polymath and 

author of varied worksto take back a more lasting, private Golden Temple to 

your office in Rockefeller Center.

And even as the world seems to grow more exhausted, 

our travels do not, and some of the finest travel books 

in recent years have been those that undertake a parallel 

journey, matching the physical steps of a pilgrimage 

with the metaphysical steps of a questioning (as in Peter 

Matthiessen’s great “The Snow Leopard”), or chronicling 

a trip to the farthest reaches of human strangeness (as in 

Oliver Sacks’ “Island of the Color-Blind,” which features 

a journey not just to a remote atoll in the Pacific, but to 

a realm where people actually see light differently). The 

most distant shores, we are constantly reminded, lie within 

the person asleep at our side.

So travel, at heart, is just a quick way to keeping 

our minds mobile and awake. As Santayana, the heir 

to Emerson and Thoreau with whom I began, wrote, 

“There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from 

the familiar to the unfamiliar; it keeps the mind nimble; 

it kills prejudice, and it fosters humour.” Romantic 

poets inaugurated an era of travel because they were the 

great apostles of open eyes. Buddhist monks are often 

vagabonds, in part because they believe in wakefulness. 

And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because 

it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are 

mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready 

to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best 

love affairs, never really end.

- Siddarth Pico Raghavan Iyer

Peter Matthiessen: an 

American novelist (22 

may 1927- 5April 2014), 

naturalist, wilderness writer, 

zen teacher and CIA officer

Oliver Sacks : (9 July 1933- 

30 August 2015) a British 

neurologist, naturalist, 

historian of science

Guess the meaning :

• atoll 

• prejudice

• fosters

apostles : vigorous and 

pioneering supporters of an 

idea or a cause

BRAINSTORMING

(A1) Read the first two paragraphs and discuss the need to travel.

(A2) (i) Read the sentence ‘If a diploma can famously ………. in cultural relativism.’ 

Pick the sentence which gives the meaning of the above statement from 

the alternatives given below.

(a) A diploma certificate can be used as a passport and a passport can be 

used as a diploma certificate.

 (b) If one has a diploma, he does not need a passport and if he has a 

passport, he does not need a diploma.

 (c) One can acquire permission to travel to foreign countries for educational 

purposes based on her academic achievements and travelling to foreign 

countries enriches one the most regarding the knowledge and wisdom of 

the world.

(ii) Prepare a list of the litterateurs and their quotations mentioned by the 

writer in the essay.

(iii) ‘The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new places but in 

seeing with new eyes.’ - Marcel Proust. Justify with the help of the text. 

(iv) Read the third paragraph and find the difference between a tourist and 

a traveller as revealed through the complaints made by them.

(v) Write four sentences with the help of the text conveying the fact that 

travelling brings together the various cultures of the different parts of the 

world.

(vi) By quoting Camus, the writer has stated that travelling emancipates us 

from circumstances and all the habits behind which we hide. Write in 

detail your views about that.

(A3) (i) Read the following groups of words from the text.

A B

crooked angle walking video screens

censored limits living newspapers

impoverished places searching questions 

 Words crooked, censored and impoverished in group ‘A’ describe the nouns 

'angle', 'limits' and 'places' respectively. They are past participles of the 

verbs 'crook', 'censor' and 'impoverish'. But in the sentences they act as 

adjectives. Similarly, in group ‘B’ words-walking, living and searching are 

the present participles (‘ing’ forms) of the verbs-walk, live and search. 

But in the above examples they function as adjectives.Discuss in pairs and make list of some more adjectives like this and make 

sentences using them.

(ii) The verbs in bold letters are made up of a verb and a small adverb.

(adverb particle. Adverb particles are not the same as prepositions.). For

example, shake (verb) + up (adverb). These are called ‘phrasal verbs.’ The

meaning of a phrasal verb may be idiomatic-different from the meanings of

the two separate words.

Read carefully the following sentences from the text and underline the 

phrasal verbs.

(a) We travel, then, in part just to shake up our complacencies.

(b) Abroad is the place where we stay up late.

(c) I remember, in fact, after my first trip to Southeast Asia, more than a

decade ago. how I would come back to my apartment in New York.

(d) All, in that sense, believed in, “being moved”…..

(e) But there is, for the traveller at least, the sense that learning about home

and ……

(A4) (i) The words in bold type show to+ verb form. These are infinitives. An 

infinitive is the base form of the verb. Infinitive is formed from a verb 

but it does not act as verbs because an infinitive is not a verb; 's', 'es', 

or 'ing' cannot be added to that.

However, sometimes infinitives may occur without ‘to’. For example,

Thus even as holidays help you appreciate your own home more –…..

In this sentence, though ‘to’ is skipped off, ‘appreciate’ acts as an infinitive’. 

Read the following sentences carefully from the text and find out the 

infinitives. 

(a) We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves.

(b) We travel to bring what little we can,…..

(c) Yet one of the subtler beauties of travel is that it enables you to bring

new eyes to the people you encounter.

(ii) Combine two sentences into one. You may use the word given in the

brackets.

(a) I go to Iceland. I visit the lunar spaces within me. (to)

(b) We have the opportunity. We come into contact with more essential parts

of ourselves. (of)

(c) Romantic poets inaugurated an era of travel. They were great apostles of

open eyes. (being)(d) The travel spins us around. It shows us the sights and values ordinarily 

ignored. (showing)

iii) Read the sentences given below and state whether the underlined words 

are gerunds or present participles.

 (a) As it's a hot day, many people are swimming

 (b) This is a swimming pool.

 (c) It's very bad that children are begging.

 (d) Begging is a curse on humanity.

(A5) Write an email to your friends about your proposed trek. You can take 

help of the following points. You can keep your parents informed about 

it by adding them in BCC.

• A trek in the forest of Kodaikanal

 • Time and duration

 • Type of trek (cycle/ motorbike/ walk)

 • Facilities provided

 • Last date for registration

 • Fees

(A6) There is boom in 'Travel and Tourism' career. Find information about 

different options in this field.

(A7) (i) Find information about:

 (a) Fa Hien

 (b) Huen Tsang

 (c) Ibn Batuta

 (d) Marco Polo

 (e) Sir Richard Burton

(ii) Further reading:

 • 'Childe Herold’s Pilgrimage' - Lord Byron

 • 'Gulliver’s Travels' - Jonathan Swift

 • 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea' - Jules Verne

 • 'Traveling Souls' - Brian Bouldrey