On one’s travels, one encounters not just other cultures but also hundreds of other travellers. Are Indians good travellers? Do you find from your experience that Indian tourists are in any way different from other ones?
Iyer visited Nepal for his first book, Video Night in Kathmandu (Photo by: Gopal Chitrakar / Reuters
Indians are born multiculturalists, and the Indians one sees travelling are used to speaking four or five languages and navigating several cultures every time they walk down the street in Mumbai or Delhi. They are also trained from birth in some of the rigours of travel—in patience and in flexibility, in other words—are as fluent in English as any traveller on earth and tend to bring a particular energy and engagement that you often don’t find in, say, travellers from China. It’s impossible, and folly, to generalize about travellers, but urban Indians are often travellers from birth, and much less thrown off, say, by New York or Hong Kong than the average American or a visitor from Tokyo, say. Among prominent Indian writers, say, V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh, Jhumpa Lahiri—and tens of others—all grew up with many, many different places inside them. It’s no surprise that they were in the perfect time, and place (or places) to hymn into being our new, multinational universe.
What is the best travel book you have read recently? And which is your favourite travel book from before the revolution in travel in the 20th century?
A Crime So Monstrous, by the young American writer Benjamin Skinner, tracing the realities of human trafficking from Haiti to India, does what every great book about place should do: opens the eyes, shakes the conscience and lights up those corners of the world that few of us would dare to inspect first-hand. A truly global work, it shows us the realities that underlie many of our casual pleasures, and reminds us of those truths that affect far more people than (those who) travel on holiday around the globe. After reading it, you cannot look at that red-light street in Romania, or that smiling face in Cambodia, in the same way.
As for classic books, all my books have been written, as readers probably know too well, in the shadow and light of Emerson and Thoreau (who enjoy first word and last in my most recent book, and who offer the epigraphs to at least three other of my works). So, it’s no secret, I fear, that my favourite book of travel is Thoreau’s Walden, which takes us around the world, while never moving more than a mile and a half from its author’s home, which reminds us that true travel takes place in the descrying of new ideas and the entertaining of new horizons—and which asks us, unblushingly, “Why go around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar?” Insofar as travel is really about transformation—the only reason ever to leave home—Emerson and Thoreau remind us that the truest and deepest journeys can indeed be found while walking around one’s backyard.
Lastly, what three things would you absolutely want to take with you on any journey?
A good book—Greene, Mistry, Lawrence, Roth—some medicines, and a sense of humour.
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WORLD TOUR