Travel used to be a pleasure, now it has
become an industry. No doubt there are
greater facilities for traveling today than a hundred years ago and governments
with their official travel bureau have exploited the tourist trade, with the
result that the modern man travels on the whole much more than his grandfather.
In order to understand that art of travel,
beware of the different types of false travel which is no travel at all. The first kind of false travel is travel to
improve one’s mind. The second type of
false travel is travel for conversation, in order that one may talk about it
afterwards. The tourists are so busy
with their cameras that they have no time to look at the places
themselves. Of course, they have the
privilege of looking at them in the pictures afterwards when they go home. It is natural that the more places one
visits, the richer the memory will be, and the more places there will be to
talk about.
This sort of foolish travel necessarily
produces the third type of false travelers, who travel by schedule, knowing
beforehand exactly how many hours they are going to spend in Shimla or Shillong.
Before moving he makes a perfect schedule and religiously adhere to it. Bound by the clock and run by the calendar as
he is at home, he is still bound by the clock and run by the calendar while
abroad.
True motive of travel should be to travel
to become lost and unknown. A true
traveler is always a vagabond. The
essence of travel is to have no duties, no fixed hours, no mail, no inquisitive
neighbors, no receiving delegation, ad no destination. A good traveler is
one who does not know when he is going
to, and a perfect traveler does not know where he came from. A good traveler
does not care for anybody in particular but cares for mankind in general. Having no particular friend but having
everybody’s one’s friend, loving mankind in general, he mixes with them and
goes about observing the charms of people and their customs.
It is true that there is something which terrifies
the and surprises the soul to find that mother nature, with her great skill and
wisdom and energy has suddenly produced a thing like a stone cave or a blessed
spot. As it is said the lion uses the
same energy to attack an elephant as to attack a wild rabbit, so does the
mother nature do the same thing. She
uses all her energies to produce a stone cave or a blessed spot, but she also
uses all her energy in producing a bird, a fish, a flower, a blade of grass or
even a feather, a scale, a petal, a leaf.
To comprehend the different organs of the
horse is not to comprehend the horse itself what we call the horse exists
before its different organs. Laoste said, “Thirty spokes are grouped around the
hub of a wheel and when they lose their own individuality, we have a
functioning cart. We knead clay into a
vessel and when the clay loses its own existence we have a usable
utensils. We make a hole in the wall to
make windows and doors and when the windows and doors lose their own existence,
we have a house to live in.
