<p>With international destinations within reach for the young and affluent Indians, Shashi Tharoor deliberates on bringing travel within the country to reify the&nbsp;idea of domestic travel for the next generations.</p>

- Shashi Tharoor

To travel is to wilfully leap into the unknown—to give up the assured security of home for the exigencies of the world. This is true whether one journeys from home to a nearby town to see a mela, or to another continent in search of work. Over time, the world and its mores seep, imperceptibly, into our lives and into our minds. We inch closer, howsoever marginally, to become— as the Greek philosopher Diogenes first called himself—a ‘citizen of the world.’

Predictably, travel arouses a swathe of responses: the world can repel or inspire reflections. For some, like Gandhi or Darwin, travel provided intellectual and moral reasons to empathise with others; for some others, like Sayyid Qutb or Pol Pot, the world inspired justifications to murder in name of religious purity and class consciousness. For most of us who fall somewhere between these polarities, travel forces our minds to adapt, to rethink, to re-evaluate our prejudices and to recalibrate our passions in ways far removed from conventional education. Travel, in other words, is a form of learning by other means.

Remarkably, in the education curricula of our country, travel rarely figures. An odd picnic during the school year is the most that one might experience. Beyond that, for large sections of India’s poor and middle class, the world is reduced to one’s city, one’s family, and nowadays whatever the television channels proffer. The wide world and its wonders mean little.

Predictably, the idea of India—whether as a geographical or cultural spac

This story is from the October 2017 edition of Travel+Leisure India.

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