Today I came across a remarkable article by Shashi Tharoor, explaining the merits of travelling, esp. within the country itself. I choose the word "remarkable" because this is very much similar to what I feel and to what I am trying to do whenever I get a chance. Following are the excerpts from that article that I would have liked to say but Shashi Tharoor made my job easier....!
To travel is to wilfully leap into the unknown - to give up the assured security of home for the exigencies of the world.
We inch closer, howsoever marginally, to becoming - as the Greek philosopher Diogenes first called himself - a "citizen of the world".
For some, like Mahatma Gandhi or Charles Darwin, travel provided intellectual and moral reasons to empathise with others
travel forces our minds to adapt, to rethink, to reevaluate our prejudices and to recalibrate our passions in ways far removed from conventional education.
We may know more facts about others, but our discourse suffers from Asperger's syndrome: the remarkable inability to empathise. Unlike those individuals who suffer from Asperger's, we have a choice.
If we are to grow into a country that is open-minded, we must learn to not just leave the windows of our homes open to the world, as the Mahatma advised us, but also step out and engage with the world. The best place to start is in India itself - large, multiple, diverse, and in many ways unknown to its own citizens. To encourage young Indians to travel through their own land would reify the idea of India for the next generation. It would be a journey well worth undertaking by all of us.
http://www.hindustantimes.com/editorial-views-on/columnsothers/The-end-is-a-journey/Article1-761529.aspx
To travel is to wilfully leap into the unknown - to give up the assured security of home for the exigencies of the world.
We inch closer, howsoever marginally, to becoming - as the Greek philosopher Diogenes first called himself - a "citizen of the world".
For some, like Mahatma Gandhi or Charles Darwin, travel provided intellectual and moral reasons to empathise with others
travel forces our minds to adapt, to rethink, to reevaluate our prejudices and to recalibrate our passions in ways far removed from conventional education.
We may know more facts about others, but our discourse suffers from Asperger's syndrome: the remarkable inability to empathise. Unlike those individuals who suffer from Asperger's, we have a choice.
If we are to grow into a country that is open-minded, we must learn to not just leave the windows of our homes open to the world, as the Mahatma advised us, but also step out and engage with the world. The best place to start is in India itself - large, multiple, diverse, and in many ways unknown to its own citizens. To encourage young Indians to travel through their own land would reify the idea of India for the next generation. It would be a journey well worth undertaking by all of us.
http://www.hindustantimes.com/editorial-views-on/columnsothers/The-end-is-a-journey/Article1-761529.aspx
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