Journey of a lifetime
OUR journey started on a Sunday in Bombay when I, as a young naval officer, looked out of a first-floor window and saw a woman walking to church on the street below. I had no idea who she was, but just knew that she would one day be my wife. I had done a lot of travelling and wanted to write; Colleen, on the other hand, did not like writing but wanted to travel. A compromise was reached. I resumed travelling, Colleen agreed to write and that’s how we became travel writers.
The first challenge was to get the financial departments of newspapers to accept our joint byline when issuing their payments. For some strange reason, they wanted to issue all the cheques in my name. We did not accept this. It was strange, however, that editors had no problem in crediting our joint byline.
Another challenge was to get our publishers to accept travel as an activity on its own, as distinct from its professional aspect of tourism. Many people seem to believe that tourism, the money-making aspect of travel, was the prime reason for people to go on journeys. It took a long time to convince them that for human beings, travel is a genetic compulsion governed by the ‘wanderlust gene’ (DRD4). It is most active in leaders and is probably the reason why human beings dominate the globe as a species.
When we entered the scene, travel journalism hardly existed; it was largely tourism journalism. Hotels, airlines, travel agents and tour operators sold their competitive services — the destination was incidental. This was not how the wanderlust gene acted. We did not concentrate on tourism services, but on the attractions that lay beyond the horizon.
We did write about the services and products offered by tourism professionals, but these were always incidental to the attractions of those wonderful new places with their strange-sounding names. Sadly, travel journalism is becoming increasingly biased towards tourism journalism. Writers are being lured to promote tourism products rather than the attractions of people and places.
We will not condemn or name the new clones of travel writing, but it is roughly the difference between falling in love with a person and bargaining for the cheapest services offered by that person.
The most joyous part was clearly that it allowed us to make these discoveries together. We were, for instance, delighted when on our visit to Jordan, we drove down a winding ravine to the Rose Red City of Petra and had reasons to suspect its Indian connections. Then, there were the startling conclusions about the origins of Indian civilisation when we confronted the discoveries of Dholavira in Gujarat.
In Switzerland, we boarded a small aircraft piloted by a young pilot. He was an only child. When he found out that so were the two of us, and we had an only child too, he asked one of us to pilot the aircraft. As it swung through the jagged high peaks of the Alps, the partner sat in the backseat praying apprehensively.
We have written for many newspapers in India and abroad. The vast majority of them have barriers beyond which we cannot go. Most are political, some are social. A well-known foreign paper did not want us to write about fishermen because they believed that fishing is a blood sport. Quite frankly, however, The Tribune never imposed such restrictions on us.