Travel for travel’s sake: When you have to go, you have to go

Today, May 3, 2019, S. Vikram of Madurai is leaving home. He is off on an epic journey from India’s southernmost town, Kanyakumari, to Kashmir in the north. On foot.

The 23-year-old has left his job of 1.5 years at a car service centre and is off on his big adventure. He has almost no money. But his will is strong. He believes things will fall in place once he is on the road.

The travel bug is a complicated thing. Or maybe it’s not. When it bites you, you tend to do things many people would consider illogical.

Journalist Vishnudas Chapke recently returned from a three-year round-the-world trip, most of which he did overland. Three years ago, he had left his home and job in Mumbai and planned to travel through Thailand and Myanmar. But once there, he decided to go right around the world.

He used the money he had saved to buy a house. Some friends also helped him with funds and organised crowdsourcing for him. Things fell in place.

Thirty-five countries and three years later, 36-year-old Vishnudas was back in Mumbai with tonnes of stories and a bag full of memories.

Anti-single-use-plastic activist Abhimanyu Chakravorty did not leave his job. But he managed to convince his boss to give him a three-month leave and went off on his motorcycle on a five-country tour to not only raise awareness on the adverse affected of single-use plastic but also to see new places.

He returned to work three months later after having convinced a number of people in Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Nepal and Cambodia not to use single-use plastic and pick up any trash they see on the road and deposit it in an appropriate place.

Stories such as these inspire almost all of us but only a few are able to gather the courage to throw caution (read security of a regular job and social acceptance) to the winds and work on it. It’s important to note that both Vikram and Vishnudas had been inspired by specific people who had been on epic adventures. They wanted to do something like that. But they are the rare people who actually did/are making an effort to do it themselves.

Your society and the world will do its best to pull you into the rat race and make you a nine-to-five robot. But you, and each one of us, have the choice to give yourself a chance to not be part of it. If you seek to travel, see new places and cultures and make friends out of people who live lives completely different from yours, you deserve to give yourself that chance.

Find your way. Be brave. Things have a way of working out.