My father, who lives in Kanpur, has a peculiar pastime: reading the railway timetable. His eyes shine with childlike pleasure as he scans its pages, lingering on the list of trains connecting one place to another — sometimes Patna to Mumbai, sometimes Jabalpur to Howrah, sometimes Amritsar to Hyderabad, and so forth.
He knows he would never make most of these journeys and therefore the information he gathers from the timetable is pretty much useless — I mean, why should he ever need to travel from Patna to Mumbai — but he loves the vicarious travel. The timetable is his ultimate travel book. By reading the schedules of the innumerable trains listed in it, he conjures up journeys to places he has never seen or will never see.
I have inherited his love for vicarious travel. I may not own a copy of the railway timetable, but my personal library boasts of an ever-growing collection of travel books. But today, there’s a gadget that weighs far less than the humble railway timetable — leave alone the books on my shelf — and yet takes the cake when it comes to promoting vicarious travel: the smartphone.
A friend recently took the train from Delhi to Mumbai, and she sent me pictures on WhatsApp throughout the journey — of the electronic display at the New Delhi station showing the train’s time and platform of departure, of the coach’s interiors, of the food, of the scenery outside and, finally, the crowds at Mumbai Central. I felt as if I had travelled.
Then there is a schoolmate who now lives in Romania, and I visit him every weekend — through WhatsApp. I go fishing with him, I go on long drives with him, and I relax with him by the pool. Not to mention the countless other places I visit, thanks to Facebook, throughout the day — one moment in Texas, another moment in Melbourne, yet another moment in Jaipur, then suddenly in a corner of my own city, Chennai. It is like leading many lives at the same time: your own, as well as of the people who matter to you.
But all things instant come at a price. If you like to receive the pleasures of vicarious travel, you must also give back the pleasure to those who want to journey with you. And in doing so, you prevent yourself from being gripped by the sensations of being in a new place or situation: you are forever a photographer, a spectator, and hardly a participant in the moment.
This realisation first dawned on me a few years ago (not that I am any wiser now) in the hill station of Kasauli. Late one morning, when I set out on a walk on the Upper Mall, I was so overcome by the beauty of everything that I saw (even the roadside bin looked beautiful) that I began taking pictures — for posterity, for showing off on Facebook, and for putting on my blog.
Three hours later, as I returned to the guest house and was going through the pictures, it struck me: okay, so I have the evidence of the walk, but where’s the sensation of it? In my eagerness to share my joy, I had forgotten to enjoy.
