Why we travel questions and answers | Why we travel 12th class
ICE BREAKERS
Question - 1. Share your views on how travelling can be a hobby:
Solutions :
Students can discuss their views on travelling, both in India and in foreign countries, and how it can be a leisure time activity.
Question - 2. Discuss in the class the benefits of travelling and complete the web:
Solutions :
Make a list of your expectations when you travel to some new place:
Solutions :
[a] Food should be delicious and available whenever hungry.
[b] Travelling should be easy and comfortable.
[c] Hotel accommodation should be inexpensive and clean.
[d] Weather should be sunny and pleasant.
Question - 3. Discuss in the class the various types of travels. Add your own to ones given below:
Solutions :
4
[A1] - Why we travel questions and answers
Question - 1. Read the first two paragraphs and write down the reasons one needs to travel.
Solutions :
One needs to travel:
initially, to lose ourselves next, to find ourselves
to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers tell us.
to bring our ignorance and knowledge to cultures which are rich in ways different from ours.
to become young fools again
to slow time down and to get taken in to fall in love once more
to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into accepting dangers and risks
to sharpen the edge of life, and to taste hardship
to leave all one’s beliefs and certainties at home, and see everything in a different light
[A2] - Why we travel questions and answers
Question - [i] Read the sentence ‘If a diploma can famously ……………. in cultural relativism.’ of this extract on page 67 of the textbook. Pick the sentence which gives the meaning of the above statement from the alternatives given below.
[a] A diploma certificate can be used as a passport and a passport can be used as a diploma certificate.
[b] If one has a diploma, he does not need a passport and if he has a passport, he does not need a diploma.
[c] One can acquire permission to travel to foreign countries for educational purposes based on one’s academic achievements, and travelling to foreign countries enriches one the most regarding the knowledge and wisdom of the world.
Solutions :
[c] One can acquire permission to travel to foreign countries for educational purposes based on one’s academic achievements, and travelling to foreign countries enriches one the most regarding the knowledge and wisdom of the world.
Question - [ii] Prepare a list of the litterateurs and their quotations mentioned by the writer in the extract.
Solutions :
Names of the litterateurs: Camus, Christopher Isherwood
Quotations: Camus said, “What gives value to travel is fear”- Christopher Isherwood once said, “The ideal travel book should be perhaps a little like a crime story in which you’re in search of something.”
Question - [iii] ‘The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new places but in seeing with new eyes.’ – Marcel Proust. Justify with the help of the text.
Solutions :
This means that we don’t really have to discover new landscapes or new sights to be in the real process of discovery. Often, we simply need to change our perspective, the way we look at things, to understand them and to raise them to a new, exhilarating level.
Question - [iv] Read the third paragraph and find the difference between a tourist and a traveller as revealed through the complaints made by them.
Solutions :
1. A tourist is someone who does not leave his assumptions at home and complains, ‘Nothing here is the way it is at home’.
2. A traveller is someone who leaves his assumptions at home but grumbles, ‘Everything here is the same as it is in Cairo – or Cuzco or Kathmandu.’
Question - [v] Write sentences from the extract conveying the fact that travelling brings together the various cultures of the different parts of the world.
Solutions :
1. You can teach them what they have to celebrate as much as you celebrate what they have to teach.
2. This, I think, is how tourism, which so obviously destroys cultures, can also resuscitate or revive them, how it has created new “traditional” dances in Bali, and caused craftsmen in India to pay s new attention to their works.
Question - [vi] By quoting Camus, the writer has stated that travelling emancipates us from circumstances and all the habits behind which we hide. Write in detail your views about that.
Solutions :
When we are at home, we have set ideas and habits, which we are reluctant to change. We dress in a particular way and we behave in a particular way, because the people around us know us and expect that behaviour. We hide behind all this. However, when we travel, no one knows us and there are no expectations about a particular type of behaviour, dress or habits. Hence, we have a feeling of freedom and emancipation from our circumstances and habits.
[A3] - Why we travel questions and answer
Question - [i] Read the following groups of words:
- crooked angle
- censored limits
- impoverished places
- walking video screens
- living newspapers
- searching
Question -s Discuss in pairs and make a list of some more adjectives like this and make sentences using them.
Solutions :
1. burnt cottage
2. disturbed night
3. hidden house
4. missing necklace
5. probing Question -s
6. standing instructions
Sentences:
1. burnt cottage – The mystery of the burnt cottage was finally solved.
2. disturbed night – Rohan had a disturbed night because of the noise from the road construction.
3. hidden house – I could see the hidden house only after climbing a hill.
4. missing necklace – The detective was sure that the missing necklace would be soon found.
5. probing Question -s – The lawyer asked the witness some probing Question -s.
6. standing instructions – The queen had given standing instructions that she was never to be disturbed while sleeping.
Question - 1. Read the following sentence and pick out the phrasal verb.
We travel, then, in part just to shake up our complacencies.
Solutions :
shake-up
[A4] - Why we travel questions and answers
Question - 1. Read the following sentences carefully and find out the infinitives :
[a] We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves.
[b] We travel to bring what little we can, …………
[c] Yet one of the subtler beauties of travel is that it enables you to bring new eyes to the people you encounter.
Solutions :
[a] to lose, to find
[b] to bring
[c] to bring
Question - [ii] Combine the two sentences into one using the word given in the brackets:
[a] I go to Iceland. I visit the lunar spaces within me. [to]
[b] We have the opportunity. We come into contact with more essential parts of ourselves, [of]
[c] Romantic poets inaugurated an era of travel. They were great apostles of open eyes.
[d] The travel spins us around. It shows us the sights and values ordinarily ignored, [showing]
Solutions :
[a] I go to Iceland to visit the lunar spaces within me.
[b] We have the opportunity of coming into contact with more essential parts of ourselves.
[c] Romantic poets, being great apostles of open eyes, inaugurated an era of travel.
[d] The travel spins us around, showing us the sights and values ordinarily ignored.
Question - [iii] Read the sentences given below and state whether the underlined words are gerunds or present participles.
[a] As it’s a hot day, many people are swimming
[b] This is a swimming pool.
[c] It’s very bad that children are begging.
[d] Begging is a curse on humanity.
Solutions :
[a] present participle
[b] present participle
[c] present participle
[d] gerund
[A5] - Why we travel questions and answers
Question - 1. Write an email to your friends about your proposed trek. You can take help of the points given below. You can keep your parents informed about it by adding them in BCC.
A trek in the forest of Kodaikanal
Time and duration
Type of trek [cycle/ motorbike/ walk]
Facilities provided
Last date for registration
Fees
[A6] - Why we travel questions and answers
Question - 1. There is a boom in ‘Travel and Tourism’ career. Find information about different options in this field.
[A7] - Why we travel questions and answers
Question - [i] Find information about:
[a] Fa Hien
[b] Huen Tsang
[c] Ibn Batuta
[d] Marco Polo
[e] Sir Richard Burton
Question - [ii] Further reading:
‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’ – Lord Byron
‘Gulliver’s Travels’ – Jonathan Swift
‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea’ – Jules Verne
‘Travelling Souls’ – Brian Bouldrey
Yuvakbharati English 12th Digest Chapter 1.7 Why We Travel Additional Important Question -s and Answers
Read the extract and complete the activities given below:
Global Understanding:
Question - 1. Write the name of the litterateur and his quotation mentioned by the writer in the extract.
Solutions :
Name of the litterateur – George Santayana.
Quotation:
George Santayana writes, “We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.”
Question - 2. Based on the extract, complete the web:
[The answers are given directly and underlined.]
Solutions :
6
Question - 3. From the extract, write the names of:
Solutions :
1. 2 litterateurs : Proust, Hazlitt
2. 2 places : Bali, Tibet
Question - 4. Pick out the false statements and write them correctly :
1. Holidays help you to appreciate your own home more.
2. Tourism can also revive cultures.
3. The writer spent many days in Bali in temples.
4. The writer finds Iceland full of chatter and routine.
Solutions :
False statements:
3. The writer spent many days in Bali in temples.
4. The writer finds Iceland full of chatter and routine.
Corrected statements:
3. The writer spent many days in Tibet in temples.
4. The writer finds Iceland quiet and empty.
Question - 5. Write the name of the litterateur and his quotation mentioned by the writer in the extract.
Solutions :
Name of the litterateur – Oliver Cromwell Quotation : “A man never goes so far as when he doesn’t know where he is going.”
Question - 6. Write if the following statements are True or False. Correct the false statements :
1. The posters at McDonald’s outlet in Kyoto have pictures of places in San Francisco.
2. The young people in Kyoto McDonald’s outlet look very American.
3. The writer was born in America.
4. Cities like Sydney and Toronto are a mix of many cultures.
True statements:
1. The posters at McDonald’s outlet in Kyoto have pictures of places in San Francisco.
4. Cities like Sydney and Toronto are a mix of many cultures.
False statements:
2. The young people in Kyoto McDonald’s outlet look very American.
3. The writer was born in America.
Corrected statements:
2. The young people in Kyoto McDonald’s outlet look very Japanese.
3. The writer was born in England.
Question - 7. Write from the extract:
Solutions :
1. Names of 4 cities: Kyoto, Toronto, Sydney, Addis Ababa
2. Names of two food items: Teriyaki McBurgers, Bacon Potato Pies.
Question - 8. Write the name of the litterateurs and their quotations mentioned by the writer in the extract.
Solutions :
Names of the litterateurs: Sir John Mandeville, Emerson, Thoreau and Sir Thomas Browne.
Quotations: Emerson said, “Travelling is a fool’s paradise.”
Thoreau said, “I have travelled a good deal in Concord.”
Sir Thomas Browne sagely put it, “We carry within us the wonders we seek without us. There is Africa and her prodigies in us.”
Complex Factual:
Question - 1. Write sentences from the extract conveying the fact that travelling brings together the various cultures of the different parts of the world :
Solutions :
1. We can become a kind of carrier pigeon in transporting back and forth what every culture needs.
2. I find that I always take Michael Jordan posters to Kyoto, and bring woven ikebana baskets back to California.
3. We become walking video screens and living newspapers, the only channels that can take people out of the censored limits of their homelands.
4. In closed or impoverished places, like Pagan or Lhasa or Havana, we are the eyes and ears of the people we meet, their only contact with the world outside and, very often, the closest, quite literally, they will ever come to Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton.
5. Not the least of the challenges of travel, therefore, is learning how to import – and export – dreams with tenderness.
6. We carry values and beliefs and news to the places we go.
Question - 2. Complete the following:
Travel spins us round in two ways at once:
Solutions :
Travel spins us round in two ways at once: It shows us the sights and values and issues that we might ordinarily ignore. It also shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty. For in travelling to a truly foreign place, we inevitably travel to moods and states of mind that we’d otherwise ignore.
Question - 3. Write sentences from the extract conveying the fact that travelling brings together the various cultures of the different parts of the world.
Solutions :
1. For when we go to France, we often migrate to French, and the more childlike self, simple and polite, that speaking a foreign language educes.
2. Even when I’m not speaking pidgin English in Hanoi, I’m simplified in a positive way, and concerned not with expressing myself, but simply making sense.
Question - 4. Write sentences from the extract conveying the fact that travelling brings together the various cultures of the different parts of the world.
Solutions :
1. When we go abroad we are objects of scrutiny as much as the people we scrutinize, and we are being consumed by the cultures we consume, as much on the road as when we are at home.
2. At the very least, we are objects of speculation [and even desire], who can seem as exotic to the people around us as they do to us.
Question - 5. Write the sentences from the extract conveying the fact that travelling brings together the various cultures of the different parts of the world.
Solutions :
1. When you go to a McDonald’s outlet in Kyoto, you will find Teriyaki McBurgers and Bacon Potato Pies.
2. The placemats offer maps of the great temples of the city, and the posters all around broadcast the wonders of San Francisco.
3. And-most crucial of all-the young people eating their Big Macs, with baseball caps worn backwards, and tight 501 jeans, are still utterly and inalienably Japanese in the way they move, they nod, they sip their Oolong teas – and never to be mistaken for the patrons of a McDonald’s outlet in Rio, Morocco or Managua.
4. These days a whole new realm of exotica arises out of the way one culture colours and appropriates the products of another,
5. The other factor complicating and exciting all of this is people, who are, more and more, themselves as many-tongued and mongrel as cities like Sydney or Toronto or Hong Kong.
6. Besides, even those who don’t move around the world find the world moving more and more around them. Walk just six blocks, in Queens or Berkeley, and you’re travelling through several cultures in as many minutes; get into a cab outside the White House, and you’re often in a piece of Addis Ababa.
Question - 6. Complete the following:
Solutions :
1. Travel is a voyage into the imagination and is the conspiracy of perception and imagination.
2. Sir John Mandeville never visited the Far East but yet gave colourful accounts of it.
3. Emerson and Thoreau insist that reality is our creation and we invent the places we see as much as we do the books we read.
Question - 7. Complete the following, giving examples: [The answer is given directly.] The finest recent travel books are those that:
Solutions :
1. undertake a parallel journey, matching the physical steps of a pilgrimage with the metaphysical steps of a Question -ing e.g. in Peter Matthiessen’s great “The Snow Leopard”.
2. chronicle a trip to the farthest reaches of human strangeness e.g. Oliver Sacks’ “Island of the Color-Blind,” which features a journey not just to a remote atoll in the Pacific, but to a realm where people actually see light differently].
Inference/Interpretation/Analysis:
Question - 1. Guess the difference : travel and travail:
Solutions :
Travel guides us towards a better balance of wisdom and compassion, of seeing the world clearly and truly. Travail means agony, or hard toil, which will be the result of laborious travelling and hardships.
Question - 2. Describe the changes that come into us because of travels, especially to foreign countries.
Solutions :
When we go abroad, we stay up late, do impulsive things and leave ourselves open to various experiences. We live for the moment, without any past or future; only the present. We may even become mysterious-to others, at first, and sometimes even to ourselves, behaving in new ways. We feel younger, as if we have been reborn.
Question - 3. Explain in your own words how travel can be a kind of ‘monasticism’.
Solutions :
‘Monasticism’ means living like monks, living a self-disciplined life that is isolated from other people. When we travel, even if we are living in a luxury hotel, we live more simply than we normally do at home. We have no more possessions than what we can carry, we surrender ourselves to chance, and to whatever may come in our way. Hence, travel can be a kind of ‘monasticism’.
Question - 4. Travelling abroad make us the object of scrutiny. Justify this statement,
Solutions :
When we go abroad, the local people there are curious about us and our culture. We seem exotic and different to them and they scrutinize our ways and behaviour to learn and understand more about us.
Question - 5. The writer calls himself ‘many-tongued’ and ‘mongrel’. Give reasons.
Solutions :
‘Many-tongued’ means that he knows many languages; ‘mongrel’ here means someone who has a mixed upbringing, someone of mixed cultures. The writer knows many languages. He was born of Indian parents, in England, and he moved to America when he was 7 years old. Hence, he says that he cannot really call himself an Indian, an American or an Englishman.
Question - 6. ‘Get into a cab outside the White House, and you’re often in a piece of Addis Ababa.’ Explain the meaning of this sentence.
Solutions :
Addis Ababa is the capital of Ethiopia, Africa. The sentence means that the driver of the cab outside the White House was probably an African American, may be originally from Africa.
Question - 7. “We carry within us the wonders we seek without us.” Explain.
Solutions :
This means that all the wonders and emotions are within us, and if we wish to, we can tap these forces. Everything is within our own hearts and imagination. Everything is internal. Whatever we find outside has first to be inside us for us to experience it. There is no necessity for any separate outside happenings for us to feel anything.
Personal Response:
Question - 1. Name the places you would like to visit the most. Give reasons to support your answer.
Solutions :
I like to travel but I have not had much opportunity yet. I love seeing new places and meeting new people. I would love to travel to the North-Eastern parts of India and to foreign countries. I am also a nature lover and would love seeing high mountains, clear lakes and green pastures.
Question - 2. ‘Travel helps you to appreciate your own home more’. Justify this statement.
Solutions :
Holidays, especially holidays abroad, can certainly help us to appreciate our own homes more. For example, if we go to the African desert and see the problems they have with potable water supply, we will appreciate our own water resources more. If we see the problems faced by people living in very cold climates, we will appreciate the heat in our country, and even be grateful for it.
Question - 3. Do you think that people travel more, or in a different way, as compared to people fifty years back? Explain your view.
Solutions :
Yes, people certainly travel more today. They also travel for different reasons. Fifty years back, in India, people generally travelled only for religious reasons or to meet relatives and family. Travelling for sightseeing was rarer. Today, in addition to these reasons, people also travel for fun, relaxation and sight-seeing. People also go on holidays abroad, which was not done often earlier.
Question - 4. Do you think that we must always seek new experiences and new places? Or do you feel that the best place is home, and we must never move?
Solutions :
If we just stick to our own homes, we will be like the frog in the pond, which thought its small pond was the whole world. This is not advisable in the world of today. To be happy and successful, we must be broad-minded and unbiased. We must see what the world and other cultures have to offer. We must try to imbibe the best from other cultures and places.
Language Study:
Question - 1. We carry values and beliefs and news to the places we go.
[Rewrite using ‘not only but also.]
Solutions :
We carry not only values and beliefs but also news to the places we go.
Question - 2. Travel is the best way we have of rescuing the humanity of places.
[Use an infinitive in place of the gerund.]
Solutions :
Travel is the best way we have to rescue the humanity of places.
Question - 3. The beauty of this process was best described by George Santayana.
[Rewrite beginning George Santayana]
Solutions :
George Santayana best described the beauty of this process.
Question - 4. Yet for me the first great joy of travelling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home. [Pick out the finite verb and say whether the sentence is simple, compound or complex.]
Solutions :
finite verb-is; simple sentence
Question - 5. Pick out the phrasal verb from this sentence:
Abroad is the place where we stay up late.
Solutions :
stay up
Question - 6. Travelling is a way to reverse time. [Identify the part of speech of the underlined word.]
Solutions :
travelling – gerund
Question - 7. I tend to believe more abroad than I do at home. [Rewrite using as….as..]
Solutions :
I tend not to believe as much at home as I do abroad.
Question - 8. Pick out the phrasal verb from these sentences:
Solutions :
1. I remember, in fact, after my first trip to Southeast Asia, more than a decade ago, how I would come back to my apartment in New York.
2. All, in that sense, believed in, “being moved”
Solutions :
1. come back
2. believed in
Question - 9. Anyone witnessing this strange scene would have drawn the right conclusion.
[Rewrite using ‘who’]
Solutions :
Anyone who witnessed this strange scene would have drawn the right conclusion.
Question - 10. I remember how I would come back to my apartment in New York. [Rewrite using ‘used, to’.]
Solutions :
I remember how I used to come back to my apartment in New York.
Question - 11. We have to carry our sense of destination. [Rewrite beginning‘Our sense….’]
Solutions :
Our sense of destination has to be carried by us.
Question - 12. The most valuable Pacifies we explore will always be the vast expanses within us.
[Rewrite using more…than..]
Solutions :
We will never explore more valuable Pacifies than the vast expanses within us.
Question - 13. It keeps the mind nimble. [Rewrite using the present perfect tense of the verb.]
Solutions :
It has kept the mind nimble.
Vocabulary:
Question - 1. Guess the meaning: riches are differently dispersed
Solutions :
cultures that are rich in ways different from ours.
Question - 2. Find out a past/present participle from the extract that has been used as an adjective :
Solutions :
crooked angle [crooked-past participle]
Question - 3. Find out two pairs of antonyms from the extract:
Solutions :
1. lose × find
2. ignorance × knowledge
Question - 4. Guess the difference between provisional and provincial.
Solutions :
Provisional means temporary, whereas provincial means limited in outlook narrow.
Question - 5. Find out from the extract a few past / present participles that have been used as adjectives:
1. walking video screens
2. censored limits
3. living newspapers
4. impoverished places
Solutions :
censored, impoverished – past participles used as adjectives
walking, living – present participles used as adjectives
Question - 6. Pick out four proper nouns for places from the extract.
Solutions :
Kyoto, Pagan, Lhasa, Havana.
Question - 7. Find from the extract one word for the following :
1. A Japanese art of flower arrangement
2. Satisfaction of one with oneself or one’s own achievements.
Solutions :
1. ikebana
2. complacencies
Question - 8. Complete the table with the words given in the brackets:
[values celebrate now deeply discovery apprehend wonderfully distant quietude foreign appreciative spins]
Solutions :
Question - 9. Find out a past/present participle from the extract that has been used as an adjective:
Solutions :
searching Question -s [searching – present participle]
Question - 10. Discuss the pun implied by the writer, ecstasy [ex-stasis]:
Solutions :
ecstasy – great joy. ex-stasis – previous period of inactivity or boredom. The words sound alike but have different meanings.
Question - 11. Guess the meaning:
many-tongued
mongrel
inheritance
notions
Solutions :
many-tongued – a person who speaks many languages.
mongrel – [here] someone who has a mixed upbringing, someone of mixed cultures.
inheritance – the acquisition of a possession, condition, or trait from past generations.
notions – ideas.
Question - 12. Match the adjectives in Column A with the nouns in Column B, with reference to the extract:
A B
1. great [a] specimen
2. new [b] versions
3. typical [c] temples
4. essential [d] world
5. synthetic [e] realm
6. foreign [f] notions
Solutions :
great temples
new realm
typical specimen
essential notions
synthetic versions
foreign world
Question - 13. Give the adjective forms of:
- perception
- imagination
- friendship
- reality
Solutions :
- perception – perceptive
- imagination – imaginative
- friendship – friendly
- reality – realistic
Question - 14. Give the verb forms of:
- perception
- imagination
- friendship
- conspiracy
Solutions :
- perception – perceive
- imagination – imagine
- friendship – befriend
- conspiracy – conspire
Question - 15. Guess the meaning:
- atoll
- prejudice
- fosters
Solutions :
- atoll – a coral island consisting of a reef surrounding a lagoon
- prejudice – bias
- fosters – encourages
Question - 16. Find from the extract the antonyms of:
- worthless
- public
- nearest
- familiar
- outside
- slow
Solutions :
- worthless × valuable
- public × private
- nearest × farthest
- familiar × unfamiliar
- outside × inside
- slow × quick
Do as directed:
Question - 1. The queen loved her people and looked after the affairs of her kingdom well.
[Rewrite using ‘who’.]
Solutions :
The queen, who loved her people, looked after the affairs of her kingdom well.
Question - 2. But I want to test this. [Change the voice.]
Solutions :
But I want this to be tested.
Question - 3. The husband had a small smile on his lips while the wife looked sad.
[Rewrite beginning with ‘Though’]
Solutions :
Though the husband had a small smile on his lips, the wife looked sad.
Spot the error in the following sentences and rewrite them correctly:
Question - 1. You must neither tell me the whole story or at least the first part of it.
Solutions :
You must either tell me the whole story or at least the first part of it.
Question - 2. No sooner did the Minister begin speaking, some rogues started shouting loudly.
Solutions :
No sooner did the Minister begin speaking, than some rogues started shouting loudly.
ICE BREAKERS
Siddarth Pico Raghavan Iyer, (born 1957) at Oxford, England
is known as Pico Iyer. He is a British –born American essayist
and novelist and is best known for his travel writing. He was
awarded the famous Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts
in 2005 and has won the accolade of Honorary Doctor of
Humane Letters by the Chapman University. He has authored
several books including Video Night in Kathmandu(1988), The
Lady and The Monk (1991), The Global Soul (2000) and The
Man within My Head (2012). He is working as an essayist
for Time since 1986.
He also publishes regularly in The New
York Review of Books and The New York Times and other renowned
publications.
In his classic essay ‘Why we Travel’, Pico Iyer explores the reasons for his passion
to travel and shares them with the readers. He quotes famous writers and puts forth his
own observations while probing into his own instinct to travel. Enormously interesting,
the extract is equally inspiring for the readers who are looking for the adventures in
their lives.
Why We Travel
We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel,
next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and
eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers
will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can,
in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe
whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel,
in essence, to become young fools again-to slow time
down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. The
beauty of this whole process was best described, perhaps,
before people even took to frequent flying, by George
Santayana in his lapidary essay, “The Philosophy of
Travel.” We “need sometimes,” the Harvard philosopher
wrote, “to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness,
into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in
order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and
to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no
matter what.”
Few of us ever forget the connection between “travel”
and “travail,” Travel in that sense guides us toward a
better balance of wisdom and compassion - of seeing the world clearly, and yet feeling it truly. For seeing without
feeling can obviously be uncaring; while feeling without
seeing can be blind. Yet for me the first great joy of
travelling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs
and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I
knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle
knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle.
Though it’s fashionable nowadays to draw a
distinction between the “tourist” and the “traveler,”
perhaps the real distinction lies between those who leave
their assumptions at home, and those who don’t. Among
those who don’t, a tourist is just someone who complains,
“Nothing here is the way it is at home,” while a traveler
is one who grumbles, “Everything here is the same as it
is in Cairo - or Cuzco or Kathmandu.” It’s all very much
the same
But for the rest of us, the sovereign freedom of
travelling comes from the fact that it whirls you around
and turns you upside down, and stands everything you
took for granted on its head. If a diploma can famously be
a passport (to a journey through hard realism), a passport
can be a diploma (for a crash course in cultural relativism).
And the first lesson we learn on the road, whether we like
it or not, is how provisional and provincial are the things
we imagine to be universal.
We travel, then, in part just to shake up our
complacencies by seeing all the moral and political
urgencies, the life-and-death dilemmas, that we seldom
have to face at home. And we travel to fill in the gaps
left by tomorrow’s headlines. When you drive down the
streets of Port-au-Prince, for example, where there is
almost no paving your notions of the Internet and a “one
world order” grow usefully revised. Travel is the best way
we have of rescuing the humanity of places, and saving
them from abstraction and ideology
And in the process, we also get saved from abstraction
ourselves, and come to see how much we can bring to the
places we visit, and how much we can become a kind of
carrier pigeon - an anti-Federal Express, if you like - in
transporting back and forth what every culture needs. I find that I always take Michael Jordan posters to Kyoto,
and bring woven ikebana baskets back to California.
But more significantly, we carry values and beliefs
and news to the places we go, and in many parts of the
world, we become walking video screens and living
newspapers, the only channels that can take people out
of the censored limits of their homelands. In closed or
impoverished places, like Pagan or Lhasa or Havana, we
are the eyes and ears of the people we meet, their only
contact with the world outside and, very often, the closest,
quite literally, they will ever come to Michael Jackson
or Bill Clinton. Not the least of the challenges of travel,
therefore, is learning how to import - and export - dreams
with tenderness.
By now all of us have heard (too often) the old Proust
line about how the real voyage of discovery consists not
in seeing new places but in seeing with new eyes. Yet one
of the subtler beauties of travel is that it enables you to
bring new eyes to the people you encounter. Thus even
as holidays help you appreciate your own home morenot least by seeing it through a distant admirer’s eyesthey help you bring newly appreciative-distant-eyes to
the places you visit. You can teach them what they have
to celebrate as much as you celebrate what they have to
teach. This, I think, is how tourism, which so obviously
destroys cultures, can also resuscitate or revive them, how
it has created new “traditional” dances in Bali, and caused
craftsmen in India to pay new attention to their works.
Thus travel spins us round in two ways at once: It
shows us the sights and values and issues that we might
ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us
all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty.
For in travelling to a truly foreign place, we inevitably
travel to moods and states of mind and hidden inward
passages that we’d otherwise seldom have cause to visit
On the most basic level, when I’m in Tibet, though not
a real Buddhist, I spend days on end in temples, listening
to the chants of sutras. I go to Iceland to visit the lunar
spaces within me, and, in the uncanny quietude and emptiness of that vast and treeless world, to tap parts of
myself generally obscured by chatter and routine.
We travel, then, in search of both self and anonymity -
and, of course, in finding the one we apprehend the other.
Abroad, we are wonderfully free of caste and job and
standing; we are, as Hazlitt puts it, just the “gentlemen
in the parlour,” and people cannot put a name or tag to
us. And precisely because we are clarified in this way,
and freed of inessential labels, we have the opportunity to
come into contact with more essential parts of ourselves
(which may begin to explain why we may feel most alive
when far from home).
Abroad is the place where we stay up late, follow
impulse and find ourselves as wide open as when we are in
love. We live without a past or future, for a moment at least,
and are ourselves up for grabs and open to interpretation.
We even may become mysterious-to others, at first, and
sometimes to ourselves-and, as no less a dignitary than
Oliver Cromwell once noted, “A man never goes so far
as when he doesn’t know where he is going.”
There are, of course, great dangers to this, as to
every kind of freedom, but the great promise of it is that,
travelling, we are born again, and able to return at moments
to a younger and a more open kind of self. Travelling is
a way to reverse time, to a small extent, and make a day
last a year-or at least 45 hours-and travelling is an easy
way of surrounding ourselves, as in childhood, with what
we cannot understand.
Language facilitates this cracking
open, for when we go to France, we often migrate to
French, and the more childlike self, simple and polite,
that speaking a foreign language educes. Even when I’m
not speaking pidgin English in Hanoi, I’m simplified in a
positive way, and concerned not with expressing myself,
but simply making sense.
So travel, for many of us, is a quest for not just the
unknown, but the unknowing; I, at least, travel in search
of an innocent eye that can return me to a more innocent
self. I tend to believe more abroad than I do at home
(which, though treacherous again, can at least help me to extend my vision), and I tend to be more easily excited
abroad, and even kinder.
And since no one I meet can
“place” me -no one can fix me in my risumi – I can
remake myself for better, as well as, of course, for worse
(if travel is notoriously a cradle for false identities, it can
also, at its best, be a crucible for truer ones). In this way,
travel can be a kind of monasticism on the move: On the
road, we often live more simply (even when staying in a
luxury hotel), with no more possessions than we can carry,
and surrendering ourselves to chance.
This is what Camus meant when he said that “what
gives value to travel is fear”- disruption, in other words,
(or emancipation) from circumstance, and all the habits
behind which we hide.
And that is why many of us travel
not in search of answers, but of better questions. I, like
many people, tend to ask questions of the places I visit, and
relish most the ones that ask the most searching questions
back of me: “The ideal travel book,” Christopher
Isherwood once said, “should be perhaps a little like a
crime story in which you’re in search of something.” And
it’s the best kind of something, I would add, if it’s one that
you can never quite find.
I remember, in fact, after my first trips to Southeast
Asia, more than a decade ago, how I would come back
to my apartment in New York, and lie in my bed, kept
up by something more than jet lag, playing back, in my
memory, over and over, all that I had experienced, and
paging wistfully though my photographs and reading and
re-reading my diaries, as if to extract some mystery from
them.
Anyone witnessing this strange scene would have
drawn the right conclusion: I was in love.
When we go abroad is that we are objects of scrutiny
as much as the people we scrutinize, and we are being
consumed by the cultures we consume, as much on the
road as when we are at home. At the very least, we are
objects of speculation (and even desire) who can seem as
exotic to the people around us as they do to us.
All, in that sense, believed in “being moved” as one
of the points of taking trips, and “being transported” by private as well as public means; all saw that “ecstasy”
(“ex-stasis”) tells us that our highest moments come
when we’re not stationary, and that epiphany can follow
movement as much as it precipitates it.
When you go to a McDonald’s outlet in Kyoto, you
will find Teriyaki McBurgers and Bacon Potato Pies.
The placemats offer maps of the great temples of the
city, and the posters all around broadcast the wonders
of San Francisco. And-most crucial of all-the young
people eating their Big Macs, with baseball caps worn
backwards, and tight 501 jeans, are still utterly and
inalienably Japanese in the way they move, they nod,
they sip their Oolong teas - and never to be mistaken
for the patrons of a McDonald’s outlet in Rio, Morocco
or Managua. These days a whole new realm of exotica
arises out of the way one culture colours and appropriates
the products of another.
The other factor complicating and exciting all of this
is people, who are, more and more, themselves as manytongued and mongrel as cities like Sydney or Toronto
or Hong Kong. I am, in many ways, an increasingly
typical specimen, if only because I was born, as the son
of Indian parents, in England, moved to America at 7
and cannot really call myself an Indian, an American
or an Englishman.
I was, in short, a traveler at birth, for
whom even a visit to the candy store was a trip through
a foreign world where no one I saw quite matched my
parents’ inheritance, or my own. Besides, even those who
don’t move around the world find the world moving more
and more around them. Walk just six blocks, in Queens or
Berkeley, and you’re travelling through several cultures
in as many minutes; get into a cab outside the White
House, and you’re often in a piece of Addis Ababa. And
technology, too, compounds this (sometimes deceptive)
sense of availability, so that many people feel they can
travel around the world without leaving the room-through
cyberspace or CD-ROMs, videos and virtual travel.
There are many challenges in this, of course, in what it
says about essential notions of family and community and loyalty, and in the worry that air-conditioned, purely
synthetic versions of places may replace the real thingnot to mention the fact that the world seems increasingly
in flux, a moving target quicker than our notions of it. But
there is, for the traveler at least, the sense that learning
about home and learning about a foreign world can be one
and the same thing.
All of us feel this from the cradle, and know, in some
sense, that all the significant movement we ever take is
internal. We travel when we see a movie, strike up a new
friendship, get held up.
Novels are often journeys as much
as travel books are fictions; and though this has been
true since at least as long ago as Sir John Mandeville’s
colourful 14th century accounts of a Far East he’d never
visited, it’s an even more shadowy distinction now, as
genre distinctions join other borders in collapsing.
Travel, then, is a voyage into that famously subjective
zone, the imagination, and what the traveler brings back
is - and has to be - an ineffable compound of himself
and the place, what’s really there and what’s only in him.
And since travel is, in a sense, about the conspiracy of
perception and imagination, the two great travel writers,
for me, to whom I constantly return are Emerson and
Thoreau (the one who famously advised that “travelling
is a fool’s paradise,” and the other who “traveled a good
deal in Concord”). Both of them insist on the fact that
reality is our creation, and that we invent the places we
see as much as we do the books that we read. What we
find outside ourselves has to be inside ourselves for us
to find it.
Or, as Sir Thomas Browne sagely put it, “We
carry within us the wonders we seek without us. There is
Africa and her prodigies in us.”
So, if more and more of us have to carry our sense of
home inside us, we also - Emerson and Thoreau remind
us-have to carry with us our sense of destination. The
most valuable Pacifics we explore will always be the vast
expanses within us, and the most important Northwest
Crossings the thresholds we cross in the heart. The virtue
of finding a gilded pavilion in Kyoto is that it allows you
to take back a more lasting, private Golden Temple to
your office in Rockefeller Center.
And even as the world seems to grow more exhausted,
our travels do not, and some of the finest travel books
in recent years have been those that undertake a parallel
journey, matching the physical steps of a pilgrimage
with the metaphysical steps of a questioning (as in Peter
Matthiessen’s great “The Snow Leopard”), or chronicling
a trip to the farthest reaches of human strangeness (as in
Oliver Sacks’ “Island of the Color-Blind,” which features
a journey not just to a remote atoll in the Pacific, but to
a realm where people actually see light differently).
The
most distant shores, we are constantly reminded, lie within
the person asleep at our side.
So travel, at heart, is just a quick way to keeping
our minds mobile and awake. As Santayana, the heir
to Emerson and Thoreau with whom I began, wrote,
“There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from
the familiar to the unfamiliar; it keeps the mind nimble;
it kills prejudice, and it fosters humour.” Romantic
poets inaugurated an era of travel because they were the
great apostles of open eyes.
Buddhist monks are often
vagabonds, in part because they believe in wakefulness.
And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because
it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are
mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready
to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best
love affairs, never really end.
- Siddarth Pico Raghavan Iyer .
- Why we travel questions and answers | Why we travel 12th class
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Why we travel questions and answers | Why we travel 12th class
| Appreciation Of Poem 12th Standard | 12th english all poem appreciation pdf |
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| 2.1 Song of the Open Road |
| 2.2 Indian Weavers |
| 2.3 The Inchcape Rock |
| 2.4 Have you Earned your Tomorrow |
| 2.5 Father Returning Home |
| 2.6 Money |
| 2.7 She Walks in Beauty |
| 2.8 Small Towns and Rivers |