On the road with a globe-trotter

A good travelogue is one that takes the reader on a voyage. A true traveller does not only see the famous places, he observes nature’s beauty and the life experiences of the people unknown” wrote Sunil Gangopadhyay for Sundeep Bhutoria’s My Life My Travels. This is one such travelogue that gives you goose bumps and is also so hilarious that you want to laugh out loud.

A self-confessed globe-trotter Sundeep Bhutoria’s original book in Hindi Aapbeeti Jagbeeti becomes My Life My Travels in English. The translation is lucid and the simple narrative makes the reader understand that the experiences are straight from the heart.

The candour of the writer touches you as you see a small-town school boy evolving into a hot-shot globe trotter.

“When I was in primary school, the geography classes at schools in the small suburb of Sujangarh were not equipped with maps or videos. According to a scholar — we cannot find truth. We can only sense its presence through the mirror of our illusions. One day, I understood that without going around the world, without experiencing it, I will not be able to sense the reality of this notional geography.”

The reader steps outside his country for the first time with the writer and is awestruck at the newness, but the effects of the glasnost and perestroika were startling enough to get disillusioned too.

“I had never seen such a grand chandelier before… But there were no lights burning in it. More than half the taps in the toilets were broken… There was neither any enquiry office nor any kiosk of newspapers and magazines…..It was definitely not the Moscow that I heard or read about.”

The political upheaval is also well-documented: “I saw hundreds of planes parked on the runway at the Moscow airport. By that time Russia had been divided. Later, I was informed that all those planes were owned by Aeroflot Airlines, which was one of the world’s major airline services and had gone to Russia during partition.”

The travels take the reader across different continents — both in good and difficult times. The first-hand chilling account of 9/11 gives the perspective of a common man stranded in a foreign location. The miraculous escape not only makes the atheist writer suddenly believe in all the gods and goddesses he can think of, it also changes one’s perception about life, its frailties and unpredictability hit you hard. Despite setting up an appointment to go up the World Trade Centre in the morning on the fateful day,  there was a sudden change of plan and that is how he slipped away from the clutches of death.  Sundeep’s eyewitness account of the fall of World Trade Centre transports one from the realm of romance associated with travel to the hazards of real world.

“I could see nothing except the dark clouds of smoke. After a few moments, when the smoke cleared a little, flames of fire from the World Trade Centre could be seen from far and wide...Just then there was an announcement on the speaker of the hotel: “Stay alert. This collision of the plane with the World Trade Centre is not an accident; it could be a terrorist attack.” I was stunned and thought of all the worst possible situations. If the plane had struck just a little to the left or the right, the 17th floor of this hotel, where I was staying could not have been saved. I was extremely nervous and prayed to all the gods and goddesses together; I had not prayed to so many gods in my whole life.”

The chapter “A Suffocating Night” deals with another near-fatal experience. This takes place in Peru where Sundeep goes to see the Machu Picchu and he admits his folly of not drinking a green concoction. The moral of this experience could be that it makes sense to pay heed to the advice of local people of any region.

Learning is an intrinsic part of travel. Despite sounding clichéd and no matter how much prepared you are to absorb new experiences, one is not ready to digest the fact that the President of a country goes to the market on a bicycle. “I was flabbergasted when the guide told us that the person, who had just come out — alone and on a bicycle — was the President.” Luxembourg President enjoys his position only during the office hours outside which he is just like any other ordinary citizen of his country. “Their President goes around the city riding a bicycle, while in our country we have to face road blocks and traffic jams to accommodate just 300 people engaging 12,000 police personnel for security!”

For any traveller, caution is something that he cannot let go even for a moment. Having entrusted his baggage with a girl at an airport in Brazil for a while, Sundeep returns only to find himself being called a thief trying to steal someone else’s baggage. This was a case of mistaken identity as it turned out the girl Sundeep had entrusted the baggage with and the girl who refused to return it were not the same but twins. The experience made him wiser and understood why people are asked to keep their passports with themselves.

My Life My Travels By Sundeep Bhutoria Vani Prakashan/Nine Books, Rs 399

In the book, Sundeep has proven that flexibility is the key to good travel. As travel requires people to adapt themselves to new situations and different lifestyles the sooner you let go of rigidity the better. Food is the biggest source of trouble for most travellers – specially Indians. With different dietary restrictions it is difficult for them to eat the local food in many countries.

When travelling in Peru he writes: “When I did not get anything except apples for two days, I bought a vegetarian sandwich, removed the pieces of a fish, washed it clean with milk and ate the bread. I feel nauseated even thinking of that now. But I figure, it was still better than dying of hunger.”

Sundeep does not just travel across continents to famous tourist spots or meet famous personalities he also makes it a point to find people with Indian roots or those who are connected to India in some way. In the process he has met different types of Indians – Mario who has never been to India and does not speak Hindi but is proud of his Indian ancestry; Suresh Goklani who married a Chilean girl and changed her name to Yashoda; Lakhi Daswani who ran away from home and after changing his locations several times finally chose Brazil as his home. He opened an Indian restaurant out of love for his motherland, despite having a Brazilian passport he was an Indian at heart. In Durban, Sundeep talks of women wearing saris, applying sindur and dancing to Hindi tunes despite not being able to speak Hindi or having been to India.

The book’s title My Life My Travels is justified as apart from his travel experiences Sundeep raises various issues inherent in the Indian society — marriage and extravagance associated with it, club culture with its colonial hangover that denies entry to members in kurta and pajama and the philosophy of life. These experiences are not travel stories but they are nevertheless part of My Life.

The book has a Foreword by Anupam Kher and prefaces have been written by many eminent writers of Bengal — from Mahasweta Devi to Sunil Gangopadhyay.

According to Gangopadhyay, “Some amount of history, culture and social reality should be there…” And Sundeep fulfils all these conditions.

The book, being a series of articles written for a weekly column in a Hindi magazine leaves us with a thirst for wanting more as these articles are rather sketchy. To quench our thirst Sundeep needs to write a sequel with stories of his travels in new countries.