Citizens of a planet

The more we travel, the more we realise there are many common threads that unite people and cultures. In the last few thousand years, people across the world travelled to different parts of the world.

Ibn Battuta in 14th century travelled all the way from present day Morocco to China via India. His descriptions give a vivid sense of the medieval world. The various travel adventurers who lived between the 14th and 16th centuries changed the history, economy and politics of the world.

The language that we speak, the dress we wear or the food we consider our ‘own’ evolved through global and regional influences over centuries. When you are in Bali, you’d see more ‘Indian’ culture than in many states of India. In Thailand, there is a strong influence of China and India in a number of ways in the dress code, food, traditional medical practice and language.  

No country is an island. Even the so-called ‘national’ dress or culture is a result of hundreds of years of acculturation. The dress culture in India is taken or absorbed from different cultures of the world. One of the favourite dishes in India, biryani came from Iran. Another favourite, tapioca, came from the forests of Amazon in Brazil. The most visible tree in Kerala is rubber and that came from Belam in Amazon via Malaysia.

Many words in Indian languages come from Arab, Persian, Portuguese, Dutch and English. So what we often take pride in as ‘national’ dress or cuisine or architecture is paradoxically a result of internationalism.

The best performance of Ramayana is still in Indonesia, a country with one of the largest number of Muslim populations. If you go to different parts of South East Asia, you can find imprint of India there.

At a time when there is rise of jingoism and extreme national pride, those who travel across nations and cultures discover the hollowness of these delusions about the ‘superiority’ of nationality that are projected. All that we are taught to call national came out of internationalism and connectivity of the people and cultures over centuries. Once you discover the unity of humanity beyond culture and language, then we begin to understand the underlying aesthetics of people and the planet.

Travels make us humble. It makes us rediscover ourselves as the citizens of this planet. It makes us think beyond institutionalised boundaries to feel the biodiversity of people and the world.

(John Samuel is an international  traveller, and researcher on internal relations, public policy and governance)