When I read Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children as a teenager, there was a phrase on the first page of the book that has stuck in my mind. The protagonist Saleem says that he was “handcuffed to history.” As I inched past my mid-30s towards middle age, this truth was looming larger. I had gone to…
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A plane ride away from a broader mind
Travel for pleasure or out of curiosity has historically been the preserve of elites in privileged nations. For much of the colonial and post-colonial periods, most Asians who traveled did not belong to this group of tourists. They were "immigrants," fleeing political persecution or economic hardship. Does this matter? Isn't leisure travel a mere luxury,…
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