ದೇಶ ನೋಡು ಕೋಶ ಓದು - Part 1

Knowledge is indeed powerful and the pursuit of the same can be a journey of a lifetime. The yesteryear philosophers in my state narrowed this pursuit very simplistically to two things – ದೇಶ ನೋಡು ಕೋಶ ಓದು (desha nodu, kosha odu - roam the country, read the books). It actually seems too simple – but the more I think about it, the more accurate it seems to acquire well-rounded knowledge - mix the knowledge from books and written soruces with the knowledge gained from experience of travelling and meeting people. Reading through loads of archives helps our brain to acquire the bookish knowledge while traveling lets you experience the same knowledge contained in the books in person, thus making us wiser. If I think about my personal experiences, I do realise that it is indeed the books and travels which has helped me in my learnings. Ever since I was in kindergarten, I have liked geography, so naturally I was more inclined towards the desha nodu way of learning. As a kid, I used to look forward to the long road/train travels and kept a log of the places / stations that we visited in my dairy. It still brings back memories of those travels and experiences when I read through those pages! One of our favourite pastime as kids was to be engrossed in either an atlas or a map and look up countries, places, roadways and train lines. When we got a dial-up modem internet in our house, Wikipedia used to be my favourite site where I used to spend a lot of time reading about places, their history and culture. With ADSL and faster internet came the mighty google earth - I was completely fascinated by the level of detail which it made available to a normal person just at the click of a button! Me and my brother spent countless hours on google earth as we clicked through streets, houses, stadiums, train stations, airports and what not - exhausting all the costly bandwidth in the process!

Although we had the atlas, google maps, etc to keep us company, growing up in a middle class family and school/college schedules meant that we could not have real travels around the world - they were few and far in between and remained restricted to my surroundings in south India. I still remained a kosha odu person. For almost 25 years of my life, the northernmost place on the earth that I had been to was Dakshineshwar (a small town on the banks of river in West Bengal). And the irony* in that statement was evident for a geography lover like me, I used to wonder if that would ever change. Some of my closest friends Tosi and Gunda moved to the United States almost a decade back, a time when everyone of us were finding feet and getting independent in life. In fact, for the first two years after they moved, we used to eagerly wait for the mails that Tosi used to send us, chronicling his life in a new country and how he dealt with being a student and eventually finding a job and settling down in the US. When the rest of the us who stayed back met and talked, we used to always discuss those mails and the way he described his experiences. Most of our gang's opinions about the culture and way of life abroad in developed counties was based on the stories they used to tell us. It really shaped our world-view. As part of my consulting work, I used to work for clients worldwide, creating maps of early adopters for a telecommunications client in far south NewZealand to analysing buying ice-cream buying patterns for retail stores in the northern part of United States. Through the course of such projects, I learnt a lot about the people from these countries, their culture and everyday way of life… and with all these stories, I had formed an image of how these places looked like in my mind… all the while wondering if I would ever get a chance to actually visit them!

Tourist versus emigrant

Like every wannabe globetrotter out there, even we (my wife and I) had Europe in our bucket list. Now, no encyclopedia can be ever complete without the mention of this small continent called Europe - at some point or the other, almost 90% of the world was colonized by Europeans and they have had a great influence on shaping the history of the world. Although I knew about its historical significance since high school, the real desire to visit Europe came from one game which Ultra and I used to play on our computer during graduation - NFS 5 (Porsche unleashed). The game featured some of the famed roads located in European countries like Germany, France, Switzerland, etc and gave us an opportunity to race Porsche cars on these tracks. A significant amount of college days was spent playing that game, virtually driving those porsches on Autobahn, Normandy, Pyrenees, etc, and then reading up on the car models and highways / mountain paths/ race tracks across Europe. This was the early 2000s and there was no real deadline set in mind when I actually go visit these places. It always remained 'someday in the future'. Around latter half of this decade, with the new found economic independence, we found that so many in our social circles were holidaying in Europe and posing pictures with some philosophical captions, it seemed that taking a trip to Europe (especially backpacking and living in hostels) was the new cool in-thing! By then, we already had a fair share of our trips outside the country - some neighbouring tropical and relatively similar third world countries which had a bit of an exotic feel but mostly similar to our own in aspects of weather, food and local culture. But Europe seemed so exotic with lot of adventures and experiences to offer travellers. Ultra was already there for two years doing his masters and a visit was long overdue - maybe around the time of his graduation. So, we started looking up web-sites for travel deals in order to plan our European holiday!

In middle of all these travel preparations, came an opportunity to work in Europe and stay for few years. My wife and I were thrilled and scared at the same time! Travelling to Europe was definitely exciting but we still had to consider the relocation. When visiting a place as a tourist, we always have a normal - we have our lives, jobs and family back in our home country. We know the normal is always back home. We know the vacation is temporary, so the stakes are not as high. We could have one bad experience here, one not-so-great hotel there and still take back nice experiences. But moving meant so many things to consider - packing for the whole year, finding the right accommodation, arranging utilities, help with local language, shopping, tax, finances, etc. We would have to build a new normal right from the scratch. For some people, moving is not as big a decision as they find our country too judgemental. Don’t get this the wrong way - but people do find my country (especially the southern cities) a bit intolerant! I have had friends who have at some point complained that my city is a bit conservative. Especially, if someone is an non-local living an independent life or for couples who marry out of their own caste, there are a lot of people who quickly pass judgments! Although it is not directly on your face, the undertones are still there which is why someone who has experienced this would definitely have no problems emigrating! We had no such complaints. We had a big gang of our friends and relatives around us and did enjoy the company immensely. So, moving away from all of them was still a hard decision to make. However, in the end, we knew that the travels and stay out of our comfort zone, would give us more self-realization and would definitely help us expand our thinking horizon, thus we decided to go for it....

PS:
1. Daskhineshwar : Town on the banks of river Hoogly in WestBengal, India famous for the Kali temple. Irony is because the word Dakshin in Sanskrit means 'South' and it was somehow the northernmost place which I had been to in life

Continued in Part 2 here