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Decoding the mind of a modern-day tourist

Last Updated 16 November 2015, 03:34 IST

‘Not the touristy stuff, the real stuff’ is a phrase we hear often. After the backpacking and the quick flights, our modern day traveller lands in an exotic country – exotic mostly in the head – and then may be found asking the ‘locals’ about authentic places to go to in exotic-land where there are not many people or ‘tourists’. Do you see the irony of this?

The self-anointed ‘traveller’ is perhaps the most camouflaged product of the capitalist economy where travelling is not that far from real estate shopping. The traveller is a scourer of sights and experiences with an ever growing appetite for new destinations – the main motto being – to travel for travel’s sake (because it can be afforded). This is of course the modern day version of pilgrimage and soul search minus the collective experience. The figure of the tourist is receding in the wings.

What is a tourist? The understood definition of a tourist is one who ends up in an exotic-land and visits all the clichés of a place. The tourist figure is a stereotype – a figure that exactly functions as the tourist-script demands: breakfast at sunrise peak, treks along a mountain cliff, sunset points and boat dinners. The tourist is also the foreigner, a visitor who confesses to not know enough about the land and trusts in the general psyche of fellow tourists.

The tourist’s trust reflects a certain unbiased collective truthfulness. Needless to say, the first tourist was a traveller who was generous enough to share his new found secret ‘spot’ with others. I am concerned about the naïve tourist, the one who confesses to not knowing enough and having no counter-cultural motivation: the scared, petrified tourist who wishes to be welcomed and homed by exotic-land and return to his home afterwards.

The traveller-figure was a rebel – the wanderer who takes the route less travelled, explores the wild side of town, engages in the introspective self-absorbed act of reflecting upon the world. In the wake of the new traveller, the middlebrow tourist is left in the wings, cold-shouldered.

The mindset of the tourist which essentially seeks a reflection in fellow tourists and exists always in relation to them is distinctly different from the mindset of the traveller who is an offspring of individualism, one who is quite contained, can afford to be self-reliant and detached and has time and space perhaps only for a few friends and a personal journal.
While I will not address the traveller here anymore as she does not need help for her case, I am interested in bringing back the tourist in our everyday – the tourist who is distant, respectfully curious and preserves critical distance. She is neither the insider not the outsider to the place but allows herself to be implicated into the place.

A typical tourist figure is one who is seen as a menace to the locals. But consider this – what if the locals turn tourists of their own place. The tourist as a point of view has potential to emancipate us from our locatedness. Imagine if all of us could ‘tourist’ ourselves from our situations and be visitors to our own selves.

Bhakti tradition

Touristing everyday, in other words, would mean to visit our dailyness with zero presuppositions. It is like photocopying a section of our world and examining it with the curiosity of one watching an art work – like when we look at x-rays of our own insides. This way, acts like reading a book, going to the cinema, visiting the restaurant for an occasional meal are all attempts at making-tourist of an otherwise static mesh of locatedness. Becoming a tourist of our dailyness gives the distance to reflect on the daily – not in isolation but in communion with the collective beings that we live with. 

Poets of the Bhakti tradition of 14th century India spoke of the Jangama philosophy in their songs in comparison to the idea of the Sthavara. Sthavara refers to that which is static while Jangama refers to that which is flowing, dynamic and always changing.

The idea of leaving home to seek something, travelling widely and then returning to find the sought at home is recurrent in many of the Bhakti poems. Similarly, the two types of emotional states – the Sthaayi and the Sanchari bhava discussed in Indian aesthetics also have connotations of movement and place.

While the sthaayi bhava refers to emotions that stay for a longer time in tune with our temperament, the sanchari bhava refers to emotions that are fleeting or passing through – they emerge fleetingly and highlight the underlying sthaayi emotional state. Sanchari reactions are spontaneous and untimely – like visitors who come and go, wanderers who visit our emotional space for a while and leave.

Not to be overlooked is the fact that touristing involves certain aspects of performance. The act of taking pictures is invariably linked to the creation of the tourist-self today. We can easily see how social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook are ongoing logs of the collective ‘touristing’ of our dailyness. The everyday photograph becomes a mirror to us; it punctures our seamless flow of time with necessary impasses – like detouring loops in an otherwise straight highway.

The importance of being a tourist is in the ‘making-strange’ of the familiar and then returning to the familiar. The importance of being a tourist is in the unsaid contract that we enter into with the world as reflective, relational beings who can reclaim the capacity to wonder at the world where there seems to be nothing obviously new at all. The importance of being a tourist lies in the ability to disconnect untimely, make disjointed the certainty of everyday, looking with fresh eyes something the new in the old every single time we look.    

(The writer is Research Fellow at Manipal Centre for Philosophy and Humanities, Manipal, Karnataka)

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(Published 15 November 2015, 17:18 IST)

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