Of memories & moments...

Souvenirs help you remember, smile, sigh, and shake your head over experiences that are etched into your history, writes Lakshmi Palecanda

Travel brings a set of special experiences that cannot really be compared to any other. Man’s besetting sin is curiosity and nothing satisfies it like shopping … umm … er … excuse me, I meant to say travel.

All right, so I confess. I love shopping while travelling. Of course, there are some snobs who go to a place only to soak in the ambience, and look down upon shopping as a waste of time and money. And on the other end of the spectrum, there are those who go only to shop. They are blind to the unique place they are in, and see only what they can acquire. But most of us who love travelling as well as shopping go to a place, soak in the ambience, both in its scenery and its shopping centres, and most importantly, bring some of the ambience home with us.

There are loads of reasons why we love to shop in the places that we travel to. You may get more bargains, the rate of exchange may make an object cheaper to buy, or there may be more variety to choose from. However, they aren’t the most important reasons.

People are as much a part of the scenery as any mountain, river or waterfall, and the best place to see the natives is in a marketplace. Buying and selling are practices as old as civilisation, and marketplaces articulate the ethos of a country and the people far better than even museums. In fact, in museums, you can see how people lived, but in marketplaces, you can feel who they are. So, be it a souk or a santhe, an agora or a farmers’ market, the local marketplace is where you can feel the pulse of the people.

Here, colourful stalls welcome you. The locals are smiling as they set up their wares, sourced from nearby places. They are dressed in clothes that proclaim their own unique ethnicity and banter with each other — and you — in their own native tongue. You may not understand a word they say, they may even be insulting you, but you can’t help smiling – you are in a whole new world. The wares displayed are often unfamiliar and exciting. Even the discovery of something that you do recognise is fun. Talking to the vendors, sharing your own ethnicity, trying to do currency conversions, mostly inaccurately, in your head, bargaining frenziedly, and finally buying something, probably for far more than it’s worth — ahh, the experience pays for itself.

Then, there is stuff that is only available in certain places. For example, key chains and change purses made from Kangaroo scrotums are available only in Australia. Yup, they are weird, but you can buy them. Of course, anything is available at the click of a button these days, but it’s far more significant and fun to buy Maasai beads from Nairobi, Kenya, or an Ushanka hat in Vladivostok, Russia. The significance increases immensely if you can actually interact with the artist or artisan.

You may love a Naga necklace, a beautiful piece of wearable art, that you ordered online, but if you actually watched a Naga woman make it for you, you will treasure it for the rest of your life. It is not about the object itself, but about the personal connection you established, that adds a unique value to the object.

Finally, it is not so much about the object you buy, but the memories you associate with it.

Souvenirs, be they tacky, plasticky dust catchers, or immensely expensive, exquisite pieces of art, remind you of a time and place that will never return. They take you back to the scene, the time and the place where you established a connection, however small, to the new place that you were visiting.

They serve as the time machines that transport you to a time when you were happy and relaxed. They help you remember, smile, sigh, and shake your head over experiences that are etched into your history.

Yes, that cheap shell necklace that a young boy coerced you into buying at Puducherry even while you were admiring his linguistic abilities is valuable not because you got it for a mere Rs 10, but because when you look at it, you see the lovely little cottage you were staying in during that trip, hear the booming waves crashing over the rocks, taste the rich curry you ate, feel the subsequent rebellion your stomach staged, experience the bumpy rickshaw ride you took, revel in the spray-laden air that kissed your cheeks, and enjoy the laughter you shared with your companions, the sated tiredness with which you fell asleep, the eager anticipation with which you woke up …Try putting a price on that.