A humbling perspective

“Of all the things that abroad offers, perhaps the most salutary is the sense of being a foreigner, not a favoured holiday consumer, but a temporary refugee in a strange place. Nothing alters your perception of who you are and where you belong to as fundamentally, radically, and permanently as being somewhere else.” – A.A Gill Is Away

I recently got back from yet another two-week escapade across the UAE, India, and the UK. Every time I travel, I’m overwhelmed by the sheer number of people just going on about their daily lives in these foreign cities. My favorite activity when traveling is not sightseeing, it’s people-watching from roadside cafés. I like to linger and stroll through the city streets, observing and taking in the pace of life around the different neighborhoods.

Never before in human history have there been so many people around, and never before have we been able to connect with them as easily as we can today. Just a mere two centuries ago, the idea of going to a city halfway around the world and living there as if you belonged there would have seemed as ridiculous as stepping foot on the Moon. Well, both of those things happened, and we’re better off for it.

Travel always makes me realize me how much I don’t know. We all like to pretend that we’re well-educated about the state of things, but everything that we’ve been told throughout our entire lifetime has some sort of bias or prejudice attached to it. Take for instance, the conflicts and battles of World War I. In American World History, the syllabus skews heavily towards American involvement in the war and how it affected people’s lives back on the mainland whilst the fighting was occurring in Europe. While I was in London, I learned of at least six battles that I never knew happened and four failed offensives by the Allied that were never taught in the American World War I teachings.

I can say the same thing for when I took World History in my Indian school. It’s all very heavily skewed towards Indian involvement in world history. The rest of the events at that time in the world are fully ignored. I’m sure this is intentionally done to teach the children the history of their own country before that of the others’ and to invoke a strong sense of national pride within the youth, but there are serious flaws with this philosophy. With an education system focused only on one country, it’s very hard to gain an unbiased perspective on world events. Everything that student learns about from there on is shaped and mirrored by what they already know of about their own nation’s involvement in world politics.

Which country actually “started” the war? Who was right and who was wrong? Who were the good guys and who were the bad? What were they fighting for? The answers to these questions will vary greatly depending on where you learned about the war. Now extrapolate this further. Things like language, culture, ecology, psychology, and all the humanities are biased by where you learn them. For the longest time, this is how people were educated about things and now for the first time with the advent of full-on globalization, we’re traveling and sharing these experiences. It’s now making us rethink how we were really taught and whether that was the right way to teach things or not.

The internet is definitely playing a crucial role here. Wikipedia tries its best to be neutral and provide an unbiased portrait of world events. But the information on there is only visible to you if you actively seek it out. The page for “Rural Geishas of 18th Century Imperial Japan” won’t magically show up unless you’re specifically looking for it. Places like Wikipedia provide a great platform to show the world what really happened without picking sides.

This is the one realization that I unanimously get every time I travel. When I went to Finland, I learned about the conflicts between Finland and Russia that I never knew about. When I went to Prague, I learned about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, which I never knew happened. Infallibly, I always c0me back from traveling with some mind-shattering fact about past world events that I would have never otherwise gained. And it boggles my mind to think how many others there are. And it boggles my mind even further when I think of all the people who could be having these experiences if they traveled outside the little corner of the world that they live in to see for themselves.

I’m grateful to have gained a newfound perspective on things every time I return from a series of travels. I wish every person on Earth could have the opportunity to do this on a regular basis. It would go to show how much we simply don’t know because society deemed it wasn’t important enough to educate us about. It would open our eyes to not how different we are, but how similar we all really are.