Do our travel habits need to change?

A young woman kayaks through the backwaters of Monroe Island in Kollam District, Kerala. Representation pic

I haven't thought of a holiday in two years. This isn't unusual given my lack of interest in meeting new people and an absence on social media platforms that eliminate the need for photographs. It has made me think about how everyone I know travels though. I have been thinking about where my family and friends go, why they choose the places they feel a need to visit, and how they spend their time when they get there. These seemingly innocuous decisions may have to be re-evaluated in the years to come, given what epidemiologists have been saying over the past few months.

We are being asked to expect a pandemic every five years from now on or, at the very least, a few more outbreaks from mysterious viruses over the course of our lifetime. We have been warned, repeatedly, that this isn't a question of ‘if' as much as ‘when', and that we should prepare ourselves for the unexpected. We have spent the past century doing as much damage to the world we live in, and the world has begun to fight back. I hope this changes how we look at the idea of sustainable living going forward or, at the very least, how we choose to holiday when that possibility finally arrives.

One of the most poignant things that struck me over these months of lockdown and isolation is how I had always taken the notion of a holiday for granted, conveniently putting out of my mind the fact that millions of people across India don't know what that means. A great many folks irrespective of economic class take days off at major festivals to visit ageing relatives in dusty villages, but none of them treat the act of travel with the kind of impunity so many of us do.

Think about how you booked your last holiday: What was your criteria? Did you go for something exotic? Did you do a search for oceans or mountains? Did you filter hotels by the number of stars? How did you choose a destination? What budget did you put aside? What did you do when you got there?

Tourists are often among the most reviled people on Earth for a reason: They do not put respect for any destination high on their list of priorities. A selfie matters more than how that selfie has been obtained, which is why so many places now dread becoming hashtags on Instagram.

The pandemic forced a lot of us to draw smaller circles around us and cast our stones closer to home while looking for a getaway. It's why everyone and their mothers turned up at Goa or Manali in the middle of the second wave, and why locals there were put at risk for no fault of their own. That, too, was an act of prejudice, a wilful dismissal of the needs of others because of the gratification so many of us took as our birthright. Some Indians cowered at home without access to masks, hand sanitisers, or vaccines. Other Indians used smartphones to jump queues, get vaccinated, and become carriers just because they could.

We are a long way from bidding goodbye to COVID-19. Even if we do, it doesn't change the fact that we can no longer go about doing the things we once used to, which involves going on holiday. I hope we can find it within ourselves to acknowledge that our lives are privileged, and that the simple act of taking a week off to visit Lonavala is still an unfathomable concept for millions of us who have yet to get that elusive first preventive shot. To assume there is no connection between those two things is to dismiss the reality that our world is more interconnected than we think.

Maybe we should stop focusing on Europe and start looking at wonders in our backyard. Maybe we should do this on purpose to revitalise local economies that have been devastated by inane economic policies in addition to the havoc wreaked by this virus.

As I write this, the European Union has made it clear that tourists from India don't meet the criteria that allows us to skip a mandatory quarantine, because our most commonly-deployed vaccine hasn't been cleared by their medical fraternity. It may be just the thing we need to make more ethical choices going forward and picking vacation spots that can do something good for the people who live in those places long after we have gone.

When he isn't ranting about all things Mumbai, Lindsay Pereira can be almost sweet. He tweets @lindsaypereira

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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper