Travels Grimm

Once upon a time, I had a lot of Amazon shopping rewards balance left and in the upcoming change of countries, I would lose access to it. This meant that I had to spend the amount fast. Naturally, I defaulted to stocking up on books on my Kindle and given my flavour of that season, they turned out to be a bunch of travel books. V S Naipaul, Paul Theroux and Pico Iyer ruled the roost as I bought their entire travelogue catalogues electronically.

It would be more than a decade later that I would actually get around to reading them and in their respective formulae, one was particularly disturbing. Pico Iyer was comfort food, displaced across multiple cultures but finding peace and joy in almost every one of them. V S Naipaul may seem more aligned to the title of the post as his unique mix of precise prose and incredible self-hatred shone through. But for Travels Grimm, I refer to Theroux's span of work in particular.

8th January, 2023

Wherever he goes, he finds only terror and deformity, stink and decay until all of a sudden, he comes across something incongruously beautiful - an experience, a person, a thought. An incredibly effective formula for his developed world readers, most of whom would anyway never leave that reading chair to venture into the badlands being written about. In horror movie parlance, this was jump scare inverse but with a series of jump scares bookended with a aesthetic moment of redemption.

Now I don't mean to judge one of the most well known travel authors of all time, but it does seem that despite his travels, he carted around his privileged first-world understanding of how life should be. Any deviation, as per him, was nothing short of hell itself. That perhaps is a result of not knowing that people are happy in most circumstances. They find many ways to be. This is not to cloak the grinding pain of poverty and dysfunctional systems but to understand that a little more engagement with his subjects would have made his travels a little less grim.