Dear Jeyamohan,
I have been thinking about your travel experiences and the way you speak about journeys. They made me reflect on the real purpose of travel. Today, most of us think of travel either as entertainment or as a break from our routine. We travel to relax, to take photographs, to visit famous places, or simply to escape the pressures of work. But I increasingly feel that the deepest purpose of travel is neither enjoyment nor rest. Travel is, above all, a way of learning.
Learning does not happen only through books, classrooms, or lectures. Human beings have always learned by moving from one place to another. Every civilization grew through journeys. Merchants, pilgrims, scholars, monks, artists, and explorers carried ideas from one land to another. A journey is therefore not merely a movement of the body; it is a movement of the mind.
When we travel, we often imagine that we are simply collecting beautiful sights. In reality, we are collecting images. These images are much more than visual memories. Every image carries within it an idea, a way of life, and a way of seeing the world. A temple is not merely a building; it represents centuries of faith, art, engineering, and social organization. A village street is not merely a road; it expresses an entire culture. A mountain is not only a landscape; it teaches silence, endurance, and scale. A river shows us movement and continuity. Every scene that enters our eyes enters our mind with its hidden meanings.
Our mind does not think only through words. Much of our thinking happens through images. Even our dreams are made of images rather than sentences. Images slowly shape our imagination, our emotions, and eventually our ideas. Therefore, travelling is actually the process of filling our inner world with new images, and through them, with new thoughts.
This is why genuine travel changes a person. It is not because one has visited many places, but because one has allowed those places to enter one’s consciousness. Every meaningful journey expands our mental world. It frees us from the narrow boundaries of our own surroundings. We begin to understand that there are countless ways of living, believing, building, eating, celebrating, and thinking. This realization naturally makes us more humble and more open-minded.
But such learning happens only under one condition. We must travel with an open mind. If we carry all our judgments with us, we learn nothing. If we constantly compare every place with our own, criticize what is different, or search only for what is already familiar, the journey becomes empty. We may travel thousands of kilometres, yet our mind remains where it began.
This is perhaps the greatest challenge. Human beings naturally look for the familiar because it gives them comfort. Even in a foreign country, many people search for their own food, their own language, and people who resemble themselves. There is nothing wrong with this, but if that becomes the only way we travel, we lose the opportunity to encounter the unknown. Real travel begins only when we willingly step outside our habits.
We should therefore train ourselves to notice what is new rather than what is familiar. We should observe how people speak, how they greet one another, how they organize their homes, how they relate to nature, how children play, how old people spend their evenings, what people eat, how markets function, how temples, churches, mosques, or public spaces are used, and even how silence exists in a place. Such observations slowly become insights into human civilization.
This also requires patience. Modern tourism encourages speed. We try to see ten places in a single day, rushing from one monument to another, taking hundreds of photographs without truly looking at anything. In such travel, the camera sees more than the traveller. But learning requires lingering. One has to sit quietly under a tree, walk through a street without haste, watch people without judgment, and allow the place to reveal itself gradually. The richest experiences of travel often come from these unplanned moments rather than from famous tourist attractions.
Your temple art journeys beautifully demonstrate this idea. The purpose is not simply to visit temples but to learn to see them. Once we learn how to observe architecture, sculpture, symbols, and the relationship between the temple and its landscape, every temple becomes a living text. We no longer collect photographs; we collect ways of seeing. The same is true of literature, painting, music, and philosophy. They all teach us how to see more deeply.
Perhaps this is why many philosophers and writers have valued travel so highly. They did not travel merely to discover new lands but to discover new ways of thinking. Every journey became an education. Every unfamiliar landscape became a lesson. Every encounter with another culture questioned their own assumptions and enlarged their understanding of humanity.
Ultimately, the success of a journey is not measured by the number of places visited but by the number of new ideas we bring back. If we return home with only photographs, the journey has been superficial. If we return with a transformed vision, a broader mind, and greater sensitivity to the diversity of human life, then the journey has truly fulfilled its purpose.
Travel, therefore, is not an escape from life. It is one of life’s greatest forms of education. It continuously renews the mind by replacing old and limited images with richer and more universal ones. Every meaningful journey enlarges our inner world, making us wiser, more compassionate, and more capable of understanding both others and ourselves.
With regards,
O.V.Arun
