Tag: Sonder

Sonder and Saudade: Reflections on Travel and Books

Sonder

Traveling anywhere in the holiday season brings this fact to the fore. Airports, railway stations, bus stops, freeways – every place is packed with people, more people and more and more people. It was faintly unnerving at times to see this many people out in the world, all seemingly busy doing their many things. How many of them thought deeply, what did they do to occupy themselves, earn a living, attend to their loved ones? How many of them were loving and giving, and how many selfish and cruel?

That feeling of realizing the sentience of our fellow beings can be especially acute when traveling in crowded places. There is a beautiful word for it: sonder.

But wherever you were: one thing was apparent. Business was thriving. Clothing stores, eateries, perfumeries, jewelry stores – they dotted every city, country and airport. One time, I remember gazing out the window as we rode from one end to the diagonally opposite end of the city, and seeing shops after shops after shops. There was an apparent unending need for clothing and electronics, for consumption. One cannot help wondering about the ecological impact of all this, but there you are. ‘Better’ means the old has to go somewhere, and make place for the new. Maybe the next wave of innovations will be in making biodegradable plastics, electronics and clothing. After all, the waste that we are generating now can hardly be a scalable problem.

Lack of book stores in all the airports, cities

Even as I gazed out through the window taking in the local sights though, one thing sent a pang through me: the lack of bookstores anywhere was truly tragic. I felt their absence keenly. I had asked my siblings to fit in a visit to the bookstore. The only one in the vicinity was a little like a wild goose chase. The shop had moved they said, you cannot see the billboard from road they said. When finally, we found it, the reason was apparent. It was tucked away underground, as if hidden away from population. Only if you truly had the magical three things, could you find it: the will, the means, and the luck.

The bookstore had a passionate but regretful owner. “No space madam. Only so many books!” He said, gesturing apologetically to the small collection he had. To be fair, the little store had a fair amount of shelf space for children’s books (maybe those are the ones people are actually buying), but other fare was slim pickings. They were a few translated classics (which was a new section I admit) – it was heartening to see A Hundred Years of Solitude translated into Tamil. We picked up some books including a Tamil version of 1984 to donate to our local library in the USA.

The Hidden Bookshops of Timbuktu

But it all felt like the hidden bookshops of Timbuktu.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbuktu_Manuscripts

How many malls, streets covered with stores, and yet for intellectual stimulation, one had to either go scrounging or online? It was the same in many airports too. Perfumes, alcohol, watches, jewelry, clothing, chocolates, coffee, burgers: you could find these everywhere you turned, but good old fashioned books were tucked away in a corner (if at all), and hard to find.

What would it take for every coffee store, every clothing store, every jewelry store to have a reading nook that people could browse and buy books if they wanted? Wouldn’t that be marvelous? A tiny art nook that one could spend time creating their own art and craft while others shopped? I know reluctant shoppers would gladly accompany their friends and family if they could be tempted with the right incentives.

Was that utopian thinking?

Image: The beautiful hotel in which we stayed in Zurich that had a large marvelous library in its lobby. My heart sang, my spirits danced, and my soul settled, here in the presence of greatness!

Saudade

Our own town in US lost its bookstores to the great Amazonian sweep a decade ago. But luckily stores like Target or Costco still have a small pecking section for those really wanting to buy books or see them before picking them up.

Oh books! When did you go from being ubiquitous to precious to rare?

Could this be referred to as Saudade? That feeling or yearning for lost experiences?

The Wonder of Sonder

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

 Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad / Roughing It

I found myself reveling in this quote as I traveled recently to the opposite side of the globe.  I had been to Jaipur, India. It was a part of India that we normally do not visit on our little family trips, and was thus a novel, beautiful experience for me. Truly, Incredible India has many surprises up its sleeve. UNESCO sites dotted the place, the vibrant active city co-mingling easily amidst centuries of history was more heartwarming than ever. 

We had visited the Amer Fort near Jaipur and our guide’s narrative views on the socio-economic views of those who had lived in the fort were well worth mulling over.

It was while we were discussing the flow of information that I got to musing on the nature of truth. There was a version of events presented to us over time. There was a version of these events that people lived through. The victors and the vanquished of all those battles, I am sure there were spies, untruths, noise, and chatter back in the days of royalty as well. Human beings have always been a complicated species, and the abilities to sort through what is right, what is factual and what needs benefit-of-doubt and so on have been questions that have wracked generations. More so, in ours, thanks to the speed and efficiency of information spread. 

To have a conversation about Twitter in the palace of the Maharaja of Jaipur, Sawai Jai Singh, was both amusing and exotic.

While, ancient ruins do have an appeal of its own, a thriving populace right alongside all of these historical sights makes for an even more interesting narrative in our heads. Just imagine the number of people who’d walked past this very strip of land: kings, queens, princesses, princes, soldiers, charioteers, jutka-pullers, robe-makers, royal jewelers, sculptors, artists, musicians, dancers, ministers, priests, philosophers, poets, maids, chefs, dhobis, plumbers, architects, animal trainers, army generals, court jesters, astrologers, astronomers, physicians, scientists, software engineers, surgeons, guides, shopkeepers, memorabilia makers and sellers, mobile phone operators, tuk-tuk drivers, bus drivers, journalists, advertisers, local influencers, and social media influencers.

How many more new professions would get to traipse along these very sands as they try to take in the long and incredibly short history of homosapiens? It is all highly fascinating when we stop to think of these things amidst all the noise and chaos that surrounds us. That is what I did that day:  imagined one of those fast-forward sequences with all the different folks who make up our society as they navigated life in this city over the past 295 years. 

Not unlike one of those sudden disorienting sensations that the persons we see going past us are just the same as we are: All people with bursts and spurts of emotions surging, thoughts swirling, ambitions burning, life calling, livelihood beckoning, creativity surging, peace loving, adventure liking, love yearning souls straddling the demands of life on the sands of time. 

There is a word for that.

“Sonder — noun. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.”

So, there you have it. I had a moment of sonder on the other side of the globe that really we are one, and the wonder of that unifying feeling was one of the many many revelations of travel.