Nothing ventured, nothing gained
The lure of revenge travel has been aiming at us in that determined, salt-sprinkling stance of Salt Bae Nusret Gökçe, and it’s got people beaming onto planes for a trip to the good times. Metaphorically speaking, that’s where everyone plans to go, I reckon; back to the future and before the bothers of the pandemic were coiled into our psyche. After mulling over this scenario, I’ve taken up an alternative POV on why we actually travel. Part credit for this exemplary discovery goes to Yuval Noah Hariri’s best-seller Sapiens — A Brief History of Humankind. What struck a cord, is that Sapiens do not forage for food and materials. They forage for knowledge.
Lured to explore new horizons, I’m reminded of UAE’s unrivalled historic photographer Ramesh Shukla. Despite sea sickness, he’d boated to Sharjah from Mumbai in 1965 with his Rolleicord camera because this desert port had offered his lens the chance to absorb something completely new. When UAE’s Founding Father, Shaikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan saw Shukla’s impressive photos of a traditional camel race, he said that he was a ‘fannan’ (artist). Shukla heeded Shaikh Zayed’s words to him, ‘Don’t leave this region. Stay’. Captured in those photos were visionary Shaikhs who would later form the UAE in 1971.
Arching on with this outlook on foraging, its rewards proved to be phenomenal. Our ancestors mastered not only the surrounding world of animals, plants and objects, they also aced the internal world of their own bodies and senses. Could it be then, that travel urges us to march on, despite the threat of feisty variants? Either way, opening up to risks appears to be soaring through the air. What’s tweaked the formula in 2022, is to make up for lost experiences, or rather, for knowledge. After assessing the risks, the forager in me took over, possibly sparred on by lyrics of Footloose in my subconscious playlist. That wasn’t sufficient reason to roll the dice and board a plane, until I was reminded of a personal incident — pretty UAE by the way, which you’ll see in a minute.
Raffle win
I’d won a Nissan Sunny in my twenties. It was the final day of a Ramadan millennium raffle draw at Nad Al Sheba in Dubai where I’d gone to watch the horse races. My darling mother Kathleen had insisted on buying three raffle tickets, which is why when ticket number 10112 was announced with my name on it, we were utterly awestruck! Although the Sunny wasn’t exactly our dream car, the stroke of winning it had taught us back then that ‘in order to win in life, you have to play the game’.
So, off I went to secure a welcoming hug from an aeroplane’s seat belt. On this familiar airline, a biography called Matisse — The Life had travelled with me. Out it came after take-off, plopped open beside little packets of salted peanuts. Grin. Speaking of little, the artist Henri Matisse survived on a pittance during his years as an art student. He’d travelled from Saint-Quentin to learn to paint at Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He failed at it. Miserably. He admitted that he wasn’t good. In fact, far from it.
His father was consistently furious every time Matisse insisted on continuing down this doomed path, and for a number of years, tightened his son’s allowance.
Undeterred, Matisse forwent food for days in order to exist off of a shoestring budget, which is peanuts, really, in a pricey metropolis. The rest, of course, is history.
Like Shukla, Matisse, too, was acting out a will to forage for knowledge. They knew that people actually want to absorb and to know more about life and how to engage with the world around them. On that note, safe foraging.