Blue Sky, Green Sea, Red Earth
I stumbled across someone’s (who’s not an influencer) Instagram account and it was so pretty! Blue Sky, Green Sea, Red Earth. So pristine! My immediate reaction was a pang of regret for not capturing any pictures during my visit to the Christmas-sy Reading today. Isn’t that what our travel experiences have reduced to? A relentless pursuit of shareable pictures, where our Instagram accounts quantify the extent of our wanderlust.
Most travel influencers are photographers, videographers, and acting glorified Lonely Planet and Trip Advisor guides. And we are just trying to imitate them. Thinking of likes, comments and the next awesome place to visit from the never-ending bucket list that is dictated by them.
Of course, the desire to escape the everyday mundane is always there. It seems we travel either to evoke envy and desire, or merely to broadcast the fact that we are travellers. People forget that there is a difference between vacationing and travelling.
Take, for instance, the faceless Brazilian Grandma who washed my pressure cooker despite us telling her not to. Or that faceless man, from a country who’s existence I didn’t know, recommending Portobello Market. Or that twenty-minute run (hugely exaggerated), from MGM Grand’s parking to my room and back, getting lost multiple times on the way (not exaggerated) because my Uber’s meter was running. And I was not even the one paying for the ride!
How can any of those be captured in Instagrammable pictures or videos? These are pretty ordinary stories. No one who’s heard them once, has asked me to repeat them. No one’s said, “I want to do that”.
These are of no interest to anyone. And yet, they hold a special place in my heart. After all, these are my stories. Notice how the narrative shifted from travelling to story telling? And not everybody is a great storyteller. Not every story is worth telling. Not every story is worth retelling. Some stories are there only for you, so that you can say to yourself that you lived them.
What about the trip you ask? Well, I saw Reading for the third time today, but differently. Not spectacular. Not reflective. Not Instagrammable. Plain. Ordinary. Christmas-sy. A trip to a large English town that is like a city but still not a city. But a story for me, making me want to visit the town again.
Maybe I should have taken a picture for a record. Maybe, I’ll take one next time. Maybe. Who knows? But definitely a new story in my Pensieve.
Blue Sky, Green Sea, Red Earth is a reference to a Malayali movie Neelakasham Pachakadal Chuvanna Bhoomi. Anyone who’s into travelling should watch it.
Update:
This is from the next time: