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Notings of an evergreen time traveller...

An

age-old adage contrasts man with other beings and deems him superior for his sheer determination to explore. However life, as it is, in over-crowded dens of modern culture, the very purpose seems defeated, save for the likes of Colin Thubron, the hitchhiker adventurer in his sixties – when men half his age prefer guided tours at over-rated tourist hotels, sipping ‘bluelagoons’ next to ‘shallow’ pool sides.

Whereas what Thubron prefers are vast stretches of uninhabited countryside. His travels are oft en delusionary, giving them a certain rich texture, imbibing within those thoughtful and sometimes erratic words, the very essence of that place – its people, their past, their present et al.

Following that particular lead, Thubron’s Shadow of the Silk Road, is not a regular book; it is a journey, a travel dismissing usual post-card landscaping into an illusion, a follow-your-heart adventure giving glimpses of history, world cultures replete with tiny doses of regional politics. All this and more can only be expected of someone who lives on escapades, somebody like Thubron, a seasoned traveller who makes merry with the locals and not by the stereotyped set of the so called Western culture-hunters armed with fancy cameras and anti-malarial pills.

Thubron, for that matter, does not carry a camera. He relies on memories. He does not compare scenery, instead he compares experience. Of the roughly 11,000 kilometres of the Silk Route, which he travels in a span of two years from Xian in China to the Turkish coastal city of Antioch, he transcends readers into the famous historical passage, a passage at best “a shifting fretwork of arteries and veins, laid (from Xian) to the Mediterranean.” The name in itself, coined by German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen in 1877, is proof enough of its historical importance dating back to 1,500 B.C.. And since then, this road spread across Central and South Asia, connected China and its inventions with the rest of Asia. Thus from printing to the crossbow, from gunpowder to the mechanical clock, the spinning wheel, iron chain suspension bridges and deep-drilling techniques, have all travelled this route in the golden days.

While on the front, a travelogue, in real terms, Shadows… is a difficult book to categorise. With Thubron’s eye for the keenest of details and an eagle’s view on present days and past ways, Thubron’s writings, if unknowingly, provide for an intimate parallel in various ways of trade and commerce throughout its existence. The book covers something as relevant in today’s day and age, such as trade between varying cultures and its subsequent impact on local tribes, which even then was side-lined.

Of his travels that can be summarized within the scope of Shadows... – if dissected – it provides a start too, to many keen on pursuing detailed studies. Like trade, which on this route is described as more of a relay race than a start to finish sprint, to the human mind ready to explore, Thubron’s reflections including those on the fall of the erstwhile Soviet Union and the rise of China as an economic elephant, can endow one with enough insight to set out to quench his or her thirst for more on these issues.

However, at its core, Colin Thubron is an enlightened traveller with an appetite for adventure. “A hundred reasons clamour for your going. You go to touch on human identities, to people an empty map. You have a notion that this is the world’s heart. You go to encounter the protean shapes of faith. You go because you are still young and crave excitement, the crunch of your boots in the dust; you go because you are old and need to understand something before it’s too late. You go to see what will happen.” However, at its core, Colin Thubron is an enlightened traveller with an appetite for adventure. “A hundred reasons clamour for your going. You go to touch on human identities, to people an empty map. You have a notion that this is the world’s heart. You go to encounter the protean shapes of faith. You go because you are still young and crave excitement, the crunch of your boots in the dust; you go because you are old and need to understand something before it’s too late. You go to see what will happen.”

Edit bureau: Shashank Shekhar

Book Extract

“We walk for a minute longer under the eaves of the temple. Then suddenly, the quiet is shattered by the stutter of power-drills and the groan of dump-trucks. ‘They’re building the new temple,’ she says. ‘For celebrations and conferences. This one’s too small. The new one will hold five thousand people.’

Later, I peer down from the hillside on the building site where it will be. I imagine the stressless, unchanging temple-pavilions of China rising from their wan granite. This place, Huangling, is only a hundred miles north of modern Xian, but is lost deep in another time of erosion and poverty. Who will come?

But the whole site is resurrecting as a national shrine, and already the older temple is filled with the memorial stelae of China’s statesmen offering homage to ‘the father of the nation’. Here is the stone calligraphy of Sun Yatsen from 1912, and of Chiang Kaishek, predictably coarse; of Mao Zedong...”

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2007

An IIPM and Professor Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned M a n a g e m e n t G u r u and Economist) Initiative

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