Howzzat!

Sometime in the 1600s, European travellers shifted from being explorers, pilgrims or merchants to travelling for pleasure. The 17th-century traveller Thomas Coryat was the first Englishman to visit Asia for pleasure, and he described his “ greedinesse of seeing strange countries ” as the “queen of all pleasures in the world.” Coryat is a gawky backpacker mistaken by Emperor Jahangir for a Western sadhu; assuming the visiting mendicant needed no more, the emperor handed the penniless pleasure seeker a measly 100 rupees to return home. Pleasure seekers like Coryat might have helped establish trails of the popular kind. In the 1700s, wealthy Brits went on cross-Europe trips called the “Grand Tour.” In the era of carriages but no engines, they had little choice but to tread on choppy waters. Starting from the English Channel, they halted at French ports, crossed the Alps, fawned over art in Venice, Florence or Rome, and even paid the then newly excavated Pompeii sites a visit. In the 1800...

Like the rest of the world, Indians get most of their Orwellian exposure from Animal Farm and 1984 . But it’s Burmese Days , Orwell’s debut novel, that is closer to home.           Fearing reprimand from the British government, Orwell had Burmese Days published in the United States first, in 1934. Born Eric Arthur Blair to British parents in Bihar, India he was raised and educated in England. His father worked as an Opium agent of the Indian Civil Service. Orwell attended Eton on a scholarship but chose to join the Indian Imperial Police at the age of 19, returning to Burma soon after. We know right away who the protagonist of the book, John Flory, is modelled after. Set in the 1920s, Burmese Days follows Flory, a timber merchant with a disfiguring birthmark who has lived in Kyauktada for well over a decade. His birthmark, or so he thinks, and his aversion to the pretentiousness of the elitist Pukka Sahib -ness alienate him from the other white men at ...