By Col Sudhir Rana (Retd)
Travelling is part of the primitive human desire, both, for the purpose of searching for food and water. Nomads and explorers undertook dangerous voyages to find new worlds. Man travelled also for trade and for colonisation. Alexander and Genghis Khan travelled for expanding and plundering. Hiuen Tsang travelled to India for learning. Krishna never could settle in one place in his life time and Ram spent almost all his entire youth in travel and exile. Columbus and Vasco Da Gama found new territories and Magellan circumvented the world. Capt Cook travelled to the North Pole and Amundsen to the South Pole to gain new experiences and education. Livingstone spent his lifetime in exploring Africa and died there. Yuri Gagarin travelled to space for the first time, knowing fully that he might not return from his journey. William Beebe and Otis Barton become the first humans to visit the deep sea in a steel Bathysphere in 1930. Man continues to explore uncharted seas and enter the bowels of the earth. He explores the jungles of the Amazon and desert of Sahara.
He travels for pleasure too. Ancient kings like Vikramaditya frequently toured their empires incognito to know first-hand the true condition of his subjects. Swami Vivekanand, Adi Shankaracharya travelled to spread the message of Sanatan Dharma, and Christian missionaries travelled to far off lands to spread their faith. Mahatma Gandhi, George Fernandes, Vinoba Bhave travelled to know about the real Bharat politically.
Modi and Prashant Kishor undertook such tours for better understanding of the Indian masses. Nowadays people undertake padyatras to make masses aware of various issues related to the environment and perform religious pilgrimage, etc. Humans have also covered long distances at sea, air and difficult terrains for the purpose of sports. Some climbed Everest, some circumvented the globe.
Finally, the story of our own incredible Pundit Nain Singh Rawat (1830–1895), who famously mapped Tibet on foot. He was a 19th-century Indian explorer and surveyor from the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand, India. He travelled 42,000 km over a period of 16 years, disguised as a Tibetan monk. He used primitive tools and incredible ingenuity to complete the given task. He measured distances by walking, counting exactly 100 steps for every bead on a specialised Buddhist rosary. He tied a rope to his feet so that every stride measured exactly 31.5 inches. He hid a compass inside a prayer wheel and a thermometer in a hollow walking stick to calculate his elevation. He memorised hundreds of paces and secretly recorded them at night in diaries using Tibetan, Sanskrit, and Persian scripts. He became the first person to determine the exact location and altitude of Lhasa, the Tibetan capital.
So friends, humans have always had a very strong tendency to travel and explore.
