The Spiritual Power of the Dollar

I was travelling solo in the lovely little hill station of Shimla when my paths crossed with two young couples from outside India. One of them was from the UK and other was from Australia. My long interactions with them, in fact, now form the best memories of the trip because they were enriching in innumerable ways and left me with a lot of food for thought. I want to write about one of the thoughts that came out of those conversations and has lived with me ever since. In fact, it had been nudging me all this while to engage with it a little more. And that's what I'm doing here.

The common thread joining their stories was that both the couples were on long journeys away from their countries. The British couple was on a four month journey and had almost traversed through the length and breadth of the country before reaching Shimla. On the other hand, the Australian couple was on an eight months long tour of Asia and had come to India after volunteering for three months in Nepal.

As someone who is taking baby steps into the world of travelling, their stories seemed so awe inspiring. So, the thought that shapes this write up was born out of a question my Aussie friend Daniel asked me while we were talking about traveling. After telling me in detail about his journey, he simply asked me, “What about you? You plan to travel around the world?” The casual tone of the question struck me as a little shocking for a second before my mind was able to put things in perspective and save me from the ignominy of giving an embarrassing answer. In fact, I said with a straight face, "For that to happen, I would need to earn a lot of money first."


But that question, coupled with a few more statements by them got me thinking. The way I see it, a trip around the world, or for that matter, a trip like theirs seems impossible in the foreseeable future. The simple reason is not that I won't have money. But I won't have the dollar bills like them. This long drawn introduction was necessary to bring us to the main argument which is that the power of the dollar gives an average Westerner greater access to travelling and adventure, and  thus, in my opinion, knowledge, both spiritual and material than an average person from the east.

One doesn't need to be an economist to understand that India, or for that matter, much of South East and South Asia is an extremely cheap destination for the traveller from the West. At least, the state run railways and cheap roadways provide a very cheap option for the people to traverse the length and breadth of the country. That is not to say that travelling in India doesn't come with challenges for the Westerners. They're short changed from time to time by conniving locals and have to face the big old communication issue. But even those add up as experiences that help them know and understand this alien land miles away from their home better.

And this seemingly innocuous but so precious knowledge is what forms the biggest takeaway for a traveller because what else is travelling but a fancy name for a very basic human instinct of exploration that has accompanied us since our birth as a species. And wherever we have reached as a civilzation in the 21st century owes much to our desire to explore. Because it was only when our ancestors' exploratory skills opened to them new vistas of knowledge that they utilized it in the task of conquering nature and developing sophisticated science that we see all around us today.
But do we have an equal access to this exploration and the subsequent wisdom and knowledge that emanates from it? Definitely not in the world of 21st century where international borders and visa regulations dictate our travel plans. More important than that, however, remains money. The currencies of the western countries have historically been stronger as compared to those of countries in the east as well as Africa. The obvious exceptions to this norm are oil rich gulf nations. Apart from those few nations, the rest of Asia and Africa present to the Western traveller a cheap and accessible travel destination as we discussed before. Not only that, Asia or the Orient has always been an object of western attraction as well as speculation for its stellar reputation as an abode of spirituality and mysticism.

Today, the Orient has opened up to the West like never before. Travelling has become easier with airways and faster railways and that explains the influx of western travellers to this part of the world as they look to turn around their lives, some through Yoga and some even through marriage. It is not surprising to know that when his life looked directionless, Steve Jobs, like many other celebrities, headed towards India. This is not to claim that Jobs owes any credit to India for his innovations that revolutionized the world but one can’t deny that the vast and diverse lands provide any traveller with infinite experiences. Even if someone is not on an explicit quest for spiritual knowledge and doesn’t take a trip down the Himalayas, travelling these places and exploring the diversity does fill up one’s mind with enough thoughts to change something in them, precisely their perception of the world outside. Why I equate travelling with gathering knowledge is because every time our eyes witness a new vista or our soul experiences a reality that was hitherto unknown, it tugs at something within us. It makes us think and contemplate the truth we thought we knew but had a new dimension added to it by the recent most experience. It is as if there are bundles of ‘knowledge’ out there waiting to be unlocked but we must reach there to unlock them and let them add to our existing knowledge base. And in a land far far away from one’s own, such experiences are aplenty.

It became clearer to me when I met the English couple again and this time on their last day of the India trip. We sat together chatting again when I popped the question about whether this trip had impacted them spiritually. The answer was in the negative, even though not an outright no, but the reflections they shared about how they felt so much at ease travelling and living out of a backpack for 9 weeks and how they came to hate and appreciate the chaos that defines life here hinted at some sort of spiritual churning.

But such a luxury seems to have become more or less an exclusive claim of the Western traveler. Yes, no doubt that everything comes at a cost but the man from the West can bear the cost if he has the will, but the same can't be said for the traveler from the East in his travel pursuits towards West. And he thus remains deprived from the knowledge of the other worlds that his counterpart from the West can proudly boast of possessing, courtesy a better economy and a stronger currency. He just can’t access those bundles of knowledge, as I call them, outside of him to unlock them.

So what is the larger impact of such a trend? In a world where economic strength determines access to knowledge, it is not difficult to recognize which part can claim its monopoly over knowledge. In fact, owing to its superior scientific and technological knowledge and armed with a claim that it ‘knows’ what the natives don’t, the West built empires and colonized other worlds. While the specter of colonialism emerging from superior knowledge doesn’t haunt the world anymore, the ease of access that the Western world has gained into the heart of spiritual east raises several concerns. A post globalization world may have us believe that the east is not east anymore and the west is not west anymore, the limited access of the non westerner to the West, however, seems to reinforce a knowledge status quo.

The east has made promising advances in science and technology, and possibly more than what the west has been able to make in spiritual realm. Yet, the West remains largely closed to exploration and an average person from the east like me, it seems, will know about it only through the gloss tinted screens of cinema and other media. The West doesn’t pose a threat to the East with its spiritual awakening. In fact, the east can claim a major victory of its soft power. At the same time though the broadening of horizons of individuals best attained through exploration (read travelling), something that history testifies and is of immense importance for personal as well as collective growth of a society, is not happening the same way as it happening in the West. And, that’s how, the status quo is being reinforced and the hierarchy is being created again, this time by the spiritual power of dollar, a situation the east has long battled against.