Popagandhi

I showed these pictures last night at Village Talk and talked myself hoarse about travel, photojournalism, passion and youth (and quite a bit about leprosy and tropical diseases). There should also be video and audio available sometime soon, but because my hair was really flat and disgusting, there’s a transcript at the end of this entry instead. Thanks to Ridzuan and Kelvin for organizing dreaming it up, the other speakers and the audience for a very engaging evening, and my dad for being there. I’ll definitely be there at Village Talk 2 (September), and you should too.

P.S. Well, I’m not quite where I want to be yet, but I can try.

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What Am I Doing Here: Adventures in Travel and Youth

I’ve always been intrigued by travel.

It seemed obvious to me that travel is a bit like life — what it throws at you, how you adapt, overcome challenges, and find your feet. You can either take an all-inclusive like everyone says you should — or do it yourself, even though it’s harder. No prizes for guessing which is more rewarding.

The kind of questions you ask yourself while you’re on the road, I like to believe, are in essence the kind of questions we want to ask ourselves about life but fail to: because we’re too afraid, it never occurred to us, or just have no time to, since weâ��re too busy working. On your travels, if you’re pushing yourself hard enough, you inevitably have no choice but to ask yourself simple but terrifying questions, questions that can change your life.

What am I doing here? Where am I going? How am I going to get there? Where, indeed, is there?

I want to share with you a handful of stories and the lessons Iâ��ve learned. I hope you will find them useful on your own journeys. In case you’re wondering, I spend close to a third of each year backpacking Asia’s villages, hilltribes, and smoggy cities with daily PSI levels of 300 and above. I’m also a blogger at popagandhi.com, which has been nominated several times for Best Asian Blog but never won, and a freelance photojournalist for publications such as the British Geographical and the Asian Geographic. All while trying to graduate (or get the hell out of) SMU with my degree in political science. Five months from now, I will be twenty two.

I’ve always loved travelling as a child. I liked overnight train rides and village life. My father got me into the habit of keeping travel journals whenever I was brought out of the country, so by ten, I had reasonably readable accounts of my time travelling. I never stopped. One of these early efforts describes travelling through the jungles of Borneo in 1992, when I was seven: my teeth were falling out. My mother put us on a rickety bus that shook so much that my teeth fell out. She’s a nurse with three decades’ experience, consequently she has no ability at all to sympathize with any of her children. She looked up from the durian she was happily eating, nonchalantly removed my tooth, stuck gauze into the crevice, and asked if I wanted kolo mee for dinner.

That was the first time I stopped to ask myself what the hell I was doing here.

Fourteen years later, in the midst of my bittersweet time at SMU, I began to wonder where I was going. My education had tried to prepare me to be a hotshot banker at Morgan Stanley, but I was not up to it — I did not want it either. There were many decisions to be made, but people only tell you what they think you should be, and never tell you how you’re getting there. So I decided to find out for myself. I packed my bags, and set off to ’see the world — starting with Asia’. On my first trip out without my family, I wanted to see the Angkor Wat, and this was before budget airlines starting flying. I could not afford to fly to Cambodia — so I took the bus. Or rather, a series of buses, Toyota Camrys stuffed with six people in the front and six people in the back, minibuses, and motorcycles. We crossed the border overland into Cambodia — walking into the country, we spent a night in a border shantytown better known for its gunmen, pedophiles and colonies of insects in my bathroom. I spent that night writing the piece, Surviving a Shower in a Cambodian Border Town.

I knew then that there was nothing I loved more.

The next summer, I spent a short two months travelling across India by road and rail, still fixated on the question of what I was going to do and where I was headed. My friends had all spent their summers interning at banks and other such esteemed organizations — I spent all my summers in SMU, including this one, figuring out how to cover the maximum distance and areas of Asia, in the longest period of time, taking the longest modes of transport and spending as little money as I possibly could. I did 7000 kilometres across India by train that year, spending $300 on train tickets. There was nothing I was better at doing. In the last week of my India adventures, I had one of those encounters that answered all my questions and pointed me in the right direction. I met a man at a cafe — I was helping him with his Mac, then we began to chat. He was a photographer from the UK, about to do a very exciting story. But his journalist had left him abruptly, so would I be interested in it? I said yes — flew home — borrowed money from my dad — and was back in India the next month, in the world’s wettest place during the monsoon. Sometimes you get a call that you can’t shake off; it makes everything right in the world, fulfils your childhood ambitions, or is simply the best deal at that point in time. This was mine. I spent a month in Bangladesh and among the hilltribes of northeast India. I polished up my Bengali, and learned to speak the hilltribe language of Khasi. I crawled in coal mines for what seemed like an eternity, and was underwhelmed by the diminutive, powerless king of Cherrapunjee. I had been published before, but never in a large publication. This story about life in the world’s wettest town during the monsoon, where it rains at times for a month and a half without stopping, then suffers from a water shortage in the winter, was the cover story of the Geographical magazine, which is the British Geo.

Make no mistake about it — every journey is arduous. Every step forward inevitably demands several steps backwards. As long as you stop to ask yourself: what am I doing here? Every once in a while, you’ll be alright. To quote da Vinci, Things don’t just happen to people of accomplishment, they went out and happened to things — though some more than others make it seem so effortless. It takes discipline. Sacrifice. Opportunity costs. I’m a heartbeat away from establishing my career in documentary photojournalism. My heart is in it. I love the people I meet, I love learning new languages, I love my job. I want to tell stories about Asia that have never been told, the Asia I know so intimately and want to share. I’ve wanted it since I was a child, when every time I tried to think about where I might work, I always ended up fantasizing about a small hut in a country nobody goes to, with my sketchpad and a camera. And I’ve got it. I happen to think it’s the most awesome job in the world, but as I said earlier, there are sacrifices. It’s the only thing I can do because I’m a loner and have tremendous amounts of patience, and I like being alone. I like taking 40 hour train rides alone, and I do it more frequently than I should. It’s also a terrifying experience to be alone for too long, no friends, 800 kilometres from air-conditioning, electricity and anybody who speaks your language, having the mother of all diarrheas. Living in grotty guesthouses, and your wardrobe really is your backpack. That’s been my life in fits and starts for some time, and when I leave SMU finally, it will be my life.

Last year in Bangladesh, I fell horribly ill while on the job. I still left my room at eight each morning, talking to and taking pictures of leprosy patients so poor they travelled 300 kilometres by oxcart for free treatment. I had the worst dysentery I’d ever had, and I have some experience with tropical diseases — but I had to finish interviewing Shogagi Chowdhury, 74 year old leprosy patient who had lost her son in the great flood and was about to lose her toes. When I was done I walked out of the room and asked myself: what am I doing here? Before an answer came to me I had to walk as fast as I could, looking for a grass patch or drain, but the leprosy hospital had sealed up everything: pushing open the first door I found, I toppled into a sink and threw up in the lab for TB, leprosy and elephantiasis studies. Then I got into the car and drove five hours to the elephantiasis hospital in another province to work some more. Some hours ago I had asked myself what I was doing here; I was listening to my favourite classical Bangladeshi music, I was driving through a region so remote even Bangladeshis I know laugh at me when I tell them I was there, and I was about to make my big debut.

What am I doing here? Where am I going? How am I going to get there? Can I do this for the next couple of years? I visited a man at his hospital bed. He had elephantiasis in his scrotum. Heartbreakingly beautiful children gave me Bengali names and hugged me around my salwar kameez that cost as much as what their families made in months. The next week I was sitting by a limestone kiln talking to Borilang War and the music-mad natives of Cherrapunjee about Bob Dylan. It started raining in the world’s wettest place. We chewed betel nuts and talked about Bob Dylan some more. It was amazing.

I still can’t tell you for sure where I will be next month, next January, two years from now but I can tell you that I will be doing what makes me happy, wherever it may be in the world, quite literally. Whatever your dreams are, whatever you hope to achieve, I believe that at the end of it all you just have to grit your teeth, and make things happen to you — so long as you are passionate about it. You don’t have to starve, because money is best made doing the things you love. It’s a simple concept that no one seems to believe in: I’m here to tell you it works. If you like toy trains, some people make a very good living making and designing toy trains. If you like cheese so much you want cheese to be in every aspect of your life — I once met a cheesemaker full of passion for cheese. His girlfriend designs biscuits for a living, and has a line of boutique biscuits that sell like hotcakes, because she loves biscuits, well, a hell lot. Don’t waste your time living other people’s dreams for you; live yours. It will be worth it.

Sometimes distractions get in the way, and cloud your vision. You have to stay the course, and this is when you need to know what you really want; which shouldn’t be too difficult if you’re passionate about something. I was offered a job to travel around reviewing luxury hotels. The pay was very good. It was a painful decision to make, but my goal is to get more of my work into publications in my field this year. Next month I go to coastal India for a story for the Asian Geographic. Last month I was in northern Thailand doing a story about the Kuomintang soldiers who had fled China when they lost the civil war in 1949, were left behind in Burma and Thailand, disowned by China and Taiwan and who now live as Thai citizens in the hills. Tomorrow? I don’t know. That seems to me a great reason to continue doing what I love.

So when I ask myself — what am I doing here?

It has to be a loud and resounding: going places. My one wish for the future is for more people to go out there and make their dreams happen, no matter how difficult it is; and perhaps as a bonus, to get to see the world while they’re at it.