As India and Pakistan face each other again, I remember Naipaul managed to make both countries unfavorable. and Argentina, East Africa, Islamic Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, Iran. Few writers see more of the world. Few people find it wanting more. Some people attribute it to a Western chauvinism that was named Cat after the first Roman emperor. For others, it's just a clear mind at work. His prose stings because it often does not do abuse or even adjectives, just like the patient's narration details.
Either way, something that might be called the Naipaul paradox in the modern world is happening. Foreign travel has grown for decades. But so is nationalism. This "shouldn't" be true. Although no one except fool or Mark Twain thinks travel is must "Deadly bias" can be fairly expected to reduce people's hatred generally because people and people are in contact.
To see how things are, look around. Around 2012, the strengthening of the relationship between China and the West was in the era of tourism and student transportation from one place to another. The British and Italians are one of the most prolific travelers in the world. Both countries voted in favor of claims or parties that might have been called nationalists over the past decade. In 1995, 8% of Americans planned to travel abroad within the next six months. In 2023, more than one in five. In these two periods, America is more internationalist?
Mark Zuckerberg believes that the date of online connections will “get the world closer together” is ridiculous. But at least some people say that. It is pointed out that travel has also failed as a unity of the species, which feels like the rudder, almost invasive. In Europe, there is still the applause of midwifery dinners, and there is no passport among such Americans. Abandoning methodological issues here - until 2007, there was no need for some foreign travel documents - so what? When 3% of valid passports hold a valid passport, the United States voted for George HW Bush, the old Chinese hand and the CIA man, the most exterior president. Now close to half, Donald Trump is in the White House.
Why did the trip fail? The kindest answer is that other troops drive nationalism, such as immigration, are even going to be tense now without a significant increase in travel. Another is that most of the growth is explained by liberals. Those who need foreign contact the most are still hiding.
Each of these is a reasonable line, but the third is: Travel should never make such a heroic claim for this. If cross-border integration itself enhances the rope of human sympathy, then Europe will have a quieter past. In other words, it is entirely possible to become a secular jingo. While rejecting it, you can interact with another culture. Otherwise, Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Zhou Enlalai and Islamic pioneer Said Kutbu would disarm them instead of raising their awareness of the differences.
The trip was fun. Apart from that, if you get to a place with a reading base, it could be a top-up for education. (If you don't run into anyone who observes by chance.) But what about the connection experience? Remind the basic unity of human beings? If so, we should expect that in the age of cheap flight, the dissipated Iron Curtain and China will become porous in both directions, rather than surges, rather than surges.
To explain this, some will stick to the difference between Crass "tourism" and "tourism". please. This has become a class difference, and that's all, like the difference between "immigration" and "immigration". Furthermore, Naipaul, at least before he became a comic book of great men highput your legs into work. He was a post-war English writer and even everyone else seemed to play at work. If he retreats from the world roaming, it seems that he is not once.
janan.ganesh@ft.com
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