Maharashtra Board Class 12 English Chapter 1.7 Why we Travel Textbook PDF Download

Why We Travel

Ice Breakers

Share your views on how travelling can be a hobby.

Discuss in the class the benefits of travelling and complete the web.

Travel Teaches You:

To be prompt and quick

To prepare / organize

To be careful and cautious

Make a list of your expectations when you travel to some new place:

(a) Food should be delicious and available whenever hungry.

(b) [blank]

(c) [blank]

(d) [blank]

Discuss in the class the various types of travels. Add your own to ones given below:

Solo travel, Culinary travel, and other types of travel.

Teacher's Note

Travelling teaches children to be organized and careful. Just like when you visit your grandmother's house in a different city, you learn about new places and new ways of living.

Exam Trick

Remember: Travel = learn something new. Travel changes how you see the world. This is the main idea of this chapter.

Points to Remember

Travel helps you lose yourself and find yourself again.
Travel teaches you to be careful, quick, and organized.
There are many types of travel like solo travel and culinary travel.
Travel helps you learn about new cultures and new people.
Travel opens your eyes and your heart to the world.

About The Author

Siddarth Pico Raghavan Iyer was born in 1957 at Oxford, England. He is known as Pico Iyer. He is a British-born American essayist and novelist. He is best known for his travel writing.

He was awarded the famous Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts in 2005. He has won the accolade of Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters by Chapman University.

He has written several books. Some of them are Video Night in Kathmandu (1988), The Lady and The Monk (1991), The Global Soul (2000), and The Man Within My Head (2012).

He has been working as an essayist for Time since 1986. He also publishes regularly in The New York Review of Books and The New York Times and other famous publications.

In his classic essay "Why we Travel," Pico Iyer explains why he loves to travel. He shares his thoughts with the readers. He quotes famous writers. He puts forth his own observations. He probes into his own instinct to travel.

The essay is very interesting and inspiring. It will inspire readers who are looking for adventures in their lives.

Teacher's Note

Pico Iyer is a very famous travel writer from England. He writes about his travels to help other people understand the world better, just like when your teacher takes you on a school trip to learn new things.

Exam Trick

Remember: Pico Iyer = travel writer. He writes essays about why people should travel and what they learn from it. His main message is that travel changes you.

Points to Remember

Pico Iyer was born in 1957 in Oxford, England.
He is a British-born American essayist and novelist.
He won the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005.
He has written many famous travel books.
He writes for Time magazine and famous newspapers.

Why We Travel

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again - to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.

The beauty of this whole process was best described, perhaps, before people even took to frequent flying, by George Santayana in his essay, "The Philosophy of Travel." We "need sometimes," the Harvard philosopher wrote, "to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what."

Few of us ever forget the connection between "travel" and "travail." Travel in that sense guides us toward a better balance of wisdom and compassion - of seeing the world clearly, and yet feeling it truly. For seeing without feeling can obviously be uncaring; while feeling without seeing can be blind. Yet for me the first great joy of travelling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle.

Teacher's Note

Travel means losing yourself and finding yourself. When you travel to a new place in India, like Goa or Kashmir, you learn new things about yourself and become a better person.

Exam Trick

Remember: Travel = lose yourself + find yourself. The word "travail" means hard work. So travel is also hard work, but good hard work that teaches you things.

Points to Remember

We travel to lose ourselves first, then to find ourselves.
Travel teaches us wisdom and compassion for others.
Travel helps us see the world with new eyes.
Travel is like the word "travail" which means hard work.
Travel changes how we think about everything we know.

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