People often ask me why I don't travel as much as an average Indian does on his/her stay in the US or any developed country for that matter. People characterize me as too lazy or too nerdy or too stingy to travel and spend money on the pleasure of travelling. Yes, those are some of the reasons I don't travel but then, there's more to it.

Excuse me for my fine art.

To understand this better, we must first ask ourselves why people like to travel? Why people like to go to new places? Why? The common answer is, "to experience". Yes, that's part of the reason. But the primary reason is to have a "change" in their mundane lifestyle. And there's nothing bad in it, we all want changes in the set boring patterns of life. But the way we experience change, is different. Some people experience change by "travelling" and I kind of do like to do it differently.

I read a book and I travel to the world that may be more beautiful than anyplace in the real world. I read a research paper and I travel to a world that can't be perceived by common sense. In this way, I travel all the time. And did I forget to mention, if you want to classify travel, you can either travel in space or time, or both. Most human beings will do very less time travel (they will live in the present, and enjoy live action all the time, seldom pondering about the past or the future) and their space travel will also be limited to a couple of orders of magnitude in length/distance (when they travel around the world, its some thousands of miles, and when they make love, they move a few inches).

But if you do the kind of travel I do, you can travel to any time period (access historic/science fiction art) or do space travel (study astrophysics for travelling to higher orders of magnitude in distance or pursue quantum mechanics for travelling to much lower orders of magnitude)

We must remember that all of us as living beings, can only experience limited amount of things due to the constraints of mortality. But its entirely up to us, in which direction and to which depth, do we want to travel.

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Professor X sat staring at me and I could feel myself shrinking down before his gigantic eyes.

"So make sure you pay attention to your second paper. I don't want you to tell me later that this one also came back like the first one."

"Uh-yes, yes, I'm trying my best-"

"Don't try, just get it published."

"B-but, the-the data is not good, I can't help it. And the topic is also not very innovative. But I'm trying my best to write a good discussion on whatever I've got."

"Topic not good? How come Prof. Goswami got so many papers out of it? Did you read them? They've got a bunch of papers on this topic. Don't tell me you can't even get one paper out of it. Don't tell me you can't. All right, see you next week, I've other things to do now. Have the draft ready by then."

Little did Prof. X knew why Prof. Goswami got a bunch of papers on a shitty topic so easily. Following are the reasons:

1. Prof. Goswami is from an AWEsome university.
2. Prof. Goswami has got 400 papers. (Prof. X has got 40 papers.)

Thus, when peer reviewers see the name of Prof. Goswami on a submitted paper, they tremble in fear, sweat in profusion, wet their pants a lil bit, and finally accept whatever comes from the Goswami group of AWEsome university.

That's how academia works.

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What are books? What is music?