Trudge through the marketplaces of Turkey, camera in hand, photographing the mounds of spices, the rolls of fabric, the doorways, the lanes and the great plates of food in the cookshops. Trash those acceptance letters from top firms, and take off for a year to Hunan, to teach Chinese teenagers. Take a train into the heart of rural Orissa to volunteer in local governance projects.

Sounds lovely – just not an Indian thing to do? Think again. These are just three different stories from three different people on my Facebook list, all born and raised in India.
Does this speak volumes for a new development in Indian student life, or does the selection bias in my data exaggerate the trend? India has long been a favourite getaway on the ‘gap year,’ that most First World of youthful activities, where young people, weary from the terrible burdens of adolescent life, go a-roving in exotic lands. But there our relationship with the concept has ended. As a result of living in one of the only countries in the world where having a graduate degree by the age of 20 is a prerequisite to entering polite society, liberal families best-equipped to encourage children to spend another year outside the pale have been the strongest opposition to the gap year idea. Imagine the bewilderment of the heads of the family when confronted with the notion. Will this be a vacation? A job? When the child could be accumulating post-graduate degrees instead? It’s enough to make the most open-minded patriarch balk.

Even in the boom years of the 90s and early 2000s, when India really opened up to travellers from abroad and vice versa, gap year travel never really achieved the status that other markers of global citizenship – McDonalds, iPods, running shoes – did. Parental disapproval aside, there seemed to be little enthusiasm for the experience among collegians, for many of whom international travel meant no more than the transcontinental flight to college abroad and back. There is one significant reason for this. The gap year is an essentially European and Australian phenomenon. In America, the cultural mother lode of the world, the practice is far from usual among the majority. When I bring up the subject of idealistic kids dropping a semester to go build huts in Kenya with Scott Hartley, an American graduate student and dedicated international traveller, he smiles. “Africa?” he says. “I’d say one in 50,000 people would go there. Maybe.” University exchange programmes and jobs that entail global travel aside, only two kinds of Americans take time off to go somewhere else: the well-heeled Europhiles, and children whose origins, like the NRIs overrepresented in Hindi cinema, lie far away from the States.

Indeed, young NRIs feeling the pull of the old country have given us the most regular insight into the lifestyle of students who count travel as part of their education, and not a hindrance or an evil necessary to it. While we are regularly surprised and touched by the commitment of the visitors whose projects in social work and economics make it into the human interest pages of the newspapers, no data exists to establish that these few are in any way representative of a minority that largely drops by to ‘find themselves.’ “Only Indians with the most direct relations to causes are likely to come by to work,” observes international student and traveller, Viren Falcao. “Even fewer volunteer elsewhere – and given the magnitude of the challenges in India, some might question the logic of sending large number of students to other developing countries as volunteers.”

In the more regularised and gap year support systems available to UK and Aussie citizens, finding oneself is sometimes supported by the wide variety of opportunities for volunteering for a variety of causes in developing nations. The ethical and practicable details of what is sometimes disparagingly known as ‘volontourism’ are difficult to pronounce judgment on. Again, in India, the context of this sort of travel is different from that in other countries. Relief work is often indistinguishable from the regular channels of charity in this country, and charity has habitually been a family affair for Indians; taken up under the auspices of religious travel and living and conducted under the watchful eye of parents and grandparents.

One form of gap year has begun to thrive in India, though. It runs entirely parallel to the idea of a year used to broaden the mind and sharpen the senses through travel; it is the ‘work’ gap year, used to build up a professional résumé and increasingly tying in neatly with the requirements of premier business school programmes in India and abroad. The truth is, travel has a long way to go before it substitutes for work or academics for more than a very intrepid handful of Indian students. In Europe, the traditions of the Grand Tour sustained themselves over centuries, at least if you were rich, white and male. In India, the clash of civilisations somehow succeeded in eroding the importance of traditions of pilgrimage and spiritual quests, and severely restricted the number and kind of people capable of undertaking these.

The Indian approach to travel is a complex heritage that is handed down to us, one that lies somewhere in between the ancient image of the ubiquitous Indian – who lives on in the modern-day jokes about finding a Gujarati or a Malayali wherever you go – and the orientalist myth of the Indian who, like the three Brahmins in The Moonstone, feared and hated overseas travel because it would break his caste. As the economy deflates and more and more students scramble for jobs or places at university, perhaps it is important to remember that discovering the intricacies of religious diversity in Indonesia, teaching in Taiwan, or photographing marketplaces in Turkey are all privileges not easily come by, and one whose after-effects cannot be measured even by a line on a résumé. For that matter, it’s not particularly hard to do any of those things in India, either. It’s a long way from finding oneself, but it’s closer to home than you might think.

An Indian Abroad
Work: The Voluntary Services Organisation [www.vso.org.uk] recruits Indian professionals to work on a variety of projects worldwide. For students in between degrees, by far the best-supported jobs are in teaching English as a second language, through a variety of programmes. Although applicants to Europe and South America face heavy competition from students from North America, the UK and Australia, opportunities for Indians in China, Korea and Turkey are opening up like never before. Check out Dave’s ESL Café [www.eslcafe.com] for more details.

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