As 2026 began with a wind of chaos blowing across the globe heralding a storm of geopolitical upheavals, we had to buckle down to producing our first special issue of the year. Ironically, we had picked a topic that is as tranquil as the world is turbulent today and as shared as the world is divided today.
Yet perhaps that is the precise appeal of an issue on travel. Because travel is about seeing the world and its people through a different lens, a lens of curiosity and adventure and not acquisitiveness or greed; it is about seeking the heartbeat of human community across borders rather than the alienation of conquest.
I have a friend from Kerala who teaches in the small town of Trujillo in Peru. Imagine her delight when she traversed 17,000 kilometres from home and found that the most popular Peruvian dish, ceviche, or raw marinated fish, is served with boiled yuca, or tapioca, the very same dish called kappa in Kerala and served with fried fish. In the mountain city of Cajamarca, she tasted a green soup called caldo verde, and I have had the same soup, of Portuguese origin, in Goa. The Portuguese contact with both Peru and India goes back to the 1500s, trade in the one case and colonialism in the other. Trekking in Cajamarca, my friend wrote: “The landscape is very similar to the Himalayan ranges, high rocks, meadows with flowers, trickling streams. It reminded me so much of my Kashmir trek.” Of course, the people and culture in Peru are startlingly different from India. Yet we seek and find commonalities across the miles and reach out to form bonds of familiarity and friendship.
As we bridge oceans and mountains, we carry pieces of our own culture and collect fragments of others. We cook curry in a London home and bring back river-polished pebbles from the banks of the Tungabhadra. We exchange amused notes about how the sky flips upside down in New Zealand, changing Orion the Hunter to Orion the Saucepan. We share Diwali wishes with Tamil cousins in Singapore and Christmas greetings with Anglo-Indian families in Australia.
And, we also recognise that Australia did not emerge overnight as a country of white people. It was the land of the Aborigines, descendants of the humans who first migrated to the island continent some 50,000 to 65,000 years ago to form one of the world’s oldest continuous cultures with its distinct language, art, music, and mores. It was a mere 230 years ago that Britain established a penal colony there to settle its prisoners, later followed by settlers and immigrants, and today’s Australia came into being. Britain’s settlement of the continent was founded on the legal fiction of terra nullius, or empty land, which disregarded and violently displaced the Aboriginal people who already had a thriving home there. Britain and the West would use the same foundational myth when they made over Palestinian lands to Israel, claiming it was “a land without a people for a people without a land”, effectively erasing the area’s large and flourishing Arab inhabitants. Today, we have the US seizing Venezuela’s President and its oil assets, we have populations worldwide encouraging violence against migrants while forgetting they were all migrants once, we have nations wanting to wipe out other nations.
Travel, thankfully, does not deny peoplehood or overrun lands or stomp out cultures. But it comes with its own set of exclusions. Travel has always privileged those with dollars and Western passports, but Trump’s US has made targeted bans, prohibitive visa fees, extreme vetting, and social media surveillance part of the global travel experience. It is a whole different nightmare for travellers with Muslim names, whether they are going to Lucknow or Los Angeles, and is at times more deadly than just humiliating hotel and airport experiences. Who can forget the Railway Police constable who identified and killed three Muslim travellers (as well as his Hindu supervisor) on a Jaipur-Mumbai train in 2023.
Imperialism is alive. The impulse of the powerful to discriminate, deny, and degrade remains. Within the limits of this imperfect and unequal world, travellers embark on journeys of connection, hoping to give of themselves and embrace the strangeness of others. Artificial national boundaries have never stopped the human tribe’s urge to wander. And in this special issue, we encourage you to keep wandering.
