Airplane Mode by Shahnaz Habib: Why be a traveller, choose to stay home

livemint.com:

Lupin was shot there), even as Paris gears up for about 15 million visitors for the Olympics later this month. At home, Tamil Nadu introduced permits for tourists wanting to visit its overburdened, fragile towns in the Western Ghats, in Nilgiris and Kodaikanal. Goans have long demanded curbs on untrammelled tourism which impacts their environment and makes their cities and villages unliveable.

Heat waves, traffic jams, litter and water shortages have made Himalayan towns less than idyllic in the summer. Despite the benefits to the local economy, everywhere there seems a backlash against the heavy toll of overtourism—crowding, the stress on resources and infrastructure, higher rents for locals, and often, unfortunately, a lack of respect for the local culture and ecology. Tourism has become increasingly stressful—whether one travels or one stays home.

Reading Shahnaz Habib’s Airplane Mode: A Passive-Aggressive History of Travel in this context is truly an education, making one question more than ever the need to travel regularly, see new places and collect experiences as if they’re fridge magnets. Habib describes wanderlust as a consumerist idea peddled to us by capitalism, and travel itself as an exploitative concept made possible by colonialism. Colonial explorers, writers and adventurers packaged milking a place for all its worth as the romance of discovery, an idea that has evolved into modern travel and the belief that every place has something to take away.