Excerpts from the interview.Q: How did this book come about? A: A lot of my books have the personal in them. I think this in some ways is the most personal. And it came about because I had this annus horribilis… And for me that was 2023 when I had this shock breast cancer diagnosis. And just as I was going through the treatment, I lost my mother very suddenly, I spoke to her the night before and then the next morning I got a call saying she’s gone. And it left me feeling very unmoored. But it also set me off thinking about how I could traverse some of these inner terrains of illness, of grief, these emotional journeys… I’ve lived in eight countries, in nine different cities since the late 1990s. Doing so I’ve learned something about the art of travelling well… And then I thought about applying some of these to other kinds of journeys, more metaphorical journeys… And it helped me a lot because I realised that recasting illness and recasting grief and recasting some of these difficult life journeys as plot really helped me to process them and to bring to them an openness and a curiosity that I normally have in my travels to countries.Q: There is a bit about hanging on to your Indian passport, despite having been married to a Spaniard with a European passport for 25 years. A: I have a chapter on passportism, essentially a hierarchy that divides people and determines who can travel and who can’t. Just as your caste is determined by birth, your passport is also usually determined by birth. It’s a throw of the cosmic dice whether you’re born in Sudan or whether you’re born in the US. But if you happen to be lucky enough to born in the US or Spain, you have the keys to the world… Although I’m in a family of passport Brahmins, I have hung on to my Indian passport… We have a friend in, say, Mexico who invites us to a wedding. Everybody is like, yay, we’re going to Mexico. And being an Indian passport holder, my initial reaction is never unalloyed excitement. But I have hung on to this passport and I’ve tried to unpack why. There’s notions of loyalty to the nation but I think there’s also something more than that. It’s this kind of sense of guilt almost that I have of being such a privileged Indian… And in some ways, that passport is at least to some extent a leveller… And the very liberal countries of the West for whom supposedly racism would be anathema, sexism would be anathema, casteism would be anathema, passportism is okay — so much so that you have these rankings that are public every year saying which is the best passport and which is the worst passport.Q: I’ve noticed that parenting is such an integral part of your being, how you have traversed as a mother and a journalist. A: I’ve tried through a lot of my work to break down the barrier between those two aspects. A journalist would be like defining my professional life. And being a mother is supposed to be something very private. And I think that’s quite disingenuous… I believe this kind of division between the personal and the professional is spurious and it does not serve the interests of not only women, but men either… I feel like when you are writing anything,… it’s very important to centre and make obvious your own subjectivity… We’ve had a tradition in foreign correspondence and travel writing of, normally, a white male writer, essentially pretending to take a kind of objective vantage point. They have this very authorial, universalistic voice which obscures the lenses that they are seeing the world through and is just telling you this is the truth… I think whenever we are talking about something, we are describing a version of the truth. And that version is very much determined by who is telling that story. And so I think it’s important to make yourself quite transparent. So you are a female, you are a mother. And that is why you are apprehending the world in that way and interpreting the world in that way… You know, when they say ‘women can do it all’, what they actually mean is when you’re at work, you pretend that you don’t have kids, and when you are with the kids, you have to pretend that you don’t have work. And that’s just patently, empirically impossible.Q: And parents, predominantly mothers, end up competing with each other. A: In the chapter on pedagogy, I talk about this phase that I go through of being this kind of typical Asian tiger mom. A lot of how I process the world is through books. In this instance, it happened to be a book by a writer called Amy Chua, ‘Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother’… So I went through a very misguided phase, at least as far as I’m concerned, given my personal predilections as a parent, of being this tiger mom… Until I realised that, I was… creating misery all around. After a few months, I felt my claws retract and the stripes on my body dissolved into colourful polka dots… The last five years we’ve spent in Spain and there, sometimes I wish people were more tiger momish. They’re only concerned about if the kids are playing sports and if they have girlfriends and boyfriends… There’s no conversation about how they’re doing in math or what university they might want to apply to. So I think it’s about finding a good balance, and also realising all these things are culture-dependent, context-dependent. Q: You discover in China that names given to you give you different kinds of freedoms and perspectives. A: I think one of the important parts of travelling is to accumulate a variety of different lenses and perspectives and to expand your sense of self… Supposing you’re an Indian. You have various assumptions about the world and you don’t even realise that these are assumptions because you just think that they’re somehow universal norms… You travel, you learn new languages, you experience new cultures, and you understand there’s so many different ways in which you can inhabit the world, in which you can translate the world, and hopefully you can accrue more and more of these lenses so that you become a wider person… I just use the metaphor of my Chinese name as a way of talking about an extra lens that I acquired by becoming familiar with Chinese culture and Chinese ways of doing things… I think that when we proselytise about the virtues of travel, we also have to keep in mind what we started this discussion off with — passportism, and that not everybody can travel in the same way… So there are other ways of travelling. You can even become a traveller in your neighbourhood. If you walk around your own colony and you look at it with openness and curiosity instead of allowing what is the quotidian to become banal… My name, Pallavi, is distorted in so many ways. I’ve been called Pullover and Pavlova and Pavali. But instead of complaining, I’ve embraced each iteration. It’s just one more way of being. Go to Source
