It is one thing to travel; quite another to travel back in time. When you travel back in time, every decade that you retrace mentally is equivalent to covering ten kilometres physically. That’s the way I look at it.
During a physical journey, you just sit back and watch the topography and culture change from one place to another; there is no imagination involved. But the canvas is totally blank when you travel back in time. You have the freedom to paint your own picture of the past, but your imagination must collate with written history. Otherwise, imagination becomes fantasy.
To imagine history while keeping historical facts in mind can be quite a task, it makes travelling back in time, even while being stationary, as tedious as undertaking a physical journey.
Murali and I, ever since we visited George Town this morning, must have travelled a total of 450 km back in time. If this distance were to be counted on the map, we would have been in Bangalore by now, sharing a pitcher of beer over lunch.
