Shahnaz Habib’s ‘Airplane Mode’

The only thing I knew about Shahnaz Habib’s ‘Airplane Mode’ was that it was a book on travel that had garnered a decent amount of attention. Within a few pages, to my delight, I discovered that the Brooklyn-based writer dissecting her anxieties of traveling off the beaten track in Rumi’s Konya and Istanbul was a Malayalee born in Kozhikode and raised in Ernakulam!

Habib was the translator of Benyamin’s ‘Jasmine Days’ and ‘Al Arabian Novel Factory’. Coincidentally, I heard (read?) both these works just a few weeks back on Storytel. Benyamin is another remarkable genius who has chronicled the Middle East for Malayalam readers like no other. These two works were set around the Arab Spring and the Baathist regime of Saddam. Aadujeevitham, released on Netflix, is also an adaptation of Benyamin’s Goat Days.

Now, coming back to ‘Airplane Mode’. International travel is deeply unequal and unfair. Its not something that one can not see. The visa application process, the background checks, the high bar for Third World travellers, and the currency exchange rates are all part of the raw deal that one is subjected to depending on the colour of our skin, oops, passport. One should be naïve to not be aware of this.

While Habib’s work is an important chronicle of such injustices, I found this whole Marxist meta-analysis of travel quite tedious. She examines with a wide range of historical texts and documents, the rise of the passport system (earlier post here), the Euro-centric historiographies (Marco Polo’s voyages, da Gama’s discoveries) and the wars that created a unique form of travel called militourism (Somme, Waterloo, Gallipoli, Pacific islands thanks to American GI stories etc) and rise of mercantile capitalism symbolized by cotton (earlier post here and a related piece on jute). Even Verne’s ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’ is a problematic text for Habib, since it represented the expanding tentacles of the steam engine and the colonial project of the West. While deeply ambivalent about the reasons one embarks on travel, Habib herself is a globetrotter who has crisscrossed the world.

Her description of Ernakulam as a mundane, run of the mill Indian city compared to the touristy Forth Kochi was spot on:

Yet not bearing the burden of history has certainly been a boon for Ernakulam. Its very banality has saved it from being a simulacrum of its past self. It has other problems, of course. It is a marvellously ugly city, with its flyovers and skyscrapers and huge billboards. But what a relief it is to be in a place where the marigold garlands go on idols in temples and not around tourists’ necks. The tailors are all booked for months; no one is going to sew you a colourful Indian tunic while you wait. When the bus stops at the traffic jam just before Jos Junction and the conductor calls out “half Jos, half Jos” in case someone wants to get off there, it doesn’t matter if no one gets the joke; he did it for himself, not for a Tripadvisor review.

And this paragraph on privilege:

We are primed to think of lack of privilege as a deficit. And of course it is that, in many big and small ways dictated by structural inequalities. But the more we think of it as a hole, the less whole we become. It is as if there are privilege-shaped holes in our selves—here is the hole where your white privilege should be, here is the hole where your straight privilege should be, here is the hole where your male privilege should be, here is where your able privilege should be, here is where your class privilege should be, here, here, here, and so on until some of us are mostly made of holes. But what if, instead of being a hole in the self, lack of privilege is more of a crack through which the light gets in? A third eye that reveals the magic-mushroom hybridity of the world we live in?

I also learnt that the idea of Paris as a city of romance and passion was imprinted in American minds as a project outcome of the Marshal Plan which rebuilt Europe after WWII. Paris has been reaping the tourism bonanza since then. Similarly, Thailand’s emergence as a global tourism magnet was driven by culinary diplomacy. Chefs were trained in Thailand and loans provided to entrepreneurs to set up Thai restaurants across the world. This craze for the cuisine led to millions flocking there. So, it wasn’t just the sex that brought them.

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