It is no secret that I love traveling and sharing stories from my travels. After-all, that precisely is the reason of this blog’s existence. Over the years, as I have traveled more and more I have realized how skewed the meaning of travel is to most of Indians. Travel in the Indian society is seen as a luxury whereas the reality is far from that. I have always believed (and experienced) that travel helps you learn things you would never get to learn otherwise, one reason I always advocate travelling as much as possible. If travelling can change the introvert me to someone who now loves talking a-lot, it surely can teach you a lot of other things too.

I now always look forward to and enjoy sharing my experiences in whatever way I can. So it was only natural to be delighted when I got an invitation to speak at justGo, an initiative by the experimental travel company F5 Escapes which is aiming to build an active travel-community. I was supposed to talk about my travels, my experience as a travel-blogger and anything I would like to talk about around the subject. I was pretty much at home :).

To be honest, I was expecting a very small audience given that it was a Sunday evening (or was it a Saturday). So, to enter in a room full of people with some of them standing because all the seats were already occupied was nothing less than a pleasant surprise for me.

It was great to hear the stories of the other two speakers and by the time my turn to speak came, the audience already seemed very interested. The mood was already set and I did not have to worry about the audience losing interest. I had not done any preparation for the evening, in-fact, I hadn’t even thought about what experiences I was going to talk about. But when the people you are talking to are as indulged in listening as you are, in speaking, things just flow on their own.

Our talks were followed by a very interactive panel discussion with lots of interesting question from the audience. I was happy to see that the younger generation, at least some of them, don’t see travel just as a luxury. They want to know about the unseen places, want to explore and learn. Things it seems, are changing 🙂

Do you think the meaning of travel has changed for you? Do you now see travel as something which teaches you something new?

**Some of the photos were shared by F5 Escapes.