5 movies that would inspire you to travel!

Traveling brings innumerable benefits and helps us to become more aware of our surroundings, and of ourselves as an individual as well as in relation to these surroundings. Many movies emphasize on travel and apart from the beautiful locations and the pleasing experience the audience receives, they also make an appeal to our psyche to begin our own journey.

• Wild – ‘Wild’ is a solo journey of a woman who encounters her mother’s sudden death and is exhausted by her marital discord. She initially gets captivated by some mal-adaptive ways of dealing with her pain, but soon realizes a need to get out of it. The movie presents her 1100 mile journey as a medium of re-discovering herself ; and a way of letting go of the excess psychological and emotional baggage one carries. The movie portrays the importance of self work (confronting, assessing and resolving our conflicts); and traveling as a medium of introspection and grief resolution.

• Queen – This movie tells a story of a small town reticent girl whose identity is majorly formed by all those around her. She faces a major setback when her fiancee calls off the marriage, and then ventures to Paris. The movie emphasizes on travel as a way of coming across people with different personalities than yourself and trying things you otherwise would not. Traveling helps this girl re-frame her identity as an independent and assertive person who evolves as an active participant rather than a passive receptor of the circumstances.

• Chalo Dilli – This movie brings a comic tale of mishaps that bring together two people who belong to different worlds as co-travelers. On their way to Delhi, they learn a lot about how to get through tough unplanned situations and still keep moving. Through the journey of the two characters, the movie presents an important message to the audience that  traveling can help broaden our mindset by looking at various ways people and their way of appraising and tackling complex issues.

• The Bucket list – In this movie, two men with terminal illness go through a retrospective journey and set out to do things on their ‘bucket list’ before they say final goodbyes. It looks at travel as a medium of identifying and dealing with psycho-social issues by meeting their loved ones. Bucket lists don’t focus on death or end of our years; instead they are very good instruments which help to add life and meaning to our years.

• Zindagi Milegi Na Dobara – This movie portrays the journey of three friends who go on a trip at a point in their lives when all three have their own sets of psycho-social predicaments. Their issues range from relationship conflicts, work-life balance and to conflicts because of parental separation. Apart from a lot of fun and good memories, their holiday trip helps them evolve as individuals and resolve their personal and psycho-social conflicts. Traveling also helps them face their fears as they take on challenges that they were escaping from all their lives. Traveling helps them to learn valuable life lessons thus evolving into more congruent human beings.

I would also like to share a famous quote by Eleanor Roosevelt – “The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.”