In 1872, a wealthy Englishman called Phileas Fogg bet members of his club that he could circumnavigate the world in 80 days. His confidence stemmed from a new railway line in India. The wager: $2.5 million in today’s value.
This is the plot of Jules Verne’s much-loved ‘Around the World in 80 Days,’ published in 1873. The journey takes Fogg, his butler Jean Passepartout, a tenacious policeman and a Bengali widow, Aouda, on a trip that starts in London, passes through Suez, Egypt; Bombay and Calcutta, India; Victoria, Hong Kong; Yokohama, Japan, San Francisco and New York, America and back home.
In 1624, the English poet John Donne wrote:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
Well, now the Brits have gone and turned Donne’s wisdom on its head, by leaving the continent – the European Union. From an Empire where the sun never set, Britain is now an island ghetto. Donne, Verne, Fogg and Passepartout would have shaken their heads in disbelief.
Before WW-I in 1914, the world was an open space, free for anyone to travel and live in. A good example is Amitav Ghosh’s non-fiction book, ‘In an Antique Land.’ Here, he tries to trace the life and times of a Jewish-Indian trader, Abraham Ben Yiju and his Indian munshis, Ashu and Bomma, doing business in Egypt in the 12th century, through their correspondence.