Around the world in 17-years
After repeated trial and error in adolescence, I came to relish very few things. A personal manifesto of guides, of travels, that I have borrowed and stolen.
When I was around thirteen, I used to watch a show called Beg, Borrow, Steal. I have purposefully declined to Google it to keep the memory of this TV show as authentic as possible, and when I finish writing about it I will look it up and keep the reader in the know.
Beg, Borrow, Steal was about a young girl - the host of the show - who travels around India with minimal preparation but with all the enthusiasm necessary. She must beg, borrow, or gasp, steal to make her life on the road possible and nothing is off the table. From lodging to food, to travel, she has nothing and no one except the camera crew documenting this adventure.
You might know where this is going, and it’s not difficult to tell, but I loved that show with all the love I had in my body and I hoped and yearned and grew greedy for her life. It was my desire to grow up and be like her. I wanted to know how to talk to people in the enviable way that makes your life kinder. I wanted to unabashedly celebrate new land I covered and revere each day that I saw something new. I wanted to meet the mountains, lakes, rivers, sands, trees, and grass, in each square meter. I wanted so much to devour the ease of conversation and exploring worlds outside and inside, and to just know things and how to do those things. I wanted to know what the appropriate length is for my hair so it always curtains perfectly around the shoulders with little maintenance and blows in the wind care-lessly/fully. I wanted to know how to get out of difficult situations and persevere in uncertainty.
My fascination with her swung between more frivolous and less frivolous and I desperately wanted to be like her. A scene from an episode is etched in my mind. It’s a dusty afternoon on National Highway Forty Four and with no money or way of transport, she must get to Rajasthan from a small village at the edge of Madhya Pradesh. After repeated attempts to hitchhike she is able to finally convince a truck driver to ride in the back along with her camera crew.
I’ve looked for the show online, and it has come to my attention that the show host, Aaliyah, was also given a sparse Rs. 100 to aid her, but around twenty years ago, this could have been a reasonable amount. Everything else she might have needed to complete the distance she was asked to cover by the producers would have to be arranged by either begging, borrowing, or stealing - albeit I don’t remember any of that.
As it turns out I remember the show perfectly, but my sleuthing on the Internet has been unsuccessful as very little exists about the show with the original host. The show was revived around 5 years ago with a slightly different concept but it doesn’t look nearly as enticing. The revived version seems to fixate too much on the ‘challenge’ of traveling on a shoestring budget with none of effortlessness of the earlier seasons - the journey isn’t what we are supposed to enjoy anymore, it’s the sense of accomplishment that is relished more.
If there’s something in common that Aaliyah from Beg, Borrow, Steal and Xuanzang have, is that there exists someone who is seethingly envious of them. I still have much to learn from a seventeen-year-long journey on land, court-sponsored, spent translating and traveling, and a camera crew-documented road trip.