Mr Subrat Ratho explores why brief conversations with strangers during travel often reveal more about ourselves than years spent among familiar faces.
Some journeys are remembered not for the places they took us, but for the strangers who, for a little while, helped us see ourselves more clearly.
Some of the most memorable conversations of my life have been with people whose names I never learnt.
They have taken place on trains in another country, in airport lounges, on benches overlooking unfamiliar rivers, in cafés I was unlikely to visit again, during wine tours, and once on a ferry where the conversation lasted only until the shoreline came into view. Occasionally, they have happened in my own city too—during the interval of a play or while waiting for a concert to begin.
Yet those conversations have often left a deeper impression than many I have had with people I have known for years.
It seems an odd thing to admit.
Travel, after all, is often marketed as an escape from the familiar.
Yet many of us travel with extraordinary determination to preserve exactly that.
We cross continents only to spend every waking hour with familiar people, discussing the same subjects, repeating the same jokes, ordering familiar food just to be safe, and carrying our familiar world around with us like hand luggage. Sometimes, the only thing that changes is the scenery outside the window.
There is nothing wrong with that.
The familiar is comforting. It reassures us that, however far we have travelled, we have not really left home. Family, friends, colleagues and communities know us—or at least they know the version of us that has evolved over years of shared history.
There is comfort in familiarity.
But familiarity has an extraordinary talent for following us everywhere.
Even to places where we had hoped to discover something new.
Over time, conversations acquire established routes. We revisit the same concerns, the same opinions, the same memories and, occasionally, the same complaints. Gradually, we become the person everyone expects us to be.
Travel offers an unexpected alternative.
Not because the landscape changes, but because, for a little while, we become anonymous.
No one in the next seat knows what we do for a living. They have no opinion about our politics, our social standing, our family history or the decisions that shaped our lives. We are released, however briefly, from the obligation of being recognised.
Perhaps that is why strangers sometimes ask surprisingly beautiful questions.
Not, “How long are you staying?”
But, “What made you come here?”
Or, after a long silence,
“Do you think people really change?”
Questions like these cannot be planned.
Because they arrive unexpectedly, our answers often come from places we ourselves did not know were waiting.
I have often wondered why such conversations feel different.
I think it is because they are free of consequence.
The stranger has no investment in who we were yesterday.
We have no need to defend old opinions or maintain carefully cultivated versions of ourselves.
There is nothing to prove.
Nothing to protect.
Only a brief exchange between two travellers who happen to share the same patch of time.
It reminds me of reading a novel.
Or standing before a painting that refuses to explain itself.
Or walking alone on a mountain trail where the silence gradually becomes inhabited.
Or even an unexpected conversation with a nurse while lying in a hospital bed, knowing that by tomorrow you will probably never see each other again.
Stripped of context and consequence, even that brief exchange can acquire an honesty that lingers long after names have been forgotten.
Perhaps these moments belong to the same family.
They interrupt the steady narrative we tell ourselves about who we are.
They invite us, briefly, to inhabit a different self.
These experiences do not necessarily provide comfort.
They provide perspective.
And perspective is a rarer gift.
I have long suspected that this is both the blessing and the burden of being an outsider.
Outsiders are often considered slightly strange by those who move confidently within familiar circles. There is always a gentle expectation that they should join the group, follow the itinerary, laugh at the familiar jokes and agree that the best conversations are the ones they have always been having.
The outsider keeps wandering off—not necessarily to see another monument, but to discover what happens when life is left unscripted.
Sometimes nothing happens.
And sometimes everything does.
An unexpected conversation.
A shared silence.
A fleeting recognition.
Every now and then, another outsider appears.
It may happen over coffee in an unfamiliar city, on a mountain path, or beside you during a delayed flight.
Neither of you says so.
Neither of you needs to.
There is an immediate sense of recognition—not because you share a history, but because you share a curiosity.
Perhaps we recognise one another not because we have shared a past, but because we have shared a way of looking at the world.
The stranger knows nothing of your profession, your family, your successes, your disappointments or the many roles you perform. They respond only to the person sitting opposite them—to a smile, a question, a silence.
Sometimes, that is the truest version of ourselves.
Then the announcement comes.
The train arrives.
The boarding gate opens.
The ferry reaches the harbour.
You smile, wish each other well, and disappear into different lives.
No photographs.
No exchanged numbers.
No promises to keep in touch.
Only the curious feeling that someone who knew nothing about you managed, for a brief while, to understand something about you that many who have known you for years never quite had.
We imagine that travel is about discovering unfamiliar places.
Often it is.
But occasionally it is about escaping the familiarity we carry within ourselves.
The greatest distance we travel is rarely from one country to another.
It is from the familiar to the unfamiliar.
And fortunately, for those who worry that we might just wander off one day, we usually come back.
The strangers, of course, we almost never meet again.
Perhaps that is precisely why we remember them.
Some journeys end at railway stations, airports or ferry terminals.
Others continue quietly within us for years.
