What I Learned from My Thirty-Day European Odyssey

This is the second book authored by M.P. Prabhakaran on his world-trotting experiences. In the preface to the first book, An Indian Goes Around the World - I: Capitalism Comes to Mao's Mausoleum, he describes his passion for travel thus: "I travel, therefore I am - apologies to Descartes for twisting his noble thought." If academic qualifications are a measure of one's learning experience, he says in the same preface, he has a string of them, including a Ph.D. in Political Science from The New School for So-cial Research, New York. "But," he hastens to add, "what I learned from this prestigious American institution and, before that, from various academic institutions in India is no match for what I did from my travels around the world." In the preface to this second book, devoted exclusively to the tour he undertook through ten countries of Europe in the summer of 2009, he goes a step further and sums up his experience through a mangled version of poet Shelley's immortal words: "The more we study, the more we dis-cover our ignorance." Prabhakaran's mangled version is: "The more I travel, the more I discover my ignorance." The 2009 tour, he says, opened his mind to various aspects of European cultures he had been quite ignorant of until then. It cleansed his mind, he adds, of the many misconceptions he had about peoples and events that shaped the destiny of Europe. It convinced him, once again, that bookish knowledge is no substitute for the knowledge one gains from the people he interacts with, events he witnesses, and things he gets exposed to during his travels to new places. He shares that knowledge with readers through the pages of this book.