The Hindu Business Line : A voyage in self-discovery

At an age when most of his contemporaries would be found around the world chasing high-powered careers and an active social life, Thomas Reissman has travelled all over the world, written a novel about the adventures he encountered while travelling to Central America and is right now in India, which he maintains, is where the western world will find a lot of answers to their spiritual quest.

But then Reissman is no ordinary young man. His life experiences have been much more than what most adults would gain in their entire life.

Consider the fact that he was born and brought up in Dresden, which was bombed in the Second World War, and spent his life till twenty behind the Berlin Wall that partitioned the country into East and West Germany.

When the Wall came down in 1989, the Reissman family moved to settle in Munich while Reissman, who admits to a great feeling of liberation, took to travelling around the globe. "The last eight years have been a wonderful voyage of discovery for me and every place I have visited has left its imprint on my mind," says Reissman who has been to the UK, the US, Australia, Thailand, New Zealand and Central and South America in this period.

The visit to the last two destinations resulted in a book, `Return to La Paz', a bizarre, but he says entirely true story of his journey and the adventures he encountered on the way.

"I had a reading of my book at a small community I was living in while I was at the US and while the book itself raises profound questions about how and what we are doing in this world, I was delighted that people actually saw the humour that is part of the entire experience," says this self-made author who managed to do a tourism management course while in Australia.

In India now, Reissman, is brimming over with ideas on what he wants to do here.

On a visit to the country last year, he toured Kolkata, Delhi, BodhGaya, Dharamsala and Kashmir, found himself enchanted by the cultural and spiritual diversity in the country and decided that he wanted people around the world to know what India could offer to those seeking to find their inner selves.

Apart from the fact that you learn practices that can change your life forever, travellers from the western world, perhaps for the first time in their lives, are confronted with images of poverty, illness and acts of nature and they carry these images back with them.

"I like to believe that for a people who more or less think that paying tax is the biggest problem in life, a reality check like this is enough to make them want to contribute to the rest of the less privileged world in some way," says Reissman.

His last visit to Kashmir coincided with the then Prime Minister's visit to the Valley and the outbreak of violence.

Using a camcorder, the back-packer shot a thirty-minute documentary on Kashmir from the perspective of the locals and was amazed by the fact that most of the people there clearly do not care which political or religious faction is winning or losing. "They want peace and that's it," he says.

Reissman is right now excited about a Web site that he is planning on India that will be a kind of ready reckoner for the back-packer from the West.

"The idea is to allow the small and medium level players in the tourism industry to get on the Web site and tell the world about what they have on offer. Usually, the smaller level people don't get direct access to clients and get by-passed. As for the backpacker, the Web site allows him to get out of the typical tourist destinations and decided where he/she wants to go." Reissman is looking for sponsors for the project.

And in the mean time, what is this Gora Sadhu doing for a living?

He is heading back to Munich where the October Fest (the largest beer festival in the world) is held every October.

"Every year for a fortnight I sell cigars at the event and the money I make there is enough for me to live the whole of the next year," he smiles.