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Five years ago I made the choice to develop my skills to facilitate long-term travel. I’m now a product marketer for a realtime Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider.
Exploration and Escape is a collection of stories about the places I visit, the people I meet, and the life of remote work. These stories explore human interaction, identity, and the impact of technology on society.
I was born and raised in inner-city Birmingham in England. My mother is second generation Irish and my father is second generation Indian. They met in the melting pot that is urban Birmingham.
I’ve always been curious about the world around us. Everything in it fascinates me. But other countries, cultures, and traditions have long held a special sway over my psyche.
For someone whose grandparents left their home countries of Ireland and India, never to return for any length of time, I’ve often wondered how much thoughts of these ‘homelands’ influenced my desire to travel.
Studying English at university, I learned about travel writing as a form of exploring our inner selves, other societies, and our relationship with the environment all around us. This cemented my desire to travel.
The trick, then, was to find a way to fund long-term travel. Working long periods in service jobs and saving up to travel for six months has never appealed to me. It’s a perfectly feasible way to travel, it’s just not for me.
As much as I enjoy travel I’m also fascinated by technology, wanting to work in the industry since being a teenager. Until fairly recently travelling long-term and being part of an industry were mutually exclusive goals.
But technology is now advanced enough to enable seamless remote working. Many tech employers are wise enough to know that the ability to do one’s job isn’t tied to a single location. I came of working age at a fortuitious time.
Here, on Exploration and Escape, I hope to capture the essence of this travel-driven life through the stories I tell.
-Kieran