The Dream of Mobility

There is a hope built into the idea of mobility, that getting somewhere else might change something. But for a large part of the world, mobility is not a real option. The will is there. What is missing is the freedom to act on it, and the access to make it possible.

Start with the most basic of things. Physical movement within your own city, to work, to study, to just exist freely, is still a struggle for most people in the global south. Public transport is often unreliable or does not exist at all. What does exist tends to be overcrowded, underfunded, and unsafe. In many Indian cities, even something as ordinary as taking a bus or walking to the nearest train station involves a fair amount of luck, patience, and personal risk. Infrastructure fails, and so does everything tied to it. If your ability to reach a college, a job, or a hospital depends on a crumbling system, then your life is already running into walls before it has a chance to move forward.

This kind of immobility shapes everything. What kind of work you do. What kind of education you can access. Whether you feel safe moving around as a woman. Whether you even try.

Then there is the other kind of mobility, the one that involves crossing borders. For many in the global south, travel is less a matter of distance and more a matter of permission. These days, it is not about whether you can afford the plane ticket and the stay. Rather, it has become more about whether the destination will let you in. Visa regimes make it clear that not everyone is welcome, even temporarily. What gets disguised as ‘policy’ is more often than not, just a set of assumptions about who is seen as a threat, who might overstay, who belongs, and who does not.

If you have ever stood in a visa queue with a passport from the wrong part of the world, you will know how easily your intentions are questioned. You have to prove that you are not trying to cheat the system. You have to show bank statements, letters, certificates. A long paper trail to justify that you are not going to disappear into some foreign city and become someone’s problem. There is always a faint suspicion hanging in the air that your presence is a risk.

People with powerful passports never have to think about this. They can decide to travel on a whim. The idea of the world being open to them is not something they feel the need to explain or defend. But for the rest, even dreams of travel get edited down to whatever feels possible. Maybe a layover. Maybe a neighbouring country. Maybe nothing at all.

This is not only about tourism or work visas. Now, it is about how the world quietly sorts people into categories. The mobile and the stuck. One group is allowed to explore, leave, return, belong in different places. The other is told to stay where they are unless they can prove, convincingly and consistently, that they are worth the hassle.

This idea of mobility extends into the social sphere too. In theory, anyone should be able to improve their life with enough work. But the reality is harder. Social mobility, the idea that people can move out of poverty or exclusion is slowly being flattened by structures that remain rigid. Education costs more than it should. Good jobs go to those who are already positioned to get them. And the gap between those who can move up and those who cannot is getting wider.

You might get a degree, but you may still be stuck in the same economic position you were trying to leave. You might move to a city, but the rent makes it impossible to build anything stable. You might speak the right language, wear the right clothes, have the right qualifications. And still find yourself having to prove your place in rooms that were never designed for you.

What ties all these forms of mobility together, physical, international, social, is the idea that movement equals freedom. And yet, for a majority of people, that freedom remains conditional. You can move, but only under certain rules. You can travel, but only if you behave. You can rise, but only if you do not challenge the order of things.

This is what makes mobility a dream. Not in the romantic sense. In the sense of something distant, fragile, unevenly distributed. For the global south, the freedom to move is often fought for in everyday ways. Waiting for buses that never arrive. Filling out forms that may never be approved. Chasing jobs that might never lift you out of precarity. And all along, there is the quiet and unsaid knowledge that the world is open to some and fenced off for others.

Mobility is rarely discussed as a form of inequality, but that is precisely what it is. The ability to move freely across a city, across countries, across social boundaries is not a neutral experience. It is influenced by politics, class, race, caste, geography, and history.

To speak of the dream of mobility, then, is to speak of a world that still denies basic freedom of movement to most of its people. The ones who have to fight for every inch. Who are constantly told to wait. Who are always being asked to justify their presence. For them, the right to move, to live fully and freely elsewhere, is never guaranteed. It has to be negotiated, every single time.