The car stopped, but before I would cut off the engine the radio starts a new song. A familiar note out of a flugelhorn is followed by Louis Armstrong's husky voice. It is his greatest number: "What a Wonderful World." I sit there, frozen. Looking out the windshield I see the star-studded sky. A feeling of euphoria drenches me -- it happens every time I hear this song. You are so very right, Louis. We indeed live in a wonderful world. If only we would stop every day and look around.

People get so entangled in meaningless things: in borrowed identities, in greed, in conflicts; they become blind towards the magical world around them, they forget what life ought to be. There is a beautiful piece of land where not too long ago the ideas of nationhood and religion of various indigenous communities clashed. I must go there. There is another beautiful region where conflict around such ideas currently continues, but that's a war zone -- that place cannot be visited. But we can go to the other one, which is now peaceful.

Several months later, we are in Bosnia. We have reached here after a long journey mainly because we are die-hard surface travellers. We wish to study the continuity of geography, language, and ethnicity -- reaching somewhere by air you lose the broader perspective. In this trip we have already travelled through Sylvania, Croatia, and Serbia, three countries that came out of the ashes of former Yugoslavia.

It is interesting how it happened. One economic system wrestled with the other economic system for over six decades. In the end, capitalism won. Like many countries of the Old World, modern Yugoslavia was a new construct, various regions that had interacted with each other in history were brought together to form a country -- the ideology of communism was the cement that held them together. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia's ideological bond weakened. The country was ready for a break-up. But unlike Czechoslovakia which split peacefully between Czech Republic and Slovakia, or East Germany which reaffirmed its racial and linguistic ties with the West Germany and quietly assimilated into it, Yugoslavia split up after a war.

"Do you think you were better off when Sylvania was a part of Yugoslavia?" I ask the receptionist at our hotel in Ljubljana. She says, yes. She tells me a lot of people feel that way, but nobody is doing anything about it. Why is she and others not happy with Sylvania being an independent country with good old capitalism as its economic system? She tells me the system lacks benevolence, now there is cut-throat competition, if you are not strong enough to run, others simply run over you.

How new countries are formed, I ask myself that night. The process starts with a public grievance against the status quo. Not happy with the erstwhile political setup people wish to find an alternative path. The movement needs a leader and a leader does eventually emerge. The leader needs to convince the followers why the idea of demanding independence and having a country of their own is so great. And then the struggle starts. Many a time the struggle fails -- it happened in Indian Punjab, in Quebec, besides countless other places. Other times the movement is successful. A new country is born. But once a country is created it has to be properly run. Running a country to the satisfaction of most people is a big challenge, and that is where the countries often fail. And when things don't change for the better, people wonder if they were better off with the previous setup.

Belgrade is gritty. We don't have a hotel reservation so we just walk out of the railway station and start looking for a place to spend the night. A tout approaches us. He wants to recommend a few hotels to us. Why not? This man is from Kosovo. He takes us from one hotel to another -- all of them are full. We are tired of walking, and tired of him. We give him a warning. He cannot just make us walk all over the city; he must call the hotel first and find a room and then we will go. He makes the call and promises us a room in Hotel Kasina. We go there and indeed find a place for the night. The Kosovar gets a commission from us and leaves.

Right next to our hotel is a huge McDonald's. We go there to see how Belgrade is celebrating its marriage with capitalism. The McDonald's is big and full of young people. After dinner we retire to our room. That night there is a lot of honking on the street below. There are people dancing, shirtless men are seen jutting out of the cars. They are very happy about something -- we don't know what.

Next morning at breakfast we find out Serbia beat Italy in a water volleyball game. Amazing how quickly people associate themselves with the winners -- nobody wants to lose. And this is true for so many countries that are losing on various fronts, day in and day out; when such a country wins a sports competition, people come out on the streets to celebrate the oasis of triumph amidst a vast desert of defeats.

Why Yugoslavia did not break up peacefully? Because the country had been around for nearly 50 years. In those five decades a notion of 'Yugoslavian' identity had developed, at least in the minds of some people -- at least in the minds of people living close to the capital. And this phenomenon is universal in the Old World. People living close to the seat of the government are most loyal to the idea of nationhood propagated by the state. As you go farther away from the capital, the nationhood spirit dissipates. Belgrade is the biggest city of current Serbia, and it was the capital of former Yugoslavia. It is not surprising that Serbs were in most favour of keeping Yugoslavia intact. They fought with everyone so that the country would not break up, with various regions going their own ways. But then the faith issue came into picture and things got complicated. The Serbs were Eastern Orthodox Christians; people in other regions were Catholics and Muslims. It quickly became a fight of followers of one faith with the followers of other faith.

Budget travelling has gone through a welcoming transformation. Twenty years ago when I travelled in that part of the world -- carefully avoiding the Balkans -- my connection with the world was mostly through newspapers and occasionally through TV. Now it is different. I am travelling with a laptop computer. There are wireless hotspots in many restaurants and hotels. I take my laptop to any such place and connect to the information highway. I am abreast with the latest news in Pakistan, which, most of the time, is not very good.

We walk the streets of Sarajevo and look at the bullet riddled facades of the buildings. Like a badge of honour, the Bosnians are keeping many of those buildings war-blemished. The chickenpox face of the edifices is a grim reminder of how violently people concluded the conflict over nationhood and religious identity. Adding to the gloom is the sad news I have learned through the internet. Another incident of target killing has taken place in Balochistan -- another teacher killed. I wonder how hard it would be to convince the children of that teacher that in the grand scheme of things their father's murder was worthwhile, that on their father's body and on the bodies of other such killed targets would eventually rise the shining structure of a new country.

Travel is supposed to be synonymous with adventure. But in this age of the internet and travel guides, it is very hard to have such a feeling of escapade. The only way it happens is when you get lost, when you end up somewhere where you did not plan to go and had no previous knowledge of. It happened with us when we got stranded in Croatia. The story starts in Belgrade which we were desperate to leave -- we wanted to go to Sarajevo, but had missed the train that day. The train goes through Croatia. There is a train to Croatia but it would reach many hours after the departure of the connecting Sarajevo train. We still decide to go…jump in the unknown. And so we reach Strizivojna, a town our guidebook did not have any information about.

We reach there and find out what a lonely place Strizivojna train station is -- a place whose only utility is to provide people a convenient station to change trains. That day it had served that purpose earlier and now it is as deserted as a small town railway station can be. Save two men waiting for a much later train to Zagreb, there is nobody there, not even at the ticket counter. The two men and we don't have any common language to communicate in. We want a place to spend the night. We tell this as best as we can through a lot of hand movements. There is no such place in that town, we are told likewise. And then we are shown the number 13 -- fingers of both hands fanning, then hands down and then three fingers of the right hand up. What is that number 13 about? The old man puts his two hands together and tilts his head to rest on them. The place to sleep at night is 13 away? 13 kilometers away? Yes. Is there a taxi? No, the town is too small to have any taxi. Then what do we do. The old man looks concerned. Then he pats air with his hand, in the gesture that says, sit down, relax. He talks to someone on his cell phone. We don't know what is happening. Half an hour later a woman shows up, in a car. Then we find out what transpired. He called his wife to give us a ride to the hotel that is thirteen kilometers away. We are grateful to him. His wife takes us to a place where we can spend the night. It is a small town which can be easily covered on foot: one church, one central market, one strip of shops and then a lot of houses around that center. We like being stranded.

Next day we are in Bascarsija district of Sarajevo, the old town near the river. Everything Sarajevo visitors are mostly interested in is right there. We eat kabob and drink from the fountain, a sabeel. This is what being a Muslim used to mean in the old days: a lot of philanthropic work, digging wells, making water and food available for the travellers, running orphanages, looking after the weak of the society. But lately things have changed. Today's Islam is about making orphans.

That night other thoughts cross my mind. Why do we need countries and governments? May be because that is the most efficient form of living in an organised society. But why do we need to define nationhood? What makes a nation? Anything you can fool people with? Unlike a country that has a physical existence, nationhood is just an idea. People rally around whatever idea they feel affinity for. People embrace others as "their own" based on their skin colour, their ethnicity, their religion, their language, and a myriad of other characteristics, and they reject others for the same reasons.

So why insist on defining a nation in a restrictive manner? In fact, why even define nationhood. For, whenever a nation is defined, the definition alienates some who do not fall within the perceived characteristics of that definition. Why not strive for the distribution of power to smaller entities, better management of the resources of the country, without insisting on an idea of nationhood? Would not Old World countries, where every few hundred kilometers dialects and cultures change, be better off staying away from the failed concepts of nation-state? Wouldn't that be the best approach to avoid balkanisation in our part of the world?