After thoughts of travelling for a month- Chapter two: REASONING SE AZAADI, (YES THIS IS AMBIGUOUS!)

CHAPTER TWO: REASONING SE AZAADI, (YES THIS IS AMBIGUOUS!)

Delhi is a selling ground. That was my first impression. I reached at Nizamuddin railway station early morning. As soon as I came out of the train station, taxi and rikshaw drivers hounded me and started selling me my journey to the destination, a room in a hotel, a good restaurant, and even a call girl. Not a single one was going to charge me as per the meter. I wanted to have tea first, but they didn’t even let me have my morning cup of tea in peace. They were lurking around and waiting for me to finish. A friend had suggested cheap hotels in Paharganj or Majnu ka tilla. I’ve been to Majnu ka tilla couple of times, so decided to go to Paharganj this time. New sets of judging eyes waited for me there. My friend and me needed a room to just keep our stuff, get cleaned up and leave to meet other friends. But my friend happened to be a girl, and people started judging her, and me and we judged them back. It was fun. Thankfully as suggested by a Delhi friend we checked in a backpacker hostel called Zostel. It is a casual and clean place packed with backpackers from different parts of the world. After getting ready, we left for Connaught place, which was walking distance from our hostel. Again people on the road started selling. Breakfast, drinks, hotel rooms, travel tickets.  And obviously we witnessed the infamous Delhi ogle. Travel is equally about the people as it is about the places. I used to think that how people from a certain city get their stereotype, why Delhites are considered as lechers, how they got stereotyped as a bunch of sex starved males? Well, I guess it’s got to do with the definitions of normalcy a certain society sets. Obviously every person doesn’t fit the stereotype of a citizen of that city. But then where do they draw lines of what is normal is about in the same zone. Because society decides normalcy, right? Anyways we spent almost the whole day in the campus of JNU. Met a friend after more than a year, and he showed me around JNU, the protest site, small hills, different departments. It’s a cool place to hang out at, and a vast patch of green on otherwise dry Delhi. It was the day when Kanhaiya Kumar got bail, and was about to return to the campus. News crew were ready with their cameras at the gate, hoping for the usual entry shots. We couldn’t see the cameras recording, as he came after we left the campus. That’s okay, but I was happy because after so many days I talked about topics from, obviously, azaadi to old monk cocktails, and psychedelic drugs, to psychedelic writers. From 50’s films, to 60’s film songs, and from hallucinations of Mohammad to forms of dance; as the day slid from JNU to Hauz Khas to the party at Zostels’ terrace. 

During all this my phone ran dry. I would have usually panicked, but I didn’t. That was the start of the journey. I needed my phone to search random stuff I was thinking about or to check if the taxi driver is taking me by the nearest route. But I didn’t crave connectivity. After every couple of hours I was meeting new people and was having fairly long conversations with them.

When I was travelling to Delhi by one of the slowest train running on that route, I was caught up with my professional commitments, trying to be relevant. I mean, it’s not like in a day I dissed the ability or urge to be relevant. But I used to rely on internet on my phone for keeping me busy, entertained, pampered, interested. But I was travelling, again the question ‘why am I travelling?’ was ricocheting in my mind. Another answer for that was to be in peace with yourself without any technological assistance. Technology is important and necessary, and only a stupid will curse it and abandon it completely. But I think technology brings things/ desires/ emotions to us even before we feel the need for it’ and after that we just get addicted to the need without even realising it in the first place. There always been the fight between the want and the need, and need is losing that battle in urban life. We want things. We want to stay connected, we want to click selfies, we want to travel, and we want to write. We were sitting on a big rock in the highest point of JNU, and my friend was reading poems in Marathi to another friend who does not understand Marathi. But he was interested in listening to those poems in Marathi first before we could translate them. Because when you read or listen any kind of literary creation in the language that was originally written, you even get to feel it’s rhythm, it’s rounded and pointy pronunciations, and even its aroma. 

These are the things I want to feel, and that’s why I needed to get out of a structured Mumbai life. This is where the definitions based on wants and needs get blurry, this is where one get to realise not just why to travel but why to live. My favourite writers, my favourite, artist, my favourite discoveries, my favourite crafts, my favourite thoughts; these are the things that puts weighs on me. That keeps me balanced and steer me away, help me define things. But when we get used to a structured, channelled out life, we cant’ be steered away, I can’t do that. I’ve seen many people doing it very effectively.

When I reached Delhi, I felt that people were judging me; they were lecherous towards my friend. Basically I was judging them back, generalising them unconsciously. I consciously realise that I judge people unconsciously. Mostly it’s seen as a negative thing to do. But as humans we need to classify things that are going around us, to process them better and basically move ahead with our lives. And we intuitively base our judgments on experiences when we encounter things similar to some that have happened in the past. But when I encounter something new I tend to enrich that experience based on the things that have put weights on me. That have expanded my senses when I was not actually travelling, the books the music, the pictures, the movies. Travelling is beautiful when we can place our new experiences harmoniously with these weights and our intuitions. Of course it doesn’t happen on the go. It is happening to me after I have completed my travel. That doesn’t mean I was just absorbing experiences when I was travelling. But now I can see things in perspective more surely and clearly.

How do you remember memorable things happened to you? Is it through words, dialogues that we spoken there, or by visuals, spiked with smells and touch. How different directors treat flashbacks in their movies always fascinates me. When one character remembers something happened in the past.  I find it weird when the directors show the scene just like any other scene. How can main characters whose memory we are seeing be in the frame? S/he can at most remember what they have seen. Those flashbacks must be in first person in visual sense as well, just like the first person voice over its usually accompanied with.  Why am I talking about this? Because I’m writing something based on my memory, a travelogue. But with the images, and instances I’m also trying to remember what kind of thoughts were going through my mind, and the thoughts definitely cannot be seen and or recorded. When I’ve experienced even my visual/sonic/orifice memory failing and painting something completely different, then how can I trust it with remembering thoughts. So yes, I will state the instances, but all the other things may or may not be what I felt and thought and that time. This is interesting, because it means the journey is still on inside me. Journeys of thoughts of the thoughts of other journeys are also still travelling inside me. Memories and feelings are beautiful things. It can paint a same event differently in the mind of every participant of that event. It should be that way. Memory of a live concert attended by thousands of people must be different than each other. But when a need to tap a larger group of people simultaneously, one has to generalise things and seek shelter in adjectives to keep it conveniently ambiguous. That’s why I’m writing this. I started with conditioning and generalising of minds but I want to document my experience of this month as personally as possible. I want to remember things. It’s not that I will forget them if I don’t write, but by that logic I can even not experience them in the first place. These thoughts come to me between the silent places of any conversations. I’m sure it happens to everyone. There are number of minute, ethereal layers of conversations floating in everyone’s mind when we are conversing. Only if these layers have colours, textures, aromas; how beautiful every conversation can be felt and remembered.

We had an early morning train for Kathgodam from New Delhi station. Even though the station was just five minutes away from Zostel, we had to run with all our over packed bags to the platform. Train left the station five minutes after we boarded it. Guess, we didn’t have to run. It was a Shatabdi express, a chair car, and coach attendants started treating us with food and beverage as soon as we settled. Finally I was going to the mountains!

After thoughts of travelling for a month- Chapter one

CHAPTER ONE: FIGHT WITH REASONS

Why do I travel? What do I achieve by travelling? I was living in valleys of Uttarakhand for last one month, where I used to have to walk 16 minutes uphill to get to a café or any shop, now I get down from my 16^th floor apartment to do so. Yes I am back to Mumbai, and then I was struck with these questions. Such questions used to strike me when I was travelling too. I had decided to finish a big chunk of writing that I was planning to finish for last one year. I was not really successful in finishing much, though I am satisfied by whatever I’ve completed. When I used to have a dull day, I used to think about these questions. Why am I travelling? Am I achieving what I set out to achieve? I used to think a lot about these questions, used to spend whole evenings pondering over them, sipping chai and watching the valley changing its colours from yellow to orange to blue to dark grey and then complete black. But then star used to start twinkling and moon used to paint the valley again in a soft glow. I didn’t used to find answers to my questions, but those were the answers right in front of me.

The word and concept of travelling has suddenly become very popular in last few years. The meaningful quotes of writers about life pasted on a beautiful landscape, the 20, and 30, and 40 things to do which will transform your life, the survival kit list, the travel couture, hotel deals, travel blogs of 20 something sharing their experiences, new and newer hashtags on instagram related to travelling, the follow project, the unfollow trend, the changing definition of coolness and addition of backpacking to the list; it all brought ‘travelling’ to the paramount of social media discussions.  There are even many blogs and opinion pieces that say how travelling in your 20’s instead of focusing on your career is the most stupid thing you could do.  So basically there are every kind of extreme, good looking, logical reasons floating in the cyberspace that keeps on diverting my thoughts to travel, to wander.  These external factors titillated my inner urges and made me restless. It’s cooler to be someone who does not belong here right? Though the ‘here’ changes with the surroundings and eventually encompasses everywhere. I went through that transition, I swam through that tide, and realised that maybe that’s not the case I want to wander. I was not sure why, but I knew for sure that it is not a hipster, millennial thing. Again these generalisations of hipster and millennial thing have resided in me through the trollers of the almighty Internet. So yeah I shouldn’t have said that. You see where am I going? This was exactly what I was thinking. Things, even though new and path breaking, are packaged in attractive wrapper, marketed riding on the newest trends, and served on a platter to the very gigantic niche audience like me.  There are more moulds that people. Even though each mould was unique than the other, the problem is very few users actually make their own moulds. It’s satisfying and assuring to fit in your moulds perfectly, but I was thinking a lot about the generalisations. And also that I’ve used the word mould too many times here. It sounds weird every time I say that word now, I’m not going to say, write that word for a while. Okay one last time- mould.

Yeah, so I was completely clueless why I wanted to travel again. For past few years I’ve made sure that I was travelling at least for 30 days in a year, not at once but all together. So it was not like I was taking a big leap or anything. I can pack my backpack under 10 minutes now.

The other thing was validation. You know validating your every action by someone. I thought my sense of judging my own work was getting rusty. A friend once sent me an article, which said that, rather than excellence, mediocrity is required to survive. I read again about mediocrity in a Murakami’s book I was reading on my train journeys. I needed a perspective again. The earlier one was fading off. I was proud of my work, but I knew for sure that most of the work was just a notch above the satisfaction level of my client, and sometimes not even the client but my immediate boss, whoever s/he might be. I thought that level should have been the level zero. I want to realign my zero co-ordinates again. Which ideally should be independent of generalisations and validations. But idealism can very well be a hindrance to the flow. Whatever, I thought I should at least be sure of the position of the zero co-ordinates.

So I finished whatever I could finish of my work, and left the rest incomplete, rather unprofessionally under the pretence of getting fed up. Which was not right.

I packed my backpack with warm clothes, basic cosmetics (hair gel, moisturiser, and deodorant.), ipod (yes, packing starts with the creating a good playlist), laptop, battery packs, camera and lenses, and few other things that I found out was in my backpack while unpacking. I went to shop for some essentials and to fix my wristwatch, after my mother insisted. I came back to find out that both the lifts of building were not working. Remember I mentioned, I live on 16^th floor? I took a deep breath and started climbing the stairs. Your counting abilities go for a toss when you are running out of breath. 7^th floor came twice, 10^th floor thrice and I was stuck at time loop while crossing the 15^th. But I climbed up to my apartment in 2min 40 sec. Not bad start. I was just getting used to climbing up and down for my rest of the journey. I reached Bandra Terminus after saying goodbyes to my parents and my wife. My mother was trying to know when I was going to return. My father advised not to be too adventurous when alone. The train, one of the slowest on this route, was going to take me to Delhi, and I had a window seat for that journey. Train left exactly on time, 00:10 hours on 2nd March. But my mind was still thinking about the plans, and daydreaming about the adventurous time. Your regular traveller daydreams. I was still going to get used to the present. But I had time in my hand.

विद्रोह

काय असतो विद्रोह नक्की?
नक्की कुठे वेगळी करायची आपली जीवनशैली आणि जीवनावश्यकता?
म्हणजे व्यापार तर चांगलीच गोष्ट आहे.
पण bank balence बरोबर माणुसकी पण वाढवा की.
पैसा कमावून व्हा की मोठे, सर्वार्थानी.
सगळ्यात वाईट गोष्ट आहे की सर्व योग्य प्रश्न आणि त्यांची जायज़ उत्तरं पण माहित आहेत.
पण बदल जरी अविरत असला तरी मला बदल  अविरत पुढे ढकलण्याची कला पण खूप चांगली येते.
जरा मोठं होऊया, हेच तर वय आहे. एक ओहदा मिळू द्या मग दाखवतो.
मरूनच का नाही जात मग?
सगळ्या यशापयाशांची शेवटची पायरी. का त्यानंतर पण अडकायचं मुक्तीच्या फेऱ्यात?
कशातच अर्थ नाही. जमिनीत आहे, दोन्ही अर्थांचा अर्थ.
पण त्यात पण रुजलेयेत वाद, अस्मिता, तफावती, जाती, द्वेष. जमीन पण ना सगळ्याच गोष्टींसाठी उपजाऊ बनून जाते साली.
स्थिर, गंभीर, काळी.
खूप वेळ निखरत बसलं न तिच्याकडे तर दिसतात बऱ्याच नकोश्या गोष्टी.
त्यापेक्षा जमिनींवर अंथरू काँक्रीटच्या चादरी, आणि आकाशात जाऊ राहायला. हे बरंय.
पण मग अंधार झाला की दिसणं बंद होतं आणि जाणवणं सुरु होतं.
दारू पण बंद नाही करू शकत उघडलेले receptors
मग परत चालू होतात तेच सात्विक वाद स्वतःशी
पण हे सात्विक वाद कधी होणार राग, संताप?
रात्रीच्या अंधारातून दिवसाच्या उजेडात येणार का हा राग?
का सकाळी उठून परत जीवनशैली जपण्याचा संघर्ष चालू करणार?
काय असतो विद्रोह नक्की?
जीवनाची आवश्यकता कधी जाणवणार?
मग जीवन अर्थपूर्ण बनवायला मी प्रेम, वासना, मैत्री, देशप्रेम, करुणा वगैरे बेगडी गोष्टी भरून घेतो आणि आदर्श नागरिक बनवतो स्वतःला, मजा येते.
वेळ तर निघून जाते, दिवस तर ढळून जातो. मग काय तर?
पण आता तेवढ्याशानी काही होत नाही
आता बाजू घ्यायला लागतात आणि त्यांचा समर्थन पण करायला लागतं compulsory
ते हि चालेल, पण काय आहे कि बाजू तुम्ही नाही इतर ठरवतील, समर्थन मात्र मलाच करायला लागणार.
बरं दुसऱ्यानी ठरवलेल्या बाजूंमधून आपल्याला सोयीस्कर बाजू पण स्वीकारायला हरकत नाही.
पण कसं आहे की तुमच्या identity वरून तुमची बाजू काय असणार ह्याचा पण algorithm तयार आहे, काय समजलात काय आमच्या समाजाला?
चेहरा नसला तरी काय झालं seperatist logic खूप गहिरं आणि प्राचीन आहे, जात नाही.
"पथ्थर मारो!" आज समाजातून आवाज आला. "कोणावर?" मी विचारलं. "public property पर, कैसी है यह public. सबको line में खडा करना चाहिये."
Okay. सतत, सतत स्वतःला इतरांपेक्षा वेगळं करायचं अनामिक राहून. पण आज मी बघूनच घेतली समाजाची ज़ुबान. काळी आहे, जमिनीसारखीच.
पण तरीही तीच्याशी चर्चा नाही करता आली, पण तिला हिंसा करवता येते. पथ्थर उचललेले लोकांनी, त्यांचेही कान फक्त हातांशी जोडलेले असतात, डोक्याशी नाही.
तेव्हा समजलं सगळ्यात कठीण आणि खतरनाक आहे डोकं वापरणं. प्रश्न विचारणं.
हाच असतो का विद्रोह?

Preface

Don’t you ever fear that one day this will just be a memory and nothing else? I mean I’m not talking about destruction and evolution and wars when this all will be lost or changed forever but just that this, right this right now will be turned into a memory, a figment of some stupid chemical reaction in your brain, just a bunch of modified brain cells. What’s the point of living in a reality, if it’s so volatile? It’s better to live in dreams. Well, the dream itself is just another figment but at least it is consistent. The feeling is more homogeneous. But then again it’s not personal ever, the daydreams. We always dream with or for someone, it’s a projection of our entity, our being, my being. We want to shy away from technology when we think of personal feelings and stuff. We want them to be original, but then we base our daydreams on them, which is a projection, and yearn for them to be presentable, and then we have to incorporate technology, I have to, technology not in terms of bits and circuits, but in terms of managing data and creating a workflow. And then I realize that this is better, the unlived life, the could-have-been and should-have-been moments, the stolen moments, and the fabricated moments. I always modify my memory on the RAM before sending it to the permanent storage in my brain. But then I start to think that the whole of mankind does that because I’m a unit of mankind. Like, scientists and statisticians only test and observe a random set of individual entities to conclude. I’m the only entity that I know most about and can experiment with. Experimenting with other humans would be cruel, not that I don’t do it! But you can’t come to a solid conclusion if you experiment with others. It’d just be a hypothesis, a theory at best. So here I am, the only guinea pig of a mad scientist! The only option left, as seen in many mainstream movies and comics is to experiment on yourself, and be a Doc Ock, or a sandman, or Agent Smith, or Nick Nolte’s character. But again that’s mainstream, money-oriented representations. Intellectuals fucking hate them! Mostly because they can’t stand that a mainstream character can come that close to what they are thinking. I might be wrong, I always am based on my statistical studies. But then what? I’m not talking about reality, it’s a dream (again because of the dearth of my vocabulary!) Dreams are alternate realities. They are self-sufficient. They don’t need your stupid laws of physics, chemistry and morality. Each one has an ongoing dream running between their senses and the brain. Trying to place the things we perceive in our dreams always tires us. It doesn’t work always. Sometimes the reality is so harsh that we/I will have to modify my dreams. Sometimes I will have to create places for the bits of reality I want to accept. For rest, well they can seek refuge in the conspiracy theories, and again be a part of some other alternate reality. Do you see where this duality between me and we is coming from? I as a human want to simplify things to perceive them better, and at the same time, I want to generalize them so to categorise them better for any future altercations, and in the way of doing so I also want to reaffirm my place as a human, or a robotic human, or whatever homo-next-sapiens species we have become. That’s the duality. I want to be unique and want to merge at the same time. That’s how advertisers tap us. Every mass-produced product is marketed in a way that would always make you feel unique and special, and it does. I would choose coca-cola over Pepsi. Because that’s the choice I have, or I can either be a green tea person, a naturalist, a glutton free, or an idiot. We will have to categorise ourselves to fit in. Individuality is a personal thing and is a hoax in the real world. I don’t even express myself to even myself, and how can I expect myself to be an individual? Even when thinking to myself I rarely communicate beyond languages. I talk to myself in Marathi, Hindi or English, and then I want to express, I want to talk, write. So, I again use a language. English typing is easy so mostly I use English, even though I know I’m not smooth in that, and that has already started fading my versatility in my native languages, which I’ve learnt to listen and talk first. The grammar has changed; the accent has adorned a weird sub or semi-regional tint. And now in the categorized world, I can’t place my individuality and thus it doesn’t exist. It starts to change the moment I start thinking of expressing myself. Maybe that’s not the case for many, but language is just one onus of expression. When I hear that a certain language has a word for something that doesn’t have a word in the languages I know, then I feel cracked. Enough of languages, it just underlines the inferiority complex. But yeah, I think everyone bears the expressions on some tools, language is just one of them. And the content starts to get mudified (I didn’t want to say muddified, because change is good, modifications open new possibilities!) So how do I end this? Just like that? Let’s just say it’s a preface, and I’m going to keep it unedited, with all the grammar and spelling and sensical and contextual mistakes (well they wouldn’t be mistakes if historically they would have been followed this style, right? like -ise and -ize baby!) Okay.

Let’s just say it’s a preface, and I’m going to keep it unedited, with all the grammar and spelling and sensical and contextual mistakes (well they wouldn’t be mistakes if historically they would have been followed this style, right? like -ise and -ize baby!) Okay.

I'm bored

I'm bored.
I'm getting too many abstract ideas about everything in the world.
I'm bored.
I have work to do.
I'm bored.
It's raining.
It's raining heavily.
I want to paint birds on the wall.
Sitting on electric wire.
But shouldn't they be flying in open sky.
But they must also be getting bored of flying.
I'm bored.

The frames we carry in front of our faces.
just like Jesus carried a cross on his back.
But he was hung on it.
And these frames have no walls to be hung upon.
The walls that could have birds painted on them.
The paintings of bored birds I did when I was bored.

Do you get bored too?
Do you blabber?
Do you fly like birds and sit on wires when bored.

It's a poem!
Poems don't have a counter point.
They just go on and on and on.
And create a sea and dip in to it.
And strangle their own words and gasp for meaning.
Poems are not of their poets
Poems are of no one.
They're rude.
They're lonely.
They're bored.
Shit I'm bored.

Kanglagauri ki kahaani!

It's that month of the year once again, Shravan! The most auspicious month of them all. People trying to seek blessings from as much as those 33 crores gods. There is a special kind of puja for every day of this month. On Mondays, you worship Lord Shiva and on Tuesday you worship Manglagauri, then Ganpati, snakes, trees, you get to worship everything! For every puja there's a story stated in the puranas. I find the stories of these pujas very interesting, not to mention inspiring and sacred of course. These stories have shaped my life since childhood.

This is my humble attempt to visualize one of such stories. The story of the great 'Kanglagauri'! I hope I will be able to offer my prayers through this small attempt and seek blessings from Kanglagauri!

Thank you!

Disclaimer: Names and places in this story have been changed to protect the sanity and purity of them. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental!

A year late - VOL I - Post VII

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A year late - VOL I - Post VI

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A year late - VOL I - Post V

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A year late - VOL I - Post IV

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