Saturday, October 24, 2009

Tips for happy travelling

I've been travelling for a while now, and its not just a fixed location just those brief sojourns in god forsaken smaller towns of U.P. and Bihar. Its like before you acclimitaze to a city and get accustomed to its viccissitudes, you have to move to another location. The moment you commend your heart in an abode, you have to abandon that dwelling place and just move on.
Atleast, by this alogrithm of travelling, i don't find time to identify myself with a particular city, so I never miss it. But then, I never feel that homely cozy warmth & comfort anywhere.
Someone said that "one step in travelling is worth more than reading hundred books"
because the use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are. Fine, that is a solace for me, instead of sitting here in meerut(U.P.) & wondering how the fading yet glaring sun would be setting in marine drive, or how my friends would make merry in red box - bandra, or romeo(my black labrador) would curiously yet innocently be gazing at a passerby.
In the same trip someone also told me about "Vihar". The same word which was used to christen the eastern state "Bihar". Though the culture and philosophy of the state has digressed and polluted a million times by millions of its burbaks the philosophy still in its essence is quintessential. Vihar is basically a Buddhist philosphy in which Buddhha recommends Vihar for even person. Vihar is constant travelling, since if you stop somewhere you consider it as your home and get attached to it. And once you get attached to it, you miss it and you forget the purpose of your travelling.
Hence even I, when on the cusp of embarking on a long ardous and tiring journey, compel myself to forget that I belong to a place. I start the considering the universe as my abode, and its just shifting rooms then.
Or if one follows the Gita, its just the change of position of a destructible manifestation of five elements, though the soul is omnipresent.

P.S. Right now the itinerary Aurangabad-Delhi_Dehradun-Haridwar-Roorkee-Muzzaffarnagar-Bijnyor-Meerut-Kanpur-Jaipur-Ahmedabad-Mumbai-Aurangabad and back