Backpacking Bride

Of late, everybody around me seems to be getting married, or engaged, or in the process of getting into either of the two relationship statuses. Let me add a disclaimer before I begin: Getting married is a great thing. BUT. But, but, only if you are mentally prepared for it and not because you are a bottle of medicine that comes with an expiry date and is no good after a certain age. So I'm going to state my reasons publicly on my blog for all my relatives/friends/well-wishers who constantly try to sell the idea of marriage to me like executives who have to meet sales targets. You see, people marry for different reasons- happiness, financial security, not dying alone etc etc. The last one is something I anyway encounter every now and then on some remote trek. Finances are taken care of by my travel writing (still can't shop at Mango but can pay my rent). Happiness. That's something travel itself takes care of. But who, ask my uncles and aunts, would want to 'live like this' for the rest of her life? Who, I ask, would want a Backpacking Bahu? And then everybody ponders over the grave situation. Perhaps I could take up a job in a city? That way I could 'travel' to work everday? Or pehaps I could marry someone who gets transferred a lot? So I could be wrapped up by Movers and Packers with the rest of the luggage and know what it feels like to be a Samsonite? Or perhaps I could give up travel all together, because eventually I would crave to be in one place? Well, it's been over five years, and not a day has come when I have thought that I could give up travel for anything, anyone. So while I'm threatened by Matchmakers who pity the fate of this poor misled girl, I meet Radka, a 62-year old female pilot who is the leader of the top aerobatics team in the world. And everything's all right when I see her calmly sip her coffee and the brilliance of her eyes that explore the world, dream and shine with the happiness of one who has followed her heart. Immediately after that, I also meet a moron who actually has the nerve to call me a weirdo, albeit in more polite words. I don't know what the future holds for me, but when I crave for that anchorage that subtly asks me to hang up my hiking boots, I will let you know. Watch this space for that post. Get a coffee, coz it might take forever.

Conde Scend: The Last Word in Snooty Travel

Or perhaps, The last word in Fashion. Or Glamour.

I feel absolutely cheated. I was conned into spending 100 bucks for a Zoom: Isske Dekho magazine in the disguise of a travel magazine. If Aishwarya the globetrotter is on the cover of this one, I insist on Ian Wright being returned the favour in the next issue of Filmfare. And till date I thought Vikram Chatwal was a hotelier. So I’m not sure if I he is The Last Word on Travel Essentials. Not carrying a Prada toilet case won’t take away from my travel experience, or most travellers’ for that matter. I really have no qualms about luxury travel, but if you are doing a travel piece on Varanasi, you will get thousands of interesting faces to shoot and feature. You really don’t need a model and highlight what designer she is wearing and how much it costs, with poor Varanasi a mere blur in the background. William Darylymple, Suketu Mehta and Shashi Tharoor sure glam up the contributors’ list, but it’s irritating to dig out their writing from a mammoth bin of ads for products that cost the earth and are by and large useless for travel. Fatima Bhutto is beautiful and a good writer. But her piece on Karachi is the stuff memoirs are made of. What’s the point of a guide to a city most Indians are likely to never travel to coz they won’t get a visa thanks to our great camaraderie with the neighbours? It further acts as an agonising teaser for my travel hungry heart, if nothing else. I could go and on, but it’s not just about resentment. It’s more a pity that the Last Word in Travel cooks something that barely smells of the true spirit of travel.

The Era that's Gone

This post popped up because an old mail came out of the archives yesterday. It made me smile and recall a pure time that's gone and buried under writing deadlines and travel assignments. I'm not complaining about life now- there's nothing else I would be able to pull off- it's just that my one year of travel for travel's sake stands incomparable. June 08 to June 09 is probably what I still look back upon as my Happy Thought. It's when I was confused about every single thing in life except for the fact that I wanted to travel endlessly, even though I had no money but enough disapproval from a lot of ppl around me. And it was an exchange of emails that year with my dear hobo friend that I was reading yesterday and I still have it in my head at 6am while I blog. The subject of the mail is 'Need Direction' and here are some excerpts:

Me: 'My aunt's astrologer predicted today morning that apparently I have a very bright future. From the looks of it, I hardly think so. I'm near broke, the pressure to become 'normal' is immense, and I think I will only return home after a long time... I am spiralling deep into an unknown darkness. I want gyan from one of the few ppl I actually listen to.'

Fellow Hobo: ' You don't need an astrologer to know that you have a bright future ahead, bright people have bright futures for the simple reason that they are willing to deal with anything life throws their way :-) ..Lastly, the pressure for 'normal' has always been there for us, nothing new. Just turn around and say, "What's so great about normal?"

Me: ' Thanks. I'm feeling better already. I feel, this too shall pass...

I shall sort life out once I'm outta here. For now I'm dealing with statements like my uncle's 'writers eventually go mad coz they live in a different reality' and 'where did this girl get genes that dont exist in the family?'

I'd rather be a mad writer than a sane shopkeeper. Life looks good again.'

Fellow Hobo:' Hahaha ya I get the genes bit all the time...Bummed around for two years..money has to be roped in, so I'll just have to grit my teeth and go back to Mumbai. Just a little apprehensive though...ok am quite apprehensive...of settling down in Bombay as such. That city has these invisible tentacles you know, that are hard to get rid of when you want to leave. The plan is to do the work in a very mechanical, detached manner :-) '


All of the above has worked for me, perhaps even the last bit. I can already feel the tentacles, though I indeed want to break free at times and relive another year of madness.

Girl, interrupted

While I mostly rant about my love for travel, I chose to begin this year's blogging with my dislike for interruptions in my travel. There are many things about civilised behaviour that I cannot comprehend. For months fellow backpackers on the road greet me with a friendly smile and a so-where-are-you-from, and I am jolted back to the norms of society the minute I meet people I know whose first reaction is 'Oh you look miserable' or 'Oh you've put on weight, have you been travelling at all?'. Ho hum. I could have done with a how-have-you-been instead. I mean, when did I last bother to ask you whether you ate brown bread or burgers with deep fried cutlets? Why do I fail to notice that precious displacement of a couple of grams? After coming back from Kerala last year, I had received a lot of queries (flak?) for my tan. So this time round, after my Base camp trek wherein I had been sunburnt beyond recognition, I stayed an extra month in the comforting anonymity of hoards of similarly damaged trekkers. The understanding and acceptance I found in the lanes of Kathmandu's Thamel was welcome, rather than the endless recoiling in horror of familiar people and the 'ohmigosh do something about it!!'. I didn't wish to explain how time is the bext healer, even for sunburns. While I would have have had to mask my face to step out in the city, I proudly wore the patchy tan like a badge and received nods of approval from people who knew the work of art could only have resulted from one hell of a journey. My faithful floaters that have stood the test of time and tough roads could be a misfit in the clatter of Bandra heels, but they too find company when they travel, in other travellers' battered sneakers and chappals that could tell tales of round-the-world adventures. While a chat over coffee here could lead to my bushy eyebrows being pointed out that I would be psychologically pressurised to get threaded the next day, conversations generally steer to higher planes when you travel. I would perhaps be deeply engrossed in discussing the similarities between Ladakhi and Mongolian plains with an Argetinian girl furrowing her equally unkempt eyebrows. The whole travel bug has given new meaning to 'beauty aint skin deep', and helped me discover that there IS a section of society that revels in truly being themselves and judges you by that alone. I have been good humouredly accused of living in a bubble, but I suggest you try stepping in sometime to see that it's a truly mind-boggling world in it, and you'd never want to burst that bubble.

Into Thin Air

As I read Jon Krakauer's book of the same name when I began my trek, I'd never quite imagined I'd end up asking myself pretty much the same questions the book poses- what is it about the Everest that compells people to throw caution to the wind, ignore the concerns of loved ones, and willingly subject oneself to such risk, hardship, and expense?

It took me going through all this and more to come up with a bunch of answers which I can't really say are conclusive. The first definite sign of what I was taking up was the plane crash at Lukla, the first stop that serves as the base for the beginning of the Everest Base Camp trek. Just when I was waiting to leave for the airport came the news of the first ever accident on the Lukla airstrip that had left all twenty German and Swiss trekkers dead, along with two Nepalis. The flights for the day were cancelled and I was shaken up realising that I had insisted on being on the first flight but somehow got the second one. I did gather myself and leave after two days on the trek I'd longed for. Starting on a curious/energetic note, at the end of it, I can say that somewhere along the line it peters down to a test of endurance of the mind. Walking for abt 9 hrs on an average each day does not even count. It's the rising altitude that can play more with your body, as much as the mind. There are sunburns despite SPF 50 creams, nose bleeds are common and so are maddening headaches. You can't eat or sleep, but need to force yourself to do both. Your reflexes become slow and the ability to decide whether you want a boiled egg or a scrambled egg reduces drastically. Probably the only senses the trek would appeal to would be your vision, that meets scenes that the most drugged minds cannot conjure.

All this does not even begin to entitle me to compare my effort with those for whom base camp is not the end but the beginning of their ascent. While I carefully walked on the landslide prone glacier at the base, I was thrilled to see my first avalanche on the mountain across. I was filled with regret and guilt over my thrill when I heard of three climbers who were killed by one the same night. I still think of the phantasmal beauty of Sagarmatha that can kill at will, and wonder how such power can be masked by such deceiving beauty.

I have known and met people who asked me why I chose to go at all, and I'm afraid I have no answer for them. Non-trekkers might label expeditions as a mere adventure, or just something different to do, but its beyond me to put into words how this wasn't the thrill one gets in a bungee jump, or any adrenaline sport, because it isn't one. I met people with disabilities and people at the sunset of their lives, slowly crawling to the top. I don't think it was to prove anything to anyone, but maybe a test of their own will. More than the beauty of the mountains, I was moved by this will of the human spirit. I would willinglingy subject myself to it all over again, if for nothing else but to experience this spirit of those who are invited up there. If the hardship were any less than what it was, something would probably be amiss, for that is not the way of great mountains.

Capital Punishment

'I'm moving to Delhi'.

Looking back on the doomsday when I uttered those words, I can only sway my head and 'tsk tsk' myself. The age-old Mumbaikar saying 'You can never adjust to Delhi once you've lived in Bombay' was brushed aside as a mere cliche. What I'd perhaps forgotten was the fact that all cliches are born because they are true more often than not. The realisation seeped in day by day, as I got used to the perpetual warnings attached to each conversation, about how I must live/behave while in the Dreaded D.

For the benefit of girls who might want to repeat my stunt, I've drawn a list to save them the trouble:

P.S: The following charter is nullified if you have a boyfriend/husband/full-time bodyguard to chauffeur you around 24x7. Or just get yourself a Rotweiller.

Do's & Don'ts

1. Be appropriately dressed at all times. Nothing you wear must be too tight/too short/ too flattering. Going by this, your Bombay wardrobe is totally disqualified, even if it's actually none of the three.

2. Remember Rule 1 even if you are just stepping out for 5 mins to walk to the nearest general store. When I had to do the same, I added a wraparound and a stole to what I was already wearing and then waltzed to the store looking like a cross between an Afghani women and a Hare Krishna devotee- no offence to either.

3. Remember Rule 1 even when you are at home. You never know when you might have to get the door for a courier boy/delivery man/ neighbouring uncle. Yes it's the same everywhere, but this is DELHI you see. Take NO chances. Cluck cluck.

4. Delhi despises solitary behaviour. Do NOT be unaccompanied, especially after sunset. And AT sunset. And before. Always be with another human being- boy,girl, group of girls & boys. Or at least a pepper spray.

5. Never walk too close to the main road, lest you are pulled in by a speeding van. Even on the pedestrian path, keep swaying your head like an owl in all directions to watch out for those who don't have a van to molest people in so choose to walk instead to brush past you.

6. Watch out for pickpockets. While you are trying to save your bottom from being pinched, someone might just pinch your wallet. When the same happened to me, I was told I was not 'careful' enough. True. I was lost in trying to protect my assets and juggling my shopping bags and positioning my stole appropriately time and again to avoid Stargazers.

7. Don't, in general, make heads turns. If something happens to you, it's probably coz YOU were standing out enough to attract bad karma.

All this is not to say that Bombay is the safest place on earth for women, it's just this general air of acceptance and respect I've experienced there, even at the most crowded local railway station, that I will have no qualms in bidding goodbye to the life and times of the Capital. There is a general 'alert status' in any city that women have switched on at all times, which makes me think at times how much better off I'd be born as a fish. Then I'd be quite comfortable in just my skin, literally. More importantly, everybody else would.

Wild Ways

It's strange how I await my birthday as the the single most important annual event when it's actually on other occasions when I'm totally unprepared, that the grey cells multiply to mark my mental growth. I've finally identified a pattern in this behaviour, and come to the conclusion that it's when I travel that this metamorphosis hits me out of nowhere and transforms me.

It took a recent journey into the wild for me to grow up a notch more. Determined to see Corbett, I set off for a tryst with India's first wildlife park ever. If not from the very beginning, I could feel a wave of difference washing over me the minute we entered the Sal forests. The two-hour drive to Dhikala in the heart of the jungle was so bumpy and so beautiful that it sure shook me.

Early next morning, I mounted on Pawan Pari's back to catch the sunrise by the river side. Riding into the dense thicket of elephant grass and wet greenery, I realised how different it was from my last visit to a tiger reserve. A year back at Ranthambhore, I hadn't learnt my lesson in the ways of the wild and had sulked and sulked till I spotted the big cats. Silently appreciating everything from a jungle fowl to a lone tusker, I heard others whisper murmers of disappointment. I couldn't help but feel a mix of contempt and anger rising in me at the ungrateful attitude that made them oblivious to the sudden start of a barking deer or the flutter of a spotted dove's wings. But then again, I wasn't entitled to feel that way since I had, in many ways, once been there. Gazing at the female elephant carefully nestling her 10 day baby between her legs simultaneously as she walked, it dawned on me that I had new found respect and understanding for the animal kingdom.

A visit to a sanctuary requires an open-mindedness that has finally come to me. I definitely don't expect to see animals the way I did in zoos as a child, but instead where they truly belong, in the wilderness. I'm glad I've grown up.