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.