There are a lot of people in India who work labor and are stuck with difficult and physically exhausting jobs. Their reponsibilities to the people in their families is immense, the ability to innovate and change jobs for a better standard of living is difficult to even hope for because they don't have much scope for change. So even if a rickshaw guy wanted to change his profession he couldn't because he has to support his family. This is probably one of the smaller issues of our emergent economy and stunted growth.A friend of mine describes his own plight as a predestined move, one that is dictated by time and need. He sometimes says if perhaps the days were 30 hours longer....

The white peaked Mountains

We walked up today to Char Dukan and bumped into Stefan Eicher, he and Preeti grew up together and he may be American but he looks and sounds like anyone of us Indians its very warm. We talked for a while, it was great to connect. Had Chai and me and Preeti spoke at length about the activist cafe.

Met the girls and walked up to sister's Bazaar which is quite empty, a beautiful street with the tallest trees and the bluest skies (I'm convinced that the skies in the hills are clearer and brighter and have more colour). Although Sister's bazaar may be called so but in all actuality there is no bazaar, one of the girls pointed out that just because it has a name that says "bazaar" doesn't mean it has a bazaar...... interesting.

and then I saw them, or we all a group of us saw them at the same time... the white peaked Himalayas, like snow cones, sturdy, distant, a vision of ice and frozen mountain, beautiful tall and cold. History and vivid television shots of the mountains rang in my head, every book about the people of the mountains, the Tibetians, the soft and insightful prose of Heirich Harrer all echoed in my mind's Halls. But I'd seen them before, as that child in an infants baby blue bodysuit socks, pants and top all connected as one clothe. These eyes had seen them before but perhaps in an incomprehendible context, in a vision that failed to recognize the magnitude of what was seen.

22odd years later. In a whole new context, a different person, older and perhaps a bit too comprehensive, i see the himalayas for real. they enrapture me. I beheld them. or perhaps the power of the hills held me. the geographic splendor. the splendor.

the train to Doon

Describe is to derive meaning from worded thoughts and Navigate is to find one's way and travel. I equally love\loathe travel. Love because of the sense of adventure and the unknown. Loathe because of instability and the unbelonging of places that I must soon leave.

I'm right now in Mussoorie, was here as a baby in years that are now once upon a time, I was wearing that full body jumpsuit that babies wear. Last time here was in Summer I think, this year. And now here, September end. I had an interesting journey apart from frequent headaches. Transition from point to point, from a plane to a taxi to a train to a share taxi and another taxi and throughout a lot of walking.

I was on the train from Delhi to Dehradoon, my travel mates were a bunch of young people, my age, all working, going for a trip to Haridwar - sounded familiar, I realized how inept I've been traveling north India, it's the south that I am familier with. I must say that the North is a lot more contemporary in terms of what people wear or how they behave, very open statement I know, but I can't quite explain it, its something to do with the conservativeness of South India and the superficial liberty that the North seems to have, on a large general scale of fashionable demeanour.

Girls and guys, traveling on my train making a racket. they spoke very nicely to me (surprised me because of my perception of Delhiwallahs, which is probably a baseless perception, but my previous experiences with Delhiwallahs have been quite rough and uncanny. They were very suave these kids, very self assured, very smart in getting what they want.

I later struck a conversation with a middle-aged couple, the man farted really loudly, said oops and then apologized to the window. The lady ignoring her husbands oprahtics asked me where I was from and I said, Hyderabad, although strictly speaking I'm not from Hyderabad although I live there. They told me that they once owned a place in Sainikpuri, which surprised me as they'd already told me (when I'd asked them) that they lived in Noida. They spoke about Hyderabad with a sense of nostalgia, like a long lost home. I told them how frequently I dated in that area (sainikpuri), they described the place where they hung out together as a couple. They described a beautiful temple surrounded by forests and further a colony\neighborhood and built into a rocky ground with a stagnant but calm, cool pond at the temple's shores - a place where me and aadishpa sit around sometimes. I found this connection interesting, being on a particular train sitting next to nice people at random and sharing pictures in our minds, experiences of a particular place at different times, but the same sights and the same smells, the trees, the rocky stone, the grass, cows, birds on the pond's edge, colours, paths the different descriptions that fit the same place of a same name of a different time and a similar experience, the journey was short to Dehradoon and by the end of it I didn't even learn their names, simply said our goodbyes and made our ways apart after such a personal conversation of the beauty of the pool, the temple, the trees, the place we'd shared, in a different time in the same place.

This is the end

Describe and Navigate is the beginning of my traveloguing and writing for this blog. its almost non-sensical to keep scribbling into books as there's very little feedback at least in the sense of something "out there" rather than something interesting scribbled "in there" - as would be with a diary. I'm still keeping diaries. But Journaling into a Blog for some reason seems to make some macabre sense, it freezes our short time on the planet, out here in the perimeters of the internet i can jarr people with my ideas, and I remain written in a state of randomness.

I love the transitional state. Life exists in the experience between the points of home and destination or place and place. Everything within the connections is connected and you find yourself in a perpetual state of motion. and in that time you think and think and think forever and unashamedly of being so non-linear..