Ernakulam....

There are three things, I believe, each one of lives should be at the end of this one life, specially so if we happen to have the means. Well traveled, well read, and well lived.

I haven't lived long enough to tell anybody how to live well. But from all the philosophy that we have been bombarded with, if I live with all I have, and love with all I have, I am quite certain that someday, I'll have a big, fat, chunky diary, that will make for a good read, and maybe also make it to Goodreads.

About being well read, I cannot say enough. All I can say is barring a few people,

"People Don't Read Anymore"- Steve Jobs

You can never read enough. Ever! I am fortunate to have voracious readers for friends, those who inspire me to not stay without a book, when I have nothing to do. It keeps the mind stimulated. And I shall stop my rant about books, before the entire post becomes about reading.

The last thing, the thing I want to talk about, is Traveling. As much as I love traveling, I haven't done much of it. I've been to a bunch of places here and there, few road trips, an odd bike trip, and that's pretty much it. Nothing close to what one may call well traveled. But I have a lifetime ahead, but you never know if you'd wake up tomorrow. Anyway, that's another discussion.

Traveling is fun as hell. All the planning, or rather in my case, the lack of planning, all the last moment hustle and bustle, and the whole emotional concoction that brews inside before, during and after the trip is just worth dying for.

All that's about to follow comes from a brief trip I had to make to Ernakulam/Cochin for a test I was supposed to write. Do not wonder about how the test went, as that is absolutely immaterial to the context of traveling. Or maybe it is not. But who cares about a test after it is over? Eh?

I like traveling alone. A back-pack, a cellphone, a book, undies, my wallet and I am sorted. If I were to be quoted by someone, I'd like to be quoted by this line...

"Travel light. Keep luggage, and more importantly emotional baggage as light as possible. They slow you down."- Myself (of course)

  Now that I have satisfied my ego by quoting myself, let's move ahead with "traveling". Go on a trip to a city where you have no bearings. No one to guide you, no easy place to stay, no immediate next of kin. It will be the most rewarding of trips you make. Why? Because then, you actually make the most of your mental faculties. You learn ways to be frugal. Because it is only when you are vulnerable that you realize your strengths.

Ernakulam, is a beautiful city. I can say this despite not having traveled through the entire length and breadth of the city because you don't need to see every nook and cranny of a city to conjure a general image of a place in your mind. A couple of places, for example the roads, and the railway stations, are more than requisite for that.

Well, that's not the only reason why I call Cochin a beautiful city. I have a special spot for this city. I know not if it is pure coincidence, or what, but I realized that the ladies I have fallen for, in the last 3 odd years, each one of them, are all supposed to be from here. And this is something I realized yesterday. Boy, OH boy! The ladies here are pretty. I was almost about to ask one of them out for coffee. The Cochin ferry, a really handsome looking place was the perfect background for such a rendezvous, but a part of me, call it my better/worse sense of judgment, cock-blocked me from asking the beautiful lady out, that too at the last moment. Sucks!

The evening that I reached Cochin wasn't the most pleasant of experiences. Not that anything specific happened. But when you're not sure about where you are going to put up for the night, and you see a board saying something like "Thevara Home For Destitutes, Ernakulam", I am pretty sure that there are few things that make you feel mare pathetic than that board staring you right in the face. That was the one time I think I would have broken down, specially because that was when my mind started playing with me. My head prompted me to call the people I know in Ernakulam, who could bail me out of my plight for the night. But thanks to manly ego, I said to myself, "What? You don't have the balls to last a night in a new city you know little about??" That rhetoric question was enough, in fact, more than enough for me to brave through the night. That is of course, given that I found myself a rather affordable place to put up for the night. So getting run over by a truck on the side-walk at night was now a reassuring impossibility.

And since I had located my test center beforehand, for the smartie I am, it was just a morning cake walk for me to reach my exam place from the motel that I put up for th night. Easy!

I get a feeling that I made a rather big deal out of a rather humdrum uneventful trip. But I did make out one thing. Traveling, and moving about by yourself in unfamiliar territory  doesn't just allow you to steer through new places. It also allows you to move through the labyrinths of your own mind and soul. I know this sounds abstract. But there are places that we haven't seen yet. And many of them lie within the bounds of our skin. 

To end with, I'd like to quote lines from the movie Up in the air...

"Imagine for a second that you're carrying a backpack. I want you to pack it with all the stuff that you have in your life... you start with the little things. The shelves, the drawers, the knickknacks, then you start adding larger stuff. Clothes, tabletop appliances, lamps, your TV... the backpack should be getting pretty heavy now. You go bigger. Your couch, car, home... I want you to stuff it all into that backpack. Now I want you to fill it with people. Start with casual acquaintances, friends... and then you move into the people you trust with your most intimate secrets. Your brothers, your sisters, your children, your parents and finally your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend. You get them into that backpack, feel the weight of that bag. Make no mistake your relationships are the heaviest components in your life. All those negotiations and arguments and secrets, the compromises. The slower we move the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other to live symbiotically over a lifetime. Star crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We are not swans. We are sharks!"

And so... Move, people! Move like the sharks