Eternal recurrence of travel

I always liked looking up distant places like Mongolia, Chad, Irkutsk, Gdansk, Togo and some dots in the Pacific.The Atlas was my favorite book during the schooldays. Much admiration was for the time zones. The very fact that people were sleeping peacefully, when I was scratching my head in the summer heat of Hyderabad was a wonder. All was flat and fine, but for one thing about the USSR. Alaska was part of it. When I raised this doubt, the arms of The Atlas were twisted and the two ends were made to met. I gasped. Immediately it dawned on me that earth was round and what its diameter was. I then grabbed and pushed it under the bed so that it would be flat again.

Every summer I used to go to places that stayed almost static like a drowsy afternoon. I used to go on a journey, in search of roots, to the villages of my mom and dad. For me, the best part of the journey was the bus terminus. I would go round the platform and then read the names of the destinations written on the buses. Some of the names sounded strange and funny. I would come back and ask my mother, questions about these places and how far they were. She subscribes to the old school in geography. Even now she does the same. She would patiently explain which direction of the country these places were and what the characteristics of the soils of that country side. She never forgets her roots in agriculture. It's just built in. I used to be amused by the stories about the villages with red soil. How the people were very sly and cunning in those lands. I used to ask her more about these people. How she came to know about them and if she met anyone from those places. When I was too annoying, she would just say that she overheard this knowledge from elders in the evening parleys in her village and no more questions. I would then just walk away and start following a new bus that has arrived.

Such was my curiosity to know about new places. Just know them. Ever since I remember, travelling left me tired and piquant. I either catch a cold, even in the hottest weather, or fever or just a general weariness and slump in my mood, by the time the actual fun starts. The travails of travel always leave with me a bleaker image of the destination. And often I get blamed as an un-fun person. Naturally, I am all about Teleportation. How good it would be to just turn into molecules and then re-assemble at some other destination. It would be perfect for lazy bones like me. Talk about eternity and I know exactly what it means. The eternal recurrence of travel. An important piece of the existential jig-saw.

At times, the Return On Investment(ROI) for travel is the company you get. Sometimes you do feel the whole journey as a lock-period. Man, people talk! They talk, talk and talk, like I used to do once. These days, I practice a trick to counter this. I carry two to three big books with me. They really scare people away. They would not want to indulge into talking because of two reasons. One being you are too absorbed in the book and two, the book is really fat and overpowering. Let me see what I have in store for the next week's journey home . I have, The Complete Novels of Kafka : The Big Red Book and The Penguin History of Early India by Romila Thapar: History minus romance. Kafka seems to be a better grab than Thapar. She can just bore some one to death. But the intrigue and incomprehensibility of Kafkan characters would put people to silence immediately. Poor souls! they would find themselves in a Kafkaesque setting next Friday.