Travelbugged

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I hate travel...always hated it. There are two reasons for it.

One, I am too lazy...like Mycroft Holmes...whose life was like a tram car running to and fro on rails between his home and workplace. In my case most of my life was spent traveling between my Qrs and Institute at IIT KGP.

Second, I am blessed with a terrific imagination. Very pixy. Once KK (Junior) gifted me a sumptuous coffee table book titled something like: Earth from Space. It had about 30 color photos of various lands and seas and mountains taken by astronauts hurling in a satellite around the Earth...the fertile greens, long rivers like the Nile, oceans, Alps and such. Whoever visited my home and looked at the pics went hoo-haa about them. But, it was all too familiar to me. I had already seen them in my mind's eye in more detail.

The few tourist sites I had been to willy-nilly were all a disappointment. When I read about them, the pics I had in mind were far more beautiful and serene. For instance, I had to perforce visit Benares to immerse my Father's ashes in the Ganga since he was so fond of the city and its bent river. If you had been there you would have noticed, unless you are a frenzied devotee, the difference between the coffee table photos (say of Raghu Rai) and the truth...if you look closely enough.

I was fortunate that I didn't read about IIT KGP before I landed there seeking a job. It looked beautiful and I stayed there like a Lotus Eater.

I also read about an equally lazy boy who, at the age of 17, traveled to his dreamland (a hill-temple town in Tamilnadu) and stayed put there for his next 53 years without stirring even for a minute. I at once took him as my spiritual Guru. The Guru must always appeal to the devotee's ideals.

But I had to travel once a year from KGP to my hometown at Gudur, where my parents stayed...I rarely went to my in-laws' place...they were visiting me regularly ;-) The entire experience of the Howrah-Madras Mail was miserable. The 3-tier compartment where I was forced to reside for a day and a half was verily a prison for me. When I got the lower berth, I was always unfortunate to have a chap in the middle berth who slept for 24 hours (he ate on the berth sleeping) and so I could never sit down and enjoy the Passing Show. On the other hand when I got the middle berth, the one in the lower berth was shouting at me whenever I slept. And when I got the upper berth and went up, I could never come down because half a dozen strangers always used to sit and play cards on my seat below.

Luckily my wife shares my abhorrence to travel...two couch potatoes...stereo system. That is what I call Dame Luck.

I have known a childless working couple who never had Quality Time together all their working lives. After their retirement, the hubby wanted to spend the rest of his life on his couch watching the sitcoms. He hated travel like me. She, on the other hand, wanted to tour every place in India with her hubby in the tow, since they had too much pension for two, not to talk of a huge bank balance. Whenever I happened to meet the hubby alone, he used to cry buckets on my shoulders. The chap could never put his foot down...sad! Last I heard they crossed over to Nepal (of all places). And she has booked air tickets to Manas Sarovar, he cried.

I did travel in the air half a dozen times...at stretches of two hours. I was happy that there were no middle and upper berths, but that was about all. It was misery. The regular drill of the so-called air-hostesses showing how to jump into the sea when 'we all fall down' was scary. I was always imagining it and feeling dead...I don't know swimming...not that it helps. Train travel has this blessing that my suit case (for whatever it was worth) was with me. But not so when I was in the air...they used to snatch it from me and dump it in the hold and I could never retrieve it in its first pass from the belt...since I am, as you know, a born woolgatherer. I just can't imagine how chaps (like my son) are happy enough to be continuously airborne for 15 hours and more across Alps or Atlantic. Beats me hollow...it takes all sorts...

Religious tourism is the worst. After my first visit to South Indian Hindu Temples, the crowd, the slippery floor full of coconut water, the dingy sanctum sanctorum, the sweating priests, the ushers acting as pushers...I stopped entering the inner works of temples...I sit down outside the main gate and pray in my mind's eye, till my wife and her cousins return.

I hope the Hades to which I rightly deserve to be committed has no crowded temples at least...the ones who hounded them here below are already ensconced in Heaven choke-a-bloc with their favorite shrines.

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Stalkathons

DC, Tuesday, 10 January, Front Page:

Center wants a new law, 7 years in jail for stalkers

Stalking, the legal definition:

# Repeatedly following the woman from place to place

# Repeatedly contacting through mails, fax etc

# Loitering or watching the house or workplace of the woman.

...There is no penal provision defining the offence of stalking in the Indian Penal Code (IPC), which has led to serious sexual assaults on women...

gps: Yes, it is high time. I have been reading, of late, maniacal stalkers hurting and blinding or even acidifying women they stalk.

They deserve exemplary punishment.

But, as a matter of sociological history, I can propose an explanation for the lack of penal provision in the IPC for this offense so far. In the Nehruvian Socialistic Pattern of Society in the 1950s of our youth, women had by and large no workplace other than their kitchens. Unlike now when they are happily emancipated.

Those were the eons of romantic films like Madhumathi, Chori Chori and Sri 420. They all ended up happily unlike the gory films of these days which are filled with violence.

Stalking was certainly there...but it ended in happy marriages.

And it was not one-sided like now.

I even know a close friend of mine who had to flee overnight from the balmy sun'n'sea'n'sand of Visakhapatnam beaches to the Junglemahal of Midnapore District (there were no East and West Midnapore Dists then).

He was stalked back...

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