A train ride!!

“The farms rush by and a waft of beautiful odor hits my nose, the next moment it’s gone and the serpent rolls on”

One of the earliest books I read as a kid was a book by Ruskin Bond in which he talks about how the train coming out of a cave with the steam puffin out of its engine reminded him of a dragon coming out of it cave and ever since then a train ride has always fascinated me. The variety of hawkers that we can see plying their trades on a long train journey is quite extra ordinary and the prices and the deals that they offer aren’t possible to be attained anywhere else.  Another fascinating facet of a train ride is the rushing past of a wide variety of landscape at every moment, passing through the fields one moment and rushing inside a cave the next; going past hillsides one moment and over a river the next… human mind has always been enchanted by the thought of soaring in the sky like birds but no one can deny the glorious fascination of a train ride.

Sometimes travelling on a train alone can be very boring but for me this time was a golden opportunity to enjoy some alone time, think and enjoy to the fullest the beauty of a train ride. As life keeps on getting busier and more tense with every passing day, this might be my last train ride till may be I am 60 with a thick produce of white mane on my head and a walking stick by my side so I decided this was the time I will try to sink it in as much as possible.

 I got into the train in the afternoon and it was going to be a 2 day long journey, 6 different states I was going to touch and I hope no European reads this blog coz they will think we are still in the 19^th century but it is what it is. The journey started as the train slowly huffed and puffed out of the station. My immediate goal was to get my blanket and pillow and get comfy, once this goal was accomplished; next up was to get some food, it started with tomato soup with some bread crumbs, then came some noodles which tasted like soaked ropes and then came some boiled eggs. After this light lunch, my appetite was somewhat satisfied for some time, I decided to adore the landscape rushing past me, I started thinking about how as a kid the scenery moving past me made me feel that I was stationary at a place and everything around me was moving, someone tried to make fun of me about this that time and later when I learnt science and understood relative motion, I realized I wasn't that wrong, if anyone has a  doubt about it then they can feel free to contact me personally, I don’t want this blog to become a science lecture or I might miss out on the money Indian Railways is supposed to pay me for promoting railways!!

The next few hours drifted away slowly and I started feeling a bit sleepy, I plugged my earphones to my ears and decided to take a nice little nap. By the time I got up, the sun had set and there was nothing outside that I could see apart from some light in a faraway place, a place I would never have the pleasure of going. I decided to focus my interest to what was going on inside the train now and I was excited about some smart business with the hawkers, believe me when I tell u this, if u want to learn bargaining, get into a train. First up to draw my interest was a hawker loaded with electronics, he had 25MP digital cameras, 32GB pen drives, binoculars, torch lights and I am pretty sure he was hiding a laptop also somewhere; I decided to do some practice of my bargaining skills before I moved to more important things to buy. I called him and asked him how much for a 32GB pen drive, he replied, “Only 500, it is branded!!” and yes it was branded, Transcend with the missing ‘c’. I said I will pay 50 bucks for it; he made a face as if I have told him Martians have invaded earth though when I now think about it, I think he won’t be that worried about the Martians. But moving forward, both literally and figuratively, he asked me to check his branded pen drive, I put it in my laptop and it showed 33.6 GB free space, I was like take 52 bucks and I am not paying extra even the 25 paisa that I have with me. The healthy bargaining continued, I was going up by 1-2 bucks, he was coming down by 50-60 bucks, I reached 60, he reached 80 and we had a Mexican stand off after that and I had to bade the good fellow adieu. This was a good start and I was hungry and actually I am hungry now also, so I shall continue with my train adventure in my next blog so don’t go anywhere… cheers!!  

Dreams that never materialized

It was the summer of 2011 and I was off for a vacation to the mountains, to the picturesque state of Sikkim, the land from where the most famous footballer of our time, Baichung Bhutia hails from. I was in a SUV (Sports Utility Vehicle) on those beautiful roads around the mountains. The river Teesta was flowing from the mountains creating a symphony and the cool mountain breeze along with the cacophony of the bird calls was a wonderful cocktail for both the body and the soul. After the first couple of hours of the journey from New Jalpaiguri to Gangtok, my mind slowly started wandering off to my childhood days. The past 7-8 years had been such a rush, getting through 10^th and 12^th, going for engineering, tensions of future and suddenly it felt as if the days of childhood were a memory of some other life. At this stage, my body had had enough and it decided to shut my brain up and I was forced to take a nap.

The following morning, the sunrise on the Kanchenjunga was a sight to behold, a beauty so intense that you have to witness it to appreciate it fully. After some hot tea and light tit bits I decided to walk on those curvy roads which you only get in a hill station, after taking in all the fresh morning air that I could, I started pondering on my childhood days again and I started thinking of what I wanted to be as a kid, my first love was sports, chess and cricket to be specific and I always wanted to be a great player someday, a hero who rises from the ashes like a phoenix and wins the most important game of his life when no one expects him to, as a kid the romance of the situation of a fallen warrior defying all odds to save the day was just too enchanting, though I had this feeling at a small scale as a kid, I couldn’t ever get to the level that I wished for. And then when I was a bit older, I wanted to be an astronaut, moving in the infinite space trying to find our origin, trying to find if we humans are alone in a universe so enormous that our earth is not even the size of a drop of water in an ocean. 

The years rolled by and reality of the world started dawning, I had to become an engineer, though I was always wanted to be one, I didn’t actually know what engineers do, I don’t think I still get actually what engineers do but that’s a story for another day. My next love was writing and I used to write a lot as a kid though they mostly used to be stupid adventure stuff inspired by some author whose book I last read but I loved writing it all the same. As I was walking on the street, too engulfed in these thoughts, a wafting smell of butter on a hot allo ka paratha reached my nostrils and I suddenly realized I was hungry, I went in and ordered 2 parathas and sat down on a chair below a bamboo shed, and waiting for the parathas I started thinking where it all went wrong, I am not a famous sportsperson, I am not an astronaut or I am not even a struggling writer, would I have been happier being one of these? 

This is a question that I will never have a clear cut answer to. And suddenly as I was looking at the enormous mountain range of the Himalayas, I realized it’s not about what could have been, these were just childhood dreams which gave me their fair share of thrills, even if I could have done one of these, there is no guarantee that I would have been happier than I am today. It’s not about the past coz its already gone, it not about the future coz we don’t know what it holds, may be one of these days I will become a famous poker player, winning a lot of tournaments and end up buying a space ship to go to space and meet aliens and I might be posting my blogs from there having millions of people reading it, who knows, so what I can really do is appreciate my present coz that’s all I am sure of right now, my present- a gift… and at this very moment a gift came for me, my hot allo parathas with a lot of butter, I decided to jump into them and I was done thinking, I was going to appreciate my present now which at that moment tasted very delicious.

The Gleams of the Truth that never was

Lying on my bed humming to the tune of my favorite song which was stuck on my mind for the past few days, I kept on thinking about the same thing over and over again… why do the best things in life always come to an end like childhood, college days etc... Great philosophers have talked about this particular topic a lot and they all talk about how it is necessary for something beautiful to end for something more beautiful to begin and how change is the only constant in this world. I am just a ‘nobody’ and I don’t have any authority or position to even think of contradicting the thoughts of these great minds but my small mind doesn’t want to accept the fact that something more beautiful always follows when something beautiful ends. According to me the childhood days were the best in my life so far, the sheer feeling of joy with the attainment of the smallest of things is a feeling I would give anything to get back right now, teenage and adolescence obviously have their perks but are they really better than the childhood days, I guess not. 

According to me it’s not about things getting better and better as we grow up but learning more and more each day and if we are stuck at one thing in life we won’t be able to grow as a person… if we don’t make mistakes, we won’t learn from them; if we don’t cry, we won’t appreciate happiness….  God, Allah, Bhagvaan, whoever you believe in surely has a smart mind, he doesn’t want us to grow coz life will get better and better but coz he wants us to feel everything in our short lives and pass them to our next generations so that life is a bit easier for them and isn’t that what our parents do for us; try to make life as good as possible for us and may be one day we will do the same. 

Life doesn’t always have to be beautiful, but just the belief that things will get better even at our darkest moments is what keeps us going. Sometimes the pain that life gives seems unbearable but for that also God has the best medicine—time… in the abyss of gloom, the faintest glint of hope is enough to make us go through another day and the day after that and then in the commotion of life we find a companion who is ready to share the baggage, someone we had no idea of ever meeting but they make life simpler and fun again, it feels we are meant to be together forever …… but what are we supposed to do when life plays a cruel joke on us and we lose that person … just leaving us like dissolving into an oblivion forever….