Home

Home

Literary Evenings: meeting the masters: of rain, unsure mornings and sad evenings.

read mores stories on my web site Literary Evenings: meeting the masters: of rain, unsure mornings and sad evenings.

why travel?

why travel? my wife has been asking me why i travel, why i always want to travel. why all i do is always preparing for travel ?

why go out of the comforts of your beloved home? why leave the favourite pillow and the warm, comforting snug of the large sized coffee mug? why put your life at the mercy of strange men driving like crazy zombies on dust laden roads trying to get everywhere? why venture into the oft tread, the oft read, the oft seen world? why ...absolutely, 100 %ently , not understandably, why, why travel?

questions like these have been bothering me ever since i remember i started travelling, suffering, enjoying, cursing, thanking, feeling joyous, feeling crushed..

why is there this sudden, unexplained, uncontrollable urge in our hearts that we humans, an afterthought of simian evolution probably or a crazy experiment by an amused alien race cant just live happily ever after at one place? why we cant just be all like immanuel kant , the german philosopher who famously never in his life time travelled more than 42 miles of his home.!

why after a certain period of repetitious, routine, perfectly normal life the mundaneness of it all starts seeping in all our pores, the routine becomes a chore, finally insufferable and then explodes into an urge to just go, just leave, just get the hell out of there, here or anywhere?

why we love the shock of a new place? the unsettling poetry of new sceneries, the strange new sounds, the stifle on the skin, the temporary holding of our bodies in suspended animated laziness, as my wife calls i put myself into almost every sunday and holiday? why the sheer movement, the mathematical displacement of our coordinates, the imaginary change in the lat longs, the ruffling phat phat of the breeze, the heavy fit of the backpack straps on the shoulders, the messy food at unknown wayside dhabas, the warm, buttery , aromatic walnut muffin of mrs richards at the corner of the mall, shimla, the cheap, costly hotel-motel rooms and the smell, the new smells , the pungent ones and the good ones,...why all this nourishes the soul?

why they all did it? all almost all who found some answers to some questions of this wonderful enigma called life? vivekanand goes travelling looking for someone who had seen god and found one finally, mahatma gandhi wanted to understand india so there he goes, one of the first backpackers the world has known before the term was invented, travelling around third class carriages in india, jesus christ travelled all around the countryside even kashmir in india looking for some thing that he alone knew, nehru, mahavir, gautam buddha just got up one day and got the hell out of his world moving his ass off in every possible direction trying to solve the eternal question of what was "dukha" or sorrow...

every great saint from guru nanak to leo tolstoy, osho to adi shankaracharya who went around india making maths, every explorer, every one who ever either listened inwards or asked questions just went off buzzing anywhere that life took him. travelling, walking, sleeping on roads, backpacking, cheaping it out, wandering aimlessly till all the aims filtered out of him..

the world is what it is today probably because of these wandering, travelling ancient backpackers "who got the hell out of there " , we owe much more to backpackers then probably to scientists, doctors, religious teachers , parents or any body else?

but the question still troubles me..why travel? why it always had to do with travelling? are we condemned to always travel? is that an inherent curse inside our conciousness that must take us places all our living time on planet earth? are we genetically programmed to travel? is it evolutionary laws of physics that impart us the kinetic energy? is kinetic energy the only energy of this universe rest everything just a metamorphosis? is travelling the very heart of life, the universe and the bing bang? the universe is travelling all the time..

those who have been travelling longer in the universe, the distant galaxies are only travelling faster everyday, there is nothing but motion everywhee, nothing but vibrations, vibrations in different dimensions, 1,3,5,7,11 a million dimensions..quantum physicists say things vibrate in millions of directions, there is this universe because there is vibration.

string theory says we are all strings of the cosmic guitar of god, the all pervading sense of music that is god and we are his symphonies vibrating at some tunes in some ways, even emptiness is vibrating, even when there was nothing there was vibration, there was the desire in the nothingness vibrating to travel, to let go, to explode, to do the big bang, to become the universe..

noone apparently created us, we this whole, beautiful, big, smooth, perfectly arranged, created, made universe had not a creator but it just happened. it just started travelling. universe is just one of those things that happen from time to time, the time being a very very long time, we dont even know how long or may be its a very small time..a very very small time.

so there was this nothingness, nothing absolutely, not even zero, no mass, no energy, no dark energy, no matter, no anti matter, not even vacum, not even nothing, and this no nothing was vibrating with the possibility, with the prabability, with the spontaneity, with the expectation of sometime, someday, somenight start travelling.

so from the possibility, from the inherent desire, the inborn potentiallity to travel, this nothing thing one day just started travelling, a big bang and it starts and probably while looking for answers of its own it just formed a universe which likewise started travelling too and is only travelling faster by the day..

so we were born out of travelling, the blood of our veins, the sinews of our flesh, our hearts, our souls were just born out of this travelling, every atom that makes us came from some distant star that grew tired of travelling, tried to rest and died and the death started it on travel once more. every single atom travelling over billions and billions of miles into space to amazingly, beautifully, startingly, for no rhyme or reason make me, sandeep saini and you whatever you call yourself and from whichever part , country you say you are from!!

when every single atom that breathes in me has travelled over the galaxies to form me wont i feel like travelling too my dear wifey dear? my darling wife who has been asking me why travel, why at all travel?

because probably the atoms inside me are taking me apart to one day leave me and make that distant someone who will then start a journey of his own...and the day i stop, the day i bind them , cage them, prison them, my dear loving wife neither will me nor this body you love holding close would survive any longer, dead like a dodo will i be, only deader for my atoms would have left me on their journey towards the galaxy that lies on the left turn of the first corner around milky way!!!

till then, adieu and bon voyage!