The Vagabond situation

"So what do you do?"

 I travel full time...

"No, No what is your PROFESSION ? What do you do for a LIVING?"

Well all I do pretty much is  travel ... 

"Ok Ok who do you travel with ? A bunch of friends?"

No.

"Do you mean to say that you travel alone?" , eyeing me up as if I might be a potential rapist or axe murderer.

After digesting that information comes another beauty.

"But you CAN'T travel full time!", as if I've just defied the laws of gravity.

Oops, I forgot again, full time travel/enjoying life to the hilt/doing what you really want to do is against the Indian law !

This is a conversation I have every day when I travel in India. 3 times a day at the very least !!! Yes folks,  like a bitter pill to be taken after every meal ! Travelling full time is considered by some in this country as worse than being a drunkard, philanderer, and adulterer all rolled into one. A thousand times worse! A good friend asked me the question recently, ‘Why bother? Is it really worth the sneers, criticisms and free advice that you have to hear on a daily basis?' Yes, my friend it is… and then some :)

I’m chilling out right now in a city Mark Twain once famously described as older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend and looks twice as old as all of them put together ! My temporary abode is  a hostel frequented by the odd mix of backpackers, college kids, vagabonds ,etc. The critic Arthur Compton-Rickett defined vagabonds as men "with a vagrant strain in the blood, a natural inquisitiveness about the world beyond their doors."

In the hostel I've had conversations with the well educated, ‘well settled’ young Indians who are kind of a little bit in awe, in envy of the vagabond situation. This is something new for me, adulation from my own countrymen! For many of them, especially the affluent guys, it’s an attainable dream to travel for an extended period since they can afford it, yet the time factor plays spoilsport. I met quite a few students from Mumbai in the hostel who stopped short of waving aarti to me for doing what I do. At least some of them found the vagabond situation incredibly cool.

To walk away from the crowd...

So you have guys who despise you, who think that you should be put behind bars or at the very least be committed in a lunatic asylum. Then there are others who think that you are Mr. Cool living ‘the life’ with no responsibilities no deadlines, no work…

The truth lies somewhere in between. Travelling alone, living alone, sleeping alone, takes some getting used to for most people. You have to be your own best friend, love your company and be able to laugh at your own jokes since often there won’t be people around to laugh at them. I've always been an introvert and am OK with this. Yet there are days, I have to admit, that you feel the need for a little companionship just like the guy in the city sometimes wishes for solitude.

I’m not doing this as a rebellion, as a statement against the system or anything. It’s because I love nature, travelling to unseen places and meeting people (once in a while !). I learn from my travels just like you learn stuff at work (or at least you're supposed to !) and for me its fun! I try to be not too bothered when the shit hits the fan as it often does, when things don’t work out even remotely as you planned them.

With a companion on the way

 I started travelling when I realized that my life was going to be short. Not just mine but yours as well. We will all be gone in a blip. Why work my ass off and save money I will never use ? Why to buy a house and pay mortgage for the rest of my life? Why live in a polluted city whne the mountains constantly beckon? Why ? Why ? Why ? I thought hard about these things,  found the answers and hence I decided to hit the road, to do what I thought was important. 

If you think that being in the corporate world and working your ass off is your thing and that you would do it even if you got paid zilch, I’d say go for it full steam ahead. That’s a good test. If money was no concern would you still be doing the thing you’re doing now ? If maintaining status and facing uncomfortable questions were no longer an issue would you still be doing the thing you’re doing now? Maybe if you really think about it,sweeping the road is your passion but you're afraid to do it because people may ridicule you. I thought about all these and more for quite some time before I decided to take the leap… 

So as S and a lot of others have been asking what the hell do I do the whole day? It may surprise many of you that I get up quite early for yoga and a bit of meditation. I read for sometime then maybe head out for local explorations. So its not about sleeping late and just lying around in a hammock all day ok? Everything is done because I love doing it. 

But I do chill! The wise call it laziness. I don’t feel the need to compulsively work just because 99% of homo sapiens believe so. I’m not living off my parent’s money or anything earned through the hawala route. It’s all been earned by the sweat of my brow (not literally of course!). Work is not just something you do for money. Well, if you look at things that way, getting your ass off bed in the morning is work. Cooking and cleaning is work. Meditation is work. The hardest work is to just sit still, be content in not doing anything, allowing the world to just be as it is…that way I'm a workaholic.

Not so long ago...

I open my eyes and it's still dark and the mind's silent. I stumble out of bed groping for the light switch congratulating myself that my meditation is finally bearing fruits  when i realize that the silence is not of the mind but because the noisy fan is not working. So no electricity again ! It's 5 in the morning and not hot, so no complaints. I can't get lost in my room because its 6 feet by 8 feet. A strong urge to empty my bowels leads me outside to the common toilets where its pitch dark. I finally get an idea how it must feel for a blind man to shit in a new toilet, Indian squatting style. He can't poke his white stick around to probe the exact location can he ? I finally manage to do it successfully ( i think !) and make a quick exit.

Welcome to Ved Niketan ashram, a real ashram with no creature comforts. Its a backpacker's paradise and they seem to love the minimalistic design... there is a thug at the front desk who always grunts whenever I greet him. I still remember the first time I set foot in my room and sat down on my bed. Everything was suddenly fuzzy due to the enormous dust cloud that rose when I settled my backpack on the bed. Its not all bad though, the shower's excellent , a swanky new thing out of which three threads of water squeeze through almost as if it cant decide whether to piss or cry. The ashram's in a very quiet area though and they were the only people brave enough to take on a solo Indian male traveller in the whole of Rishikesh. 

This was after my stay in the great Sivananda ashram in Rishikesh, an institution in itself. To be in with any chance of staying there you have to write 2 months in advance, so straight after I landed in Rishikesh I just walked in there hoping to charm my way in. The swami in charge was not amused and told me so. But just as i did my pranams and lifted my butt off the seat, he relented and gave me the dorm. The dorm in Sivananda is ***** compared to the single room in Ved niketan . A view of the Ganga , with a sunrise thrown in everyday  + my dorm mates, who comprise of swamis in the ashram, travellers, of all ages, brahmacharis, etc. There was a guy who walked from Rameshwaram all the way here ( just 2000 km) with not a single paisa in his pocket. Everybody has their story and it will fill a book or two easily. Most of them seemed genuine , at least more than me , and that's the criteria I go by to judge genuineness! So all sorts of guys came and went during my 10 days there , and it was fascinating. Yet it was quiet most of the time, people just minded their own business. It was great not to feel the need to explain why I was STILL  travelling close to a year. It was the norm.

During the last two days though, a sanyasi took upon himself to give me small lectures on the mysteries of the universe. Maybe i reminded him of his son who was a similar age. This small mishap apart, it was a beautiful tranquil period.

 One day it was the birthday of one of the gurus and we all floated scores of diyas on the Ganga as part of the aarti ( evening worship). No photograph could capture the beauty of that scene. Finally i overcame my phobia of bacteria count  and dead bodies and swam in the Ganga. Everyday 2 oclock sharp , i used to go with a swami and man it was just ccchhhhhillllllll...... so cold  so refreshing, better than any coca cola in the world !

Any travel in India is bound to be engaging , you never know what to expect even if you're Indian. Just today, i saw a cow stealing and munching heartily some orange ice cream cones while the vendor was screaming blue murder and a Tibetan looking chap walking dreamily around in his underwear with welts all over his body as if he just landed from some S & M club. Then there's the dirt , the shit, the smells , the poverty which I can never get used to... Oh the bulls are something else here. They are big humped ones and I saw one charging a swami in the groin in a narrow lane.

So life's never dull, although... sometimes travelling alone gets to you. You might be lying in your room and suddenly it hits you, the loneliness you've always been carrying with you since birth, with no distractions in a 'foreign' land far from 'loved ones' makes you think about the absurdity of it all. Isn't it just better to sit at home and go for that 9 to 5 job? But then i look outside my window and see that the tussle between the bull and the swami is still going strong...