One of Those Journeys...

I am on one of my numerous, not-as-often-as-I-like journeys. Nowhere too great, just to that lovely paradise of mine, Madikeri. All no thanks to my nasty foot. Typing this on the bus now reminds me of another journey when I was typing a post, a very different post…

The journey now. I don’t quite like clichés now. But then sometimes, there is nothing truer than a cliché, I notice. Wasn’t it a cliché again now, that thing about the journey being the destination? On a day bus, something I religiously avoid normally, with a Kannada movie in the background grating, many varied voices about me, I look out at SH 17. There are many more voices in my head too; for a while, I try to ignore them. There is today, much to see.

Many fields. Corn and maize and sugarcane. Villages. I like those that dot highways. It is like they cropped up just to break the monotony of roads and green fields. The roads on this stretch used to be bad; I have traveled here many years. Smoother stretches, better buses, worse traffic. The villages remain the same, save for crude advertisements on huts and their roofs, the people flashing mobile phones and an odd internet/cyber games/DTP/ typing/e-mail centre.

What do I spot? Several cattle grazing, some along the roadside, some in the fields. A farmer still ploughing the fields, even as the sun rises higher above his head. Coconut trees. A small fire. Earlier, another fire warming up a little boy. Tender coconut vendor. A tiny hut. Sheep in front of the thatched hut. A little temple for the little village, brightly painted in pink and blue and green, the oddest of colours. Little boys still at a game of marbles; they actually play that still! A Panchayat katte, they still have those! Farmers. Their wives. The children. The lives so different from what we otherwise perceive as ‘real’ or ‘developed’ or ‘modern’. Lots of fields and farms and beautiful landscape. Makes me wonder…what on earth am I doing in a city?

Most times, I blissfully sleep through the journey home. I prefer the mundanities of a usual journey to pass that way. Today, with my thoughts and some music and some audacities that I subscribe to what I am dreaming of, a journey becomes a destination again.

Isn’t this the vestiges of a nomadic culture. Isn’t humankind, most often than not, nomadic, be it in thoughts or otherwise? Am I not a nomad by those parameters too? It is not the romantics of the idea that inspires, it is the idea in itself.

A nomad.