Skip to main content

The journey matters

The company mattes on the way


If destination is all that mattered, the graveyard would be the happiest place. What really matters is what happens between the cradle and the grave. That is true about leisurely travels too.

Some of my happiest journeys were the treks in the Garhwal Himalayas which were all made with students while I taught in Delhi. My first trek was to Hemkund which is at 4633 metres (15,200 feet) above sea level. Dr S C Biala, the principal of the school, was a passionate mountaineer and he introduced mountaineering to the school. Though I was initially hesitant about my physical ability for a trek of that sort, I fell in love with trekking after that first experience. In the next few years, I trekked to quite a few peaks in the Garwhal Himalayas with my students and loved all of them.

The destination is not what really matters when you go trekking. Most of the places like Hemkund or Gaumukh have nothing much to offer for sight-seeing or anything. It is the trek that really lingers on in your bones. The ascent and its excitements as well as exhaustions remain in your memory for years.

However, when it comes to the usual tourist destinations where we reach by vehicles, I don’t know if we can say that the journey matters more than the destination. I remember the long journeys I made with students to Goa from Delhi or Coorg from my present school in Kerala. The journeys were quite harrying and the destinations were the real fun.

Some of the places I visited with Maggie alone, such as Gangtok, Darjeeling and Shimla, offered much thrill on the way as well as at the destinations. The journey becomes bliss when you have the ideal company, I guess. Travel has its romance too. I still remember our car ride from Bagdogra airport to Gangtok and the long hours spent waiting on the road for the landslide-caused block to clear. The bumpy ride from Gangtok to Darjeeling on a shared taxi driven by a drunken surly young man who kept grumbling all along the way had its own memorable excitements too.

Life is a journey too. The sights and smells on the way make that journey worth and meaningful. The bumpiness of the rides and the grumpiness of co-travellers also add charm to the journey. When I look back at the journey so far, I’m amazed by the variety of experiences I have had. I learnt a lot of lessons along the way. The tragedy, perhaps, is that the lessons were learnt rather late. If only one could begin the journey with the inherited wisdom of generations!

PS. Written for In[di]spire Edition 260: #TravelTrends



Comments

  1. Ruchira KhannaFebruary 9, 2019 at 11:05 PM

    Well said!
    Loved your post.

    ReplyDelete
  2. voicesFebruary 10, 2019 at 3:07 PM

    Travel bliss nicely put in words

    ReplyDelete
  3. Neeraj KumarFebruary 10, 2019 at 4:55 PM

    This post per se is a journey related to different experiences of travelling. Loved it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 11, 2019 at 2:29 PM

      I was a lover of travels. Now i would rather drive.

      Delete
  4. Arvind PasseyFebruary 11, 2019 at 11:40 AM

    Ah! Loved that reference to the graveyard as a travel destination... and it brought the essence of the topic immediately to the forefront. This is something that only accomplished writers can do. Thanks for sharing your point of view, buddy. :)

    ReplyDelete
  5. जितेन्द्र माथुरFebruary 18, 2019 at 10:52 AM

    Your experiences are heartening and the concluding views are completely agreeable.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
44 comments
Read more

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The
62 comments
Read more

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so
39 comments
Read more

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let
36 comments
Read more

Octlantis

I was reading an essay on octopuses when friend John walked in. When he is bored of his usual activities – babysitting and gardening – he would come over. Politics was the favourite concern of our conversations. We discussed politics so earnestly that any observer might think that we were running the world through the politicians quite like the gods running it through their devotees. “Octopuses are quite queer creatures,” I said. The essay I was reading had got all my attention. Moreover, I was getting bored of politics which is irredeemable anyway. “They have too many brains and a lot of hearts.” “That’s queer indeed,” John agreed. “Each arm has a mind of its own. Two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are found in their arms. The arms can taste, touch, feel and act on their own without any input from the brain.” “They are quite like our politicians,” John observed. Everything is linked to politics in John’s mind. I was impressed with his analogy, however. “Perhaps, you’re r
34 comments
Read more