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
47 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more

Are You Sane?

Illustration by Gemini AI A few months back, a clinical psychiatrist asked me whether anyone in my family ever suffered from insanity. “All of us are insane to some degree,” I wanted to tell her. But I didn’t because there was another family member with me. We had taken a youngster of the family for counselling. I had forgotten the above episode until something happened the other day which led me to write last post . The incident that prompted me to write that post brought down an elder of my family from the pedestal on which I had placed him simply because he is a very devout religious person who prays a lot and moves about in the society like the gentlest soul that ever lived in these not-so-gentle terrains. I also think that the severe flu which descended on me that night was partly a product of my disillusionment. The realisation that one’s religion and devotion that guided one for seven decades hadn’t touched one’s heart even a little bit was a rude shock to me. What does re...
10 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

To an Old Friend

Image by Copilot Designer Dear S, I don’t know if you’d even remember me after all these decades, but I find myself writing to you as if it were only yesterday that we parted ways. You were one of the few friends I had at school. You may be amused to know that a drawing of yours that you gifted me stayed with me until I left Kerala after school. Half a century later, I still remember that beautiful pencil drawing, the picture of a vallam (Kerala’s canoe) resting on a shore beneath a coconut tree that slanted over a serene river on whose other bank was an undulating hilly landscape. A few birds flew happily in the sky. Though it was all done in pencil, absolutely black and white, my memories of it carry countless colours. I wonder where you are now. A few years later, when I returned to Kerala on holiday, I did visit your village to enquire about you. But the village had changed much and your hut on the hill wasn’t seen anymore. Maybe, you moved on. Maybe, you took up your father’s...
8 comments
Read more