Our Way of Life

What is life but a string of memories? Memories that give you immeasurable happiness are the ones that stick; those are the ones I really remember. The horrid ones are also there, but my brain has shoved them away into a corner. As I was returning from my office to my hostel, walking the long walk, with nary a person around for about fifty meters, with no phone or book to distract me, all I could think about is how badly I have always wanted a telescope since I was a little kid in school. And that innocuous memory really did open the floodgates.

For before I knew it, they came flooding in. Those trips with my family to Nagpur, Ujjain, Mumbai, Jaipur, Sanchi, Lucknow, Varanasi, Ahmedabad, Allahabad, Nainital, Haldwani, Abu, Ghaziabad, Bhopal, Delhi, Indore, Etawah, Karauli, Orcha, Guna and so, so many other places. I believe I can say, with sufficient confidence, that as a family, we’ve covered more road miles than probably any other family I know.

My parents would go out of their way to take me to places that weren’t really on the radar of most people so that I could get a glimpse of what lies underneath the country I know and the life I have seen.

 Hence, a trip to some obscure museum in Chittor, or to the glassware district in Ferozabad, or the Taj’s poor replica in Aurangabad or the Buddha pagodas near Sarnath, or that trip to McDonald’s which culminated into a trip to see Kanishka’s headless statue, or that trip to some dusty motel near Gandhinagar which, as it turned out, had more than a hundred vintage cars on display, lovingly collected and restored by the owner’s family over a period of more than a hundred years!

 Or even that trip where in I believe we were the only people who skipped the Corbett National Park and went to Corbett’s old bungalow and not the other way round! Or even that trip to Ajanta and Ellora, where we were told that tigers used to frequent the caves a century ago and the entire area had a very Stonehenge-y feel to it, as if it time had left it untouched.

Or that one time when we took a diversion and landed up in a place called “Harda Khas”.

I inherited from my parents a distaste for the usual places; a distaste for the city life as we’ve come to know it. And an immense and enduring love for wide, open spaces; animals of all kinds; long highways that criss cross our country; sturdy utility vehicles, villages and a quiet way of life.

Although I’d like to think of myself as somewhat of an atheist, some of my best trips with my family have been the ones to religious or semi-religious spots. I have fond memories of me going to Karauli every couple of months in my childhood (for some reason, the frequency of those trips decreased greatly as I grew up). That trip to Pushkar was delightful and at that time I really did believe Pushkar to be the Center of the World. Those trips to Shirdi and the Dargah in Ajmer, Aurangzeb’s tomb in Khuldabad, the Kashi Vishwanath temple in Benares and my beloved Kailash Mandir and of course, all the temples in Vrindavan.

But the important thing is that during all those trips, all I could think about was the heat, or the never ending journey or the all pervading smell of diesel. But now, as I sit here in Gandhinagar, away from my family, I see those trips for what they actually were: the best moments of my life and a family’s unshakeable belief in the words that ‘the journey’s more important than the destination’.

These are memories I will cherish my entire life. But the years will go by, and soon I will be taking my family on such long trips and it will be me fishing for such off beat places on the Map and *I* will be the one creating the new memories for everyone around me. That is a humbling thought but it doesn't necessarily have to be a sad one. For this is our way of life, and we will do everything in our power to preserve it.