Skip to main content

Travelling Thoughts

We always seem to feel a license to suspend the everyday disciplines when we're on vacation.

I always wonder what that context would be where I am truly myself. Would I get up and dance, or run through the streets in my pajamas or lie on the beach...or simply sleep through the day?

Why is it that I contain myself inside the bottled expectations of what we call "normal life"? I often feel I need to express myself in anticipated ways, to stay "true to [a] form" drawn by others (not without my own collusion of course). I find it hard to break free of that. And no one else to blame but myself.

But there are also things you encounter in yourself on a consistent basis, those things that might be the "true form". Like the fact that one of my "essences" is housekeeper. I find myself tidying surfaces, putting things away, folding clothes, making neat piles of paper...you get the picture...no matter where I am.

It is so easy to be away from the structure of one's everyday. The job, the family, the house, the routine--the scaffolding that holds one's life. We tell ourselves that routine is what sustains us but one has to wonder whether the only agency we will/can ever feel is that which comes from controlling or sustaining that routine.

The pockets of time that we discover in the lost spaces of our routines suddenly present themselves to us as opportunities for discovery--of the world-as-yet-undefined and of ourselves-as-yet-unrealised.

Without the maps of the "have-to" and "ought-to" and "plan-to", we are lost, and so lose the chance to break free from that scaffolding and find ourselves in the world.

Perhaps this is why we prefer the conducted tour, the Blue Planet led holidays, the organized vacation. Where the postcards we send are never from the edge of discovery, but from the centre of expected experience.

A friend told me a quaint story about a neighbour in San Diego, California (where it's mostly beautiful weather and there's plenty of sun and sand and palm trees) who went to holiday in Florida (same difference) and posted on Facebook pictures of sun and sand and palm trees, with the comment "In Paradise!" My friend quipped: "It looked a lot like home."

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A house called Ayodhya

How do words get taken away from you? How do they mutate and reconfigure around entirely new meanings, only weakly related to those that they held when you owned them? And then, through repetition and constant association, they solidify into these new forms, their other histories hidden behind impenetrable layers, where they have not been erased altogether.   I live in a house whose name often elicits a curious look, raised eyebrow, a muffled cough, a judging eye, or even a vigorous nod of approval. But for even the least politically minded, the name is evocative of something. For some of us, it is the wave of negativity, divisiveness, and violence unleashed by the events of a December three decades ago. For others, it may represent the righteous assertion of identity.   But the name etched into the gate pillar, now fading and diminished when compared to the glitzy lettering on neighbouring walls, has nothing to do with the politics of place and claimed heritage. It is a simple, gentle

Origin Story

You can know someone all your life and only begin to discover who they are more fully after they are gone. The stories seem to flow more easily, less self-consciously, without the moderating physical presence, perhaps more detailed in the awareness that they cannot be challenged and the memory can retain its sanctity. Today is my parents’ anniversary, 62 years since their marriage that rainy day in Secunderabad when the monsoon used to arrive without fail on the 10th day of June. The family legend has it that it poured so heavily on the 9th (the evening of the nichyathartham or engagement ceremony) that water entered the storage room, soaking the provisions for the next day’s big meal, causing my maternal grandmother to faint. That turbulence however did not seem to affect the tenor of the marriage which, by all accounts and my own experience, was characterized by a calmness that suggested a harmony of purpose and personality.   Not that my parents are/were alike in all ways. T

taking measure of 21 years

How does one measure the usefulness of anything? Does it lie in its quantum of influence--spatially, numerically, intellectually, materially? Does it lie in its ability to survive over time? Or (as some in this age would have it) in the number of mentions it generates on social media? An idea that was born just over 21 years ago is now in the process of being put to rest. Not quite given up on as an idea, but in its material form, designated "unsustainable". Teacher Plus was mooted in the second half of 1988, and given shape to in the first half of 1989, in the offices of Orient Longman Pvt Ltd, Hyderabad. The ELT team in the publishing house, of whom Lakshmi Rameshwar Rao (Buchamma), Usha Aroor and Rema Gnanadickam were a part, originated the idea of a professional magazine for school teachers that would serve as a forum for the sharing of teaching ideas and experiences, and perhaps motivate teachers to play a catalyzing role in reforming classroom practice. I was recru