The Road goes ever on and on #1

The Road goes ever on and on

I would have to thank Bill Bryson personally for without him this write-up would have never been possible, although I do not know him.

1. Madras

As I sit back thinking on how a travelogue should be structured; I am faced with a very important crisis which I am usually not bothered with- to whom this writing should proceed and how useful they might find it.
For the first time in my life I set out to do something which someone other than the wombats(who can never read) find it useful and believe me, writing a travelogue is just quite as easy as writing nonsense; people in the days to come might find both the same.

I am not a traveler but I should say I have been a tourist or person visiting relatives in various cities, but travel has always excited me and people should necessarily understand the difference between travel and tourism both being completely different the only thing common is that both start with the alphabet t.

My trip would take me to the southern city of Trichy for a cultural event and like all other things in my life; the preparations were done in haste. Truthfully speaking I was very much looking forward to it but two divine interventions called laziness and college delayed my preparations, the latter also delayed my schedule and I had to leave a day later than the originally decided day due to a thing which I am remotely connected called practicals.
I have never enjoyed anything in life which basically deals with drawing four line borders with black pen and two underlines in blue ink and flowers at each corner to please the examining officer and needless to say I learnt very little but like all the other academic activities I did it with a fair share of grumbling, surprisingly the experiment which was concerned about the working of a transformer in different conditions interested me and so I played around me with the circuits which I would avoid otherwise. This I consider as one of the reasons for my tired nature for the rest of the day, then I slept for the rest of the day which I am not supposed to do and the classes continued, the thought of the journey ahead shone like a light at the end of the tunnel somehow the tunnel seemed to extend forever as my college made plans to work for the whole of the weekend and have classes on Sunday-‘ridiculous’ my pig brain said, another villainous part of it schemed my absence on that very day, finally something made me feel happy- I would not attend classes for the next two days and have three days as holidays, the very thought made me come front to the first bench for the math hour; I even made an attempt at solving two dimensional heat equations.

Classes for the day ended as I made my movement to the buses; I was finally going home. The books in my bag (which was predominantly occupied by ‘From Russia with Love’ by Ian Fleming which had a good retro feel to it and pleasurably had the picture of a Russian woman in a ‘not so often seen pose’ and ‘The moor’s last sigh’ by Salman Rushdie a book I am yet to understand and will require all of my cerebral capacity)

Reading through one of the sleazy massage sequences in ‘From Russia with love’ (which occurs in the very early pages of the book –all those James Bond fans out there) I went into the fantasizing mode where I imagined I was (who else) Bond and the operation involved me rescuing a beautiful Russian actress from an oil tanker, the route would be from under the sea while we finally came out of the water(me in swimming trunks showcasing a six-pack abs contrary to all that flab I have in real life and the actress would undress into a smaller version of a bikini, maybe that’s how they celebrate summer up in Russia). The oil tanker would later explode and the Bond theme orchestrated by John Barry played in the background. After all this was imagination and anything could happen, a co-passenger commented that he had never seen me go through my course book with such interest, the boy remembered me of my father’s daily monologue.
I wowed to finish the Bond novel by next week as I comfortably ignored the literary Rushdie as I reached home.

My mind for the next one hour focused on packing, finally I was leaving home.

Satyeki