New York to Ithaca

The endless road north west from New York is five hours long. Five hours that pass through the snow in winter and the thick green canopies in summer. Every bus ride is a cacophony- a cacophony of a dozen ear phones playing bad music, empty nothings from the multitude of cell phones and the droning of the bus punctuated by the old and faithful snore.

Through tinted glass, you can see the hours go by. Thoughts meander to meaningless conclusions. Annotations and re-annotations soil them, filing them to an archive, in the hope of eventual retrieval and maybe they will make the pages of a "biography of an unknown citizen" or a library bound moribund thesis .

In the contained atmosphere of the bus, there resides a smell- an amalgam of countless odours. An amalgam of the air freshner in the washroom and the odors of a million riders, it permeates your senses and sets off a million memory recalls of earlier journeys.

A waking sleep approaches, either lulled by fairies of summer or the gloom of winter. Through deep valleys and high hills, the mind drifts, powered by the currents of chance and circumstance.

At the very end, the five hour road empties into Ithaca, a small town by the lake. Journeys seem to begin and end in circular manner, till the ends and the beginnings all coalesce into a large droplet , threatening to overwhelm the reality that is journeyed upon.

Travelogue 1: Long journey home

Long journeys are dangerous. On such journeys, if you are Bilbo- you can kill dragons. If you are Rama, you kill Ravana. The rest of us make do with lost luggage, jet lag and empty bank accounts.

Now, even if you dint do the traveling, you may suffer the ill effects of some someone close to you doing the traveling- sort of similar to second hand smoking. First, you might have to get up at unearthly hours to open the door (either to the car or the house). Second, you might have to help pack their suitcases etc. Third, you might have to read their boring travelogues. Right now, I am inflicting, upon you, the absolute pain and boredom of reading my travelogue.

A few aeons ago, I crossed one ocean, a couple of seas and continents to come to Amrika. In light of the long time interval that managed to pass itself by and in part due to the availability of a paid vacation( vacca= latin for cow, ation= the action of, thus vacation= action of being a cow), I took the greatly unexpected and shocking decision of going home.

My first limb of the journey took me from the middle of nowhere to new york to get a bite off the big apple. The stay here was mostly uneventful with the exception of a friend driving up the wrong side of the street. While this accident caused a panic attack in the car, a similar action was carried out voluntarily and with much sangfroid, on the streets of Hyderabad, while discussing the lack of lane discipline on Indian roads. I must also mention that I -the common NYC taxi commuter-was, most probably, swindled to the tune of a few million (8.3 to be precise) dollars by the cab driver (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/12/nyc-taxis-overcharged-pas_n_497662.html)

My flight from NYC took off without much drama and flew well enough. The few sore exceptions included a lawyer sitting next to me. Her excellency would not switch off the phone till the plane flew over the atlantic- where I believe the cell phone signals are a little weak. By the time I landed in Frankfurt, I had consumed two dinners,four glasses of juice, twelve pounds of boredom and thirty six winks - interrupted only by 500 days of summer and a snoring snooty lawyer.

Frankfurt at 5 AM on christmas day, was all you would expect of it. Vast empty lobbies with occasional, but large concentrations of Indians- flying to Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Delhi, Mumbai and the washrooms (to brush their sparkling teeth). The only exceptions were solitary Indians, manning check-in desks and snack bars. The ones at the snack bars were not really mallu but insisted on giving me euros as change for the dollars I paid.

Now, in due course of time, it was time..for me to fly on further. There was a long line of Indians who waited to charge into the plane..so they could find cabin spots for the millions of tons of hand baggage they carried.I often wonder whether the 'Vimanas' of the Indian epics failed to make it to the modern era primarily because ancient India failed to discover the concept of limiting cabin baggage.

During the halt, I looked at each humanoid entity, to determine which would share my seat. It could have been the exceptionally pretty woman, it could have been the economist I gossiped with or even a normal non-entity. It was however, a male of the species. He was the type who had spent a couple of days in various airports- delayed by storms and the like. That was by itself not particularly tragic. It was also not tragic that he dint remove his heavy jacket during those storm ridden days. It was however, tragic that he decided to unbutton and remove his jacket- the moment he sat next to me. For a screamingly long instant, Dante's last level of hell opened its gates to olfactory senses. In that moment, the agnostic that I was, made a deal with God to see if he was really almighty.

The plane took off and turned south east. "Le Tormentor mon olfaction" of the aisle seat slipped into the seat and into a deep sonorous sleep. In the midst of the smell hell, the roof leaked!Yes, the roof of an Airbus, A340...pride of the Airbus family..leaked water that dripped onto me at regular intervals. But then, lo and behold!There was a miracle. A passenger on the seat behind me, my guardian angel, got up and sprayed "Le Tormentor mon olfaction"with a deodorant. Perhaps, god exists and is almighty.

Then, the plane flew on, the food flew in. As I flew over the Black Forest, there was a cake,over Turkey, I was served some sweet meats. Over the Caspian, I was served some eggs. Over Iran, there was some tea. As the procession of food went by, I came closer and closer to India. I could no longer sit in my seat. Neither could any of the other passengers. For it seemed like half the passengers knew each other, but were according to impeccable german efficiency- seated separately. Children (about 25-3o year old) were separated from their parents. Friends were divided (for about 8 hours). Yet, no wall or fence (that the germans could come up with) kept them apart.

At last, without any drama, the plane touched down. I was nearly home..er, the new airport was a few light years away. But, I was home....to be contd...if I have the mood, time and the boredom.

The American highway

The highway is long and winding.....its an interstate that according to uncited and unchecked conspiratorial brains, were desgined to be straight enough for nuclear armed planes to land and take off during the cold war. I bet that you need a plane to land vertically on this highway. It was nice and pretty in the couple of afternoon hours that the sun hung up there. The sun...it was nothing more than the size of a quarter, as dim as a fully lit moon. The woods, to copy Frost...were lovely, dark and deep, covered with frost and mist and all those symptoms of late autumn. I like the word autumn, it echoes much longer ...reflecting and giving a taste of the beauty, of the wind coloured by the falling leaves and the golden sun.I hate to use 'fall' to describe it.Its a word- american in body and soul. Shortened to save time,typewriter ribbons and telephone conversations. Autumn, nature's last dance before the white winter monochrome sets in.

Its early evening if you are an Indian, but late afternoon if you are american. Its very dark now...the sun snuffed by the gnawing winter and the rain. The rain is not heavy, its just a spiteful drizzle. Its probably icy cold. From where I sit, I see it only in the persistence of the windscreen wipers and in the dipping lights of the weekend traffic-wierding and snaking its way,away from city life and its cancerous existence.

The weekend traffic rumbles on, to find a place they call home, out in the deep dark woods. They ride the american road-ambition, innovation and the free market.Free to buy, to sell and to get up and run to places they wonna go. I hope I dont ever need my forgiveness, but I am on this road.This is America, the land of confusion-the land where Hunter S. Thomson is god and Robert Frost is feared and loathed.This is the land where speech is free but everything else costs.There is an Indian driver, with a North Indian accent thats driving this bus. Welcome to the land of nylon, dreams and the first amendment.

The rain is transmogrified to sleet now. I like calvin.Its the sketch of america, a nation we all ape. America is a nation, that to quote another mass manufacturer of such lines, knows the cost of everything, but many a times, the value of nothing.

note: My views in this essay are influenced by my limited experiences here,my patience and the silly undergraduate in the seat next to me who is testing my patience with three hours of non-stop gossip. I hope that either I get where I am going soon or that her battery fails, or her voice dies!