Travel and books

**Pic taken at Triund, Mc Leodganj, India

Its been long I wrote something and this very thought has pushed me to jot down something here.

 Many of you cajoled me to write yet another post, mentioning that u enjoyed reading what I wrote. I couldn't decipher whether you were serious or it was some horseplay but I loved to cut the comedy out of your statements and took the praises to my head. Few of you acknowledged that you liked my hilarious posts, few gave tributes to my diary-like-posts while few relished the random stories. That is what confused me but it instilled my confidence in beauty of random human choices.

 Since u read me last, I have read some books and have traveled to few places. So lets keep this post to that. To something I can confidently deliver.

 Lets start with travelling. I prefer travelling alone. Many people ask me what do I do when I travel alone or why do I have this fascination of lone travelling. I admit that I feel that the right way to travel is to travel alone. U gel with the surroundings, u mingle with the localites, u know more of a place. U start belonging to the moment. Just think about it.

 Just pick up your bag, put some necessary items in it, take some books along. And just leave. Enjoy the open sky, the moving bus or the train. Talk to localites, smile at fellow travelers, relish the idea of so many people who are oblivious of your presence crossing your backyard. Enjoy the randomness. Take a diary along or a camera to shoot. Pamper yourself. Experience it.

 I met this monk at Mc Leodganj who had braved Tibet cold and escaped out of the Chinese rule of Tibet. He suffered a frost bite while the long sipping away and had to get his right hand amputated. I talked to him for half an hour and it nearly choked me. But that man was happy for exchanging his right hand for freedom.

Travelling helps to come out of your shell. It heals.

Lets talk about books now. Off late I read some books. Mainly Kundera, Murakami, Nabokov and Rushdie. All are fascinating in their own ways. In the end I get pleasantly exhausted after reading it, its not easy to live so many lives. I will leave you all with one of the quotes from a book I just read:

 “The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything....The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place.” –Kundera