Tumultuous Traveller

busy airport

Enter a railway station or an airport, I am throbbing with a joy quite indescribable. Being born and brought up in Calcutta, a basically plain and not so much happening city, the mountains, the deserts and the beaches were all the kind of geographies I wanted to see.


My love for foreign travel was much more because there was more to see, the people especially, the whites, yellows and blacks!! Thanks to some big banner Indian movies, I got to get a glimpse of the beautiful alps and the golden and blue beaches of exotic locations. But all this didnt quench me, for I wanted to feel and be a part of them in flesh and blood, than just see pictures.

eeks! is this me?

When I was very small, papa often travelled abroad for work and I always begged him to take me but I always had school when he was going and even if there was vacations he would not take me because he wasn't going for a vacation himself, but his NO didn't deter me from taking out all my clothes from my wardrobe and crying my lungs out. My longing for foreign travel reached such levels that when my father took my grandpa for treatment to London because he had been diagnosed with cancer. I prayed that I should get some dreadful disease for which my father would have to take me there!!


 Even if this didnt work, I thought it would be best if some "foreigner" fell for me so that I could be his bride and in his foreign land for real!! For the love of travel too, I wanted to marry far away from home so that even if there was nowhere to go, I'd still be travelling once a year to my parents.


Enough about my rantings of my obsession for travel. I have met some people whom I might have influenced more than they influencing me so here I am writing about them.


After I had turned 18 (desperate to be 18), I planned a trip with only friends to Darjeeling. We had just finished our boards and ready to taste our new found freedom of adulthood! There was a group of boys who reached there same day as us and we kept banging into each other during our outings and sightseeing. We were already quite raucous and bolder than the boys. We thought one of them would pick up enough courage to come and ask to accompany us together for the rest of the trip, but I think they were either too afraid or just too genteel!! But as luck would have it, we had our train berths adjacent with each other on our return journey. Since the trip was over and they had done nothing at all (meaning to get friendly with us) we took it upon us to get at them, we kept lunging at them with our boisterous behaviour. One of them wore shorts on the train, obviously for comfort reasons, and whenever he passed us we sang aloud, "jungle jungle baat chali hai pata chala hai, chaddi pehan ke phool khila hai phool khila hai.
(the word is in all jungles that a flower wearing an underwear has blossomed) LOL!!
So he finally came up to us and asked us why were we doing all this? We couldn't answer at all, because we couldn't stop laughing at him! I have never forgotten them and the fun we had because of them and hope they haven't forgotten what fun we gave them!

inviting attention? :P

I particularly cant forget the south India trip which was the last I took before I got married. The hit film DDLJ was released and the story was similar to mine, heroines engaged to an unknown guy and she takes a last trip with her friends to enjoy her last days of being single. I had secretly hoped to find a Shahrukh Khan equivalent who would fall hook line and sinker for me and come to rescue me from being bonded to an unknown person for life. Unlike Kajol who was not in the lookout for any SRK, I was. I particularly laughed  aloud and made a lot of gesture to attract people around me, lest anybody missed seeing me. you see, there is no director in real life who can orchestrate the entire romance. I flirted shamelessly with a cute salesguy at a big store in Bangalore. I told him my entire itinerary in the hope of him following me all over the trip and propose to me by the end or perhaps even come to stop my wedding!! hehe.
He had promised to come to the hotel later in the evening when he was off from his job, but he never came :(
No dilwale for me.

desert safari

When I went to Dubai, I had gone to the desert safari and when we were at the highest dune, the driver stopped for us to have a view and I just felt like rolling down the slopes in filmy style so I just dropped down and let myself goooo..down down the slopes I rolled and the speed picked up so fast that I thought I would not be able to stop myself. It was risky but what adrenaline pumping!! Then at the camp, the belly dancer asked me for a dance with her and I kept turning around in such speed that I was caught in a tizzy and fell flat on my back. Seeing such high excitement in me the driver, who was also our guide commented if I had been possessed by any ghost or spirit inside me! I remember his face, he was plainly in shock!


Now, did I meet interesting people or did they meet ME?


Picture from here (airport), here (crying kid) and here (woman)


I am writing this post as part of the around the world with Expedia at indibloggers contest.

http://www.expedia.co.in/