The Road goes ever on and on

Super excited to present to you, my first blog entry by a friend who's among the very few people I can share a comfortable silence with. Someone with whom I'd an instant connect though we had very little in common, someone who will be a part of my life for a long long time, someone who's so bloody smart that I really believe that he has a solution for everything in the world :) Siddharth Ramesh - take it away! 

As most of my friends know and as one of my ex-employers said, I am verbose. And therefore there is more than one thing I know and will verbiate about. The first of those things is as follows.

One must travel. No other activity, physical or mental can be substitute for traveling. And this I say after ten days of traveling over 6000 kilometers. Grueling is too small a word for the idea behind it. It doesn't even sound like it feels. But trying as it may sound, the sights and smells (and tastes and colors) of the places I went to those ten days may well have colored my opinions about traveling and colored them well. Colored them the reds, greens, blues, yellows and whites of the sandstones that grow out of the earth like giant potatoes, out of the ancient valleys that are fed by rivers whose very waters echo with the sounds of times much before us; the colors of the shimmering-haze heat that dances always at a distance and creates little sandstorms on the sand-stone-ridden-earth. The blacks and dark greens and dark grays of lighting and storms across miles of fields on which, at a distance stood two men that walked across the field, and the lightning, playing games with our eyes, made them move so slowly, they seemed to be standing still. The yellow-whites of approaching trucks that leapt out of the sheets of water from apparently nowhere, while white fumes of steam rose from the dry and parched earth as it was quenched. Many a time, it seems to me that somebody up there is trying really hard to sell traveling to me. Don't it to you?

The lack of travel shows in a man (read as the race of humans) [I am being politically correct, for those who need spelling out] very discernibly. One needs spend just a few minutes with a less traveled person to know that the person is less traveled. Less-travel is like the nervous tick of winking intermittently that one of my acquaintances had, forcing people to notice it although they strive for holy propriety not to show it. There is no stunting circumstance I would wish less for a growing child than the inability to travel, to see the world without a roof to go back under, to sit on strange dirts and look at themselves as if from a great distance, to see what lies behind the round mirror that is the world.

One could fill books about the moments and memories of faraway lands and even find echoes in the wanderlust of many of you reading this. And the moments that don't have echoes shall be grabbed back and treasured fiercely, like the image of a forgotten hiding place, like an inconsequential piece of paper conspiratorially buried by a child's hands, like a secret tryst on the edge of remembrance. But the verbose epiphanies and pastel colors off all those moments, painted as though by a mysterious hand scrupulously trying to disguise itself, could be completely superseded by that elusive moment of stillness which the mind seems to take such beautiful pictures of, and which will never be found in the mundane vicissitudes of acquiring and preserving, that moment of bright darkness that is only your own. That moment that stands at the edge of the horizon, beckoning, touching invisible visceral strings that create music that speaks of the smells of the earth, the murmured conversations of waves and unseen sands, and the colors of distant skies. The road begs but just one step on it. The earth would roll under your feet if only you stepped out. Travel.