Freedom is not the ability to do anything I like and do anything I want when I want to. Those are only few of the various manifestations of freedom. At a higher level, freedom is the release from the only choices I have given myself so far in life. Freedom is the choice always available to me to release myself from guilt, regret and pain of things that I have done and of things that I have not done. Freedom is my ability to choose what makes me genuinely happy, even if it does not make everyone around me happy.

That happiness, though, need not be easy or kind to you. I gave up the security of a well-paying job 3-years ago because I was not happy. In the process of discovering the specifics of what makes me happy I have erred a lot, made a lot of mistakes, let myself and a lot of others down, incessantly doubted my own abilities and I have also been living a far less flamboyant life than what I have been used to. You may not believe it, but joy and pain can co-exist at their extremes on this road.

Eventually, I wound up feeling far less divine and a great deal more human and ordinary than what I used to think of myself earlier. I am free now to feel a lot more, but what I feel may not always be to my liking. Therein lies the essential paradox of the situation – why would you want to be free in this manner to feel all those difficult things. Well, you don’t need to. The freedom at stake here is not the freedom from pain or difficulty. The freedom at stake here is the freedom to choose differently, each time, every time. It is the freedom to realize that you are in a prison by your own choice.

It is an old track and not for the faint of heart. Lots of layers, big beats, synths going crazy.

I was recently looking a the list of things I wanted to do in life and it occurred to me that some of those things had been on the list for years now. I have not had as much free time as I have had in the past three-years. If I could not make even a minor dent on that list in that time, the problem really was elsewhere and it has everything to do with distractions.

It was not until I quit Facebook on a whim last year the realization of how much time I would waste on a daily basis. I would mindlessly click through albums, profiles and so many other things. Looking back, I can see the same pattern in almost everything else. I have done the same thing with people, problems and anything else as long as I did not have to really deal with my own things.

After Facebook I quit almost every other social network I have been on. I have not used Twitter in a week and often times I feel this is what rehab probably is like. The elusive fix is even harder to deny myself when what I am trying to work on is not easy. Sometimes it is immensely frustrating when I manage to do little of what I am supposed to do and I can’t get around to my fixes that would otherwise give me the feeling of having done a lot without having done anything of any significance.

The good part is that as a result of all these shenanigans I am slowly reclaiming time. I have not been proud of saying “I don’t have time” for a while now. I can no longer say that. Now it is a matter of making good use of the time that I have found. I’m still working on that one.

Mesmerizing then, mesmerizing now.

Mushroom at Chindi

Today, I have no stories to tell. There is only the faint glow of an old oil lamp, a flame from the wick steadily lighting up a warm circle, keeping at bay the night and its darkness. There should, ideally, be a breeze, but not today. There is only a loud stillness and the ebb and flow of thoughts. A conversation is not rare, even when words are not spoken. There is much to be said, but not much already not said. It is a kind of repetitive rinsing. Washed repeatedly, it shines a true transparence. A new spectacle to see the world through.

Being twice out on the roads in two months should satiate even the hungriest looking for an uncertain familiarity in the hands of strangers. Not for me. Each outing only makes the yearning stronger. When you dream, plot and plan for it so much, the inevitability of it is least surprising. It is not unhappiness that I find here, but it is not the zenith of happiness either. I’m uncertain whether leaving here would be flight, or a homecoming. I don’t have the required objectivity to call it right. Regardless, I’m inching forward.

We had a day of almost endless rain. The incessant drumming of droplets and bits of pine slows down now and then before it starts off again. I can sit and watch it rain endlessly in the valley; what does time mean? I do not care to know how this universe came about, but I can imagine a very creative bent of mind at work. Hell, I could call you ‘god’ just to have a name I can send the congratulations to. Morning finds night’s blanket dragged away from the valley, leaving bits of cottony clouds still stuck to the mountains. Untidy, it is childishness at its best, but it lends an indescribable joy to this adult’s mind.

Returns often find me maudlin, not this time. Few miles on our way back and I had already returned in mind a hundred times and plotted another hundred times more how to be back with body in tow. We have flowers here too, where I live, it is hard to escape the green. But, it is something about the green’s shade? Or is it something about that droplet on the tip of a leaf, a purity that can only be experienced? There is something there and there is no escaping it.

I used to take much pride and pleasure in my writing. A lot of it scattered over numerous web pages are often embarrassing in both form and substance, but some do have a glimmer of promise. Importantly, most of it has an unspoiled earnestness to it even when it is tainted by a naivety that only youth can provide for. In most of it also lies the search for identity, the search for a place in the world and the search for an interpretation of the past. Disappointment, bitterness, disillusionment — all have come and gone and yet life remained doing its thing, like an unyielding child who runs laughing away from you, from your grasp and understanding, every time you get close to it.

In life, as in writing, I have often searched for an answer in greatness. I have searched for a far more noble purpose than to rid myself of the burden of ordinariness that has otherwise plagued both things. Quixotic – I ranted, raved and raged through many years, searching desperately for a cause, for a reason, for a spectacular sword to die on. Strangely, nothing of the sort happened. I did not change the world. I did not lead a revolution. I did not do anything that touched a million lives. Honestly, I did not do anything that touched even a thousand lives. This was puzzling, disconcerting and irritating at the same time.

Back to square one. Going round in circles. You get the idea.

I have always believed that the best years of anyone’s life is between 26 and 32. If you want to do your best, you have to peak at 32 in terms of being able to push yourself. At 32, I found myself struggling with the most ordinary of things. A great painter is not necessarily always a great cook. Greatness always has plenty of ordinariness to it. A lot of ordinariness has much greatness attached to it. For every great one, there are millions of living ordinary ones who do extraordinary things by choosing to make it out of bed everyday even when there is nothing great about their lives.

So, whatever happened to my own greatness? I actually no longer know about that. At the moment I have my hands full trying to be just an average decent being. It is not always easy. Once shorn of the self-assigned crown of greatness you have to first stop being as big an ass as you have often been in the past. Sometimes I manage it well, a lot of other times I struggle with it. So, the agenda for the time being is to do a decent job at being ordinary and then do the best I can. You see, it is much like my writing. I’m making an honest attempt to reduce the fluff and keep it real and I don’t succeed at it as often as I would ideally like to.

I’m working on it.

Vellayani Lake, Trivandrum, Kerala. Picture from a previous trip.

Nothing spectacular about this one. It was a 10-day trip to get some errands done in Trivandrum, so it had precious little travel within the state involved in it. Otherwise, it was mostly work and short runs around town. I also got to experience the new Indigo flights to Trivandrum. Flew in on the early morning flight from Delhi to Trivandrum via Cochin and flew back to Delhi on the flight that has a hopping stop at Bombay. The flight, as it is the case with Indigo, was before time in both cases, but, strangely, the landings were not the smooth-as-butter landings I have come to expect from them. Not sure if this was due to crosswinds since the aircraft was rolling quite noticeably on the final approach in all four landings.

I have been travelling now at least twice a year to Trivandrum for the past five-years and it has been an interesting experience to see the changes on each visit. On every visit, the city resembles a little less of the place that I grew up in and the pace seems to have accelerated rather violently in the past year-and-a-half. The pinnacle of the change for me was a visit to a well-done discount store near the Technopark campus that had rates lower than what I have ever found in Delhi. That, though, finds a sinking feeling in me. This time around, I did not feel that I was in the town that I grew up in. It felt more like one of the many new character-less cities that are clones of each other in India these days.

Of course, most of that is sentimentalism and nostalgia that should not obscure the fact that it is good for the state and its people who have always had to go outside the state to make a good living – unless you were a doctor, engineer or in the government service.

The route was the tried and tested NH1 – NH21 and the start from Delhi was made at the usual 2AM to beat the traffic. Return was re-routed via Shimla to bypass Chandigarh since India was playing Pakistan at Mohali that day. Rest of the journey can be seen through the pictures.

We stayed all four days at The SIlvermoon, Kullu. The hotel is an old ITDC property that is now operated by HPTDC. It is not in the best shape, but has only six rooms and they are humongous. When you are travelling with young children that becomes a major consideration. The staff is also one of the most helpful and friendliest I have ever seen during my travels.

The rates are as low as Rs 1500 per night, which is quite reasonable even if everything has a feeling of oldness to it in the hotel. They have requested for a renovation of the property and if that happens it will become a prime destination with a rate to boot. The location – a bit before you enter Kullu town, at Shastri Nagar – gives you a reasonably quiet experience while being at a walking distance from the main town.