February 2011

Saturday, February 12, 2011

Its some kind of a heavy feeling,
That makes my heart weigh,
Those additional XXX pounds,
I struggle to breathe in and out,
Drowning in my own worries,
The terrible loneliness surrounds!

I need some air, And that too fresh,
A brand new breeze, to help thoughts un-mesh,
Someone who can teach me to be least bothered,
If at all i can learn to stay un-quivered!

I want my heart to explode for once,
Throw it all out and find a balance,
Keeping it inside makes my brain go numb,
I really want it all again, to be blithefully blithesome!

PS: Blithesome: Cheerful, merry

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

This post is submitted to clear trip "my purpose" contest,"Tell us about an interesting trip you took and it's purpose!" Vote for me :)

No, i don't want to take you on a tour, neither do i want to be your tour guide. Mine is not a travelogue, so i definitely won't be writing every second of the day 1 to day 6 of my trip. I would rather like to focus on "the purpose". A million trips to same place are different for millions of "different us". Yes, may it be India's splendid Taj Mahal or New York's rocking Time Square, our unique perceptions create different versions of the same place. So every trip in my opinion is unique to YOU and thus, the place hardly matters.

You are bored with your routine chores, make a trip to "somewhere".
You are exhausted from work, take a break to "somewhere".
You want to find your Self, go "somewhere".
You want to wander a little, where? "somewhere" :)

This going "somewhere" always has a reason, a purpose. We had one too. Me and my husband Mandar planned a road trip in the spring of 2008.

The constant existance and support of technology, flights to fly you around the world, laptops where ever you go, GPS if you are traveling in cars, iphones to give you traffic updates, is somehow making us too dependent. So-very-handicap, that we don't want to memorize roads anymore, we don't want to look at the directions, we might possibly get lost looking at the maps, we won't be surprised to look at the jammed traffics because we know it all in advance with the help of a million gadgets surrounding us. They won't let you think beyond the extra-comfort and the instant-assistance.

So, we decided to leave it all at home, plan nothing, allow ourselves to bungle a little and try our luck at the most exciting road trip to..............where? Well, we didn't know yet. The purpose of the trip was to make it to somewhere without the technological armaments :) Instead we grabbed an Alabama state road map and..............we left :)

Coming to a traffic signal from where we were suppose to turn left for highway X and go straight for highway Y, but of course we didn't know which one to follow. So we left it up to the traffic signal. First come, first serve :) and thus we turned left because it was the first one to turn green. Progressing through the journey to nowhere, the map came handy and we spotted an excitingly beautiful destination, The Talladega National Forests of Alabama USA. It was a few exits away from where we were on highway X and we stamped it, Talladega it is! The air felt romantic. Enjoying the company of the greenest nature, windows open, music aloud, and lovely spring weather, we drove, drove and drove without any specific destination to go to.

Few hours later.................we were LOST! Majorly! The map was 2 years old, we figured it out when we were surrounded by huge trees, extreme silence and boggling shade of the approaching evening. The roads were new which misled us somewhere deep into the forest and we didn't know where we were and how to get out of there. Suddenly the air felt scary, the breeze was too cold and the greenest forest seemed to be staring at both of us. No network on the phone and rest everything was at home. So, us, map, car and a non working phone in Talladega!

Lost in the map, still trying to figure out what exactly to do, after 2 and half hours of wait, i saw two lights blinking far away, slowly coming towards us and what do we see! Ah! A Cop's car, he stopped by, and asked "Can i help you guys?" OMG! a big big sigh! "Yes sir, you sure can :) We are lost and blah blah blah". This was the first time when an American cop escorted us to the nearest town instead of handing a traffic ticket :PP

We found a hotel to crash in and talk a little more about the day we had spent with heaps of mixed emotions. Roamed around the town, saw some countryside, clicked a few pictures, made some new memories and returned to Birmingham 2 days later. One heck of a trip through which we experienced freedom, endurance, adventure, thrill and a dynamic energy that surrounds us in the name of Nature. Plus, a satisfaction on the completion of an independent, non-technology-assisted trip full of spirit :)

That was Talladega for us in our unique way. We rocked it and you?
Give it a try some day to somewhere or nowhere :)

Image Courtesy: Google Images, of course!

Sunday, February 6, 2011

Happy Chinese new year everyone. Went to the CNY celebrations the other day. Chinatown was crowded, oh! i am saying this as if any other area of Singapore is not. Yes, Singapore is always crowded, whichever part of the city it may be, whatever day you choose and the time of course doesn't matter to Singaporeans. They run at 2 in the night, health freaks i tell you. No offense :)

Chinatown has fireworks on the CNY eve, very similar crowd to the one on 4th of July in the US. I definitely noticed the difference in the way the fireworks were shot in the sky. On the 4th, fireworks used do be really pretty, organized, one after the other, streamlined. Here in Singapore, the fireworks were definitely not as random as it is in Diwali, neither were as streamlined as they used to be in Birmingham. It didn't give a feel of a monotonous parade, it was lively, colorful and warm. I thoroughly enjoyed the 5 minutes of extreme sound pollution, colored sky, rapidly blinking eyelashes around, religiously pouring rain in the background, umbrellas not so much on the heads but in the hands and the heads looking up in the sky, mouths shut and open, mild smiles on faces, breeze breathing through hairs and the happiness around.

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