You love travelling?

Being a Bengali, I know I am supposed to love “bhromon” or travel, and I don’t know whether I will be dubbed a “bohiragato”, if I confess that I just do not. Because you see, when I get leave from office, I want to relax. Which is exactly the thing I cannot do if I am “travelling”. First of all, there is the stress of planning everything in advance, and this goes double when you have kids, when to go, where to go, how to go, in what order we should do things, and what should be those things? At work, one gets paid for planning such complex projects, and failure at worst leads to loss-of-job, but here one is setting oneself up for a lifetime of recriminations if anything goes wrong later. There is the inevitable waking up early, and all those things you realise once you are on the road, the things you have not packed, or whether anyone checked the stove before leaving, and then there is traffic, or cancelled flights, or interminable queues at security because of course, you are travelling on the long weekend when the entire world is, and even before the vacation has started, your nerves are frayed. And then you reach the place, the hotel isn’t quite what you thought, and the tour guide is leading you into a tourist trap, and you obsessively keep tapping yourself to ensure your wallet is where it was and so is your passport, and then you catch a stomach bug, and then something you never thought planning for, happens. Now even if, and that’s a big if, everything falls into place perfectly, there is still the matter of waking up early, for you are “always on the clock”, you have to squeeze as much activity possible within the time, or else why did we spend so much time to come here, just to sleep? Given that we have just a few breaths in this world of ours, and given that we spend so much of our income investing in the place we dwell in, doesn’t it make much more sense to just stay home during leave from work – wake up late, read a book, and watch a screensaver of high-resolution images of whatever place you thought you would visit slide past, as you lean back, and enjoy the simple sensation of just being alive?