Where do we go from here?

10th January 2015 | 01:00 PM IST |Dhanushkodi, Tamilnadu, India

It was the start of 2015 and mid of the Indian winter. South India usually remains cool in winter and makes it a good season to explore the humid and coastal area. I didn’t have any list of places before I started traveling but I had an inner feeling for the places I wanted to see. Dhanushkodi was one of them.

They said the last tip of the land is just a few miles from here. You can get a bus till one spot and can walk down till the tip from there or just tag along with fishermen vehicles but they won’t take you till the end. And as always, I decided to walk. It was a 4kms walk on the beach where I reached the ghost town of the Rameshwaram, Dhanushkodi. It’s a southmost town of India towards Srilanka and also a place from Hindu mythology Ramayana. This place is also referred as Ramsetu in mythology.

By the way, religious places never excite me. For that matter, I had never chosen any religious place for traveling. Dhanushkodi was again not for the spirituality the world come looking for. The place was full of abandoned buildings and ruins of an old town which got washed away in one of the cyclones. I chose it for the tranquility of the ruins and wildness of the sea that ranges both the side of a strip of land that goes deep into the sea.And I had to reach the tip before the sunset.

There I was, on a tip of the land, surrounded by sea on three sides and a strip of the land connecting back to the mainland. I had no battery in my phone to click the pics, nor I used to carry cameras for the trip. It was not my first solo trip. I had a year full of traveling before reaching there. But I knew by that time, it was just a start of the long journey I have been through. I knew by that time, that there are going to be many moments in this journey, that the stillness of each moment will be journey itself.

29th November 2017 | 07:00 PM | Ganga Ghat, Rishikesh, Uttarakhand

Have you ever been to Rameswaram? asked a baba sitting on Ganga ghats while passing the smoking pipe across the group. Yes! it’s been a long time, and it stays one of the firsts from my travel journey, I replied. Why do you ask me that by the way? I continued. That’s where I came from, he replied with a smile.

It was a dusk. After the Ganga prayer when I decided to sit on a ghat for some time, a group of babas settled down near me. One of them was talking about how does wireless charging work in his torch. I was curious about their discussion, so I joined them just before a baba lit a smoking pipe for everyone there. I never could get why they left their home on a journey either to get enlightened or to escape the worldly things. When I started talking to one of them, eventually he explained how far he has traveled and yet he is nowhere close to so-called enlightenment. I asked why are you still on the journey then? He replied, calmly, where do we go from here now?

Where do we go from here now? After traveling relentlessly over four years, I was again at a spiritual place but not looking for the god. But somewhere in my journey, my traveling started getting influenced by spiritual ideas, I repeat not by the religious ideas in any way. It revolved around identity, purpose and sometimes the chaos. By then I had started looking for my own gods. When traveling for such a long time, you end up with the same questions you asked before, pause for a while and try to look at what you have unlearned. Traveling then wasn’t about finding something which I was looking for, but losing the things which never belonged to the journey. It will be a chaos when you would be left with very few things you relate to, but it will be a freedom if you manage to contain it. When you have left with nothing to rely upon, you have freedom to choose your thoughts, ideas and the identity.

If you liked reading this article, hope you will like this too —

Related posts:

Health Econometrics is research oriented course for healthcare professionals offered at AnEc Center for Econometrics Research. AnEc Center for Econometrics Research offers private and instructor led…