Travelogue of an Itinerant Mind

In last one month, three person confided in me with their personal problems. Two of them work as office boys and one is a driver. I just happened to ask them about their well being and they just vented out the frustration life had thrown at them. The first person, lives with his wife and a small child. His work fetches him a very small amount of money per month. With in his meagre income he has to take care of all the needs of his family. Every fortnight he has to take his child to a doctor in the city for check up due to neurological ailment. For taking to the doctor he has to take leave. As per his contract he won’t get paid if he takes a day off from work. Last month due to the child’s treatment he had to take many leaves resulting in lower salary not sufficient for the monthly expenses. He was showing his helpless ness where he has to choose between money and his child's health everyday. The second person has two children, old parents and a wife to take care of. He himself has ...

On a recent trip to my home state, I happened to travel in the three most common modes of transportation, i.e. road, rail, and air. During the train journey, I was thinking of how our travel and the associated habits have changed over a period of time. Of late, air travel has become a necessity, which was once a luxury as recent as 15-20 years ago.   Forget air travel, in our childhood, even a car or a jeep journey was also a luxury. Most long-distance travel used to be via bus only. I had my first train journey at the age of about 7-8, which was for about 70-80 kilometres only. I had to wait for another 10 years before I boarded a train again in May 2002 (that too without a ticket). Bus travel was the cheapest and the only affordable option we had in childhood. We mostly travelled to our ancestral village or to our maternal uncle’s home. For a distance of about 90 kilometres, it used to take about 3 hours. The worst part of my summer vacations were the 6 hours of bus journey to ...