About the journeys

How do you see a place when you visit it? Do you take a tour of the 'places to see' and eat at famous joints and shop the natives' manufactures and thus, in a nutshell, try to unravel the place and what it offers? Do you explore the people, watch their daily travails, listen to them as they walk-by you during your strolls in the neighbourhood after dinner? As tourists we most often to go sightseeing and as it gets over, we pack our bags towards home. In my small and ordinary life of 27 years, I did the same. I have travelled to a lot many places than my fellow ordinary beings of this age (by ordinary I mean you are normally educated like any other average person and have worked your skills out for a penny and do not have a rich father to bring the world in front of you) and every time, we were on a mission to cover the popular places-to-see and consequently, we exhausted ourselves but on after-thoughts, we realised we kind-of enjoyed it too. 

There is so much to see, so many fun things to do in this one small but magnified life; a plenty of untold speeches to hear of, that will make you inspired at times; a multitude of stimulating conversations to be a part of; so much to read and live those characters and make yourself high-spirited through people and food; and certainly so much to write for some pleasurable smoke in this very life! 

Just a trip to complete all places-to-see doesn't necessarily lead to the life that I talked above. The place I travel to, fortunately, sometimes, gets inside me, so much so, that I feel feverish with its way of life as a disease from which I certainly don't feel like to come out unless the next place I visit sets in my body and mind. I travel to live multiple lives with countless shades and colours like a chameleon changes according to its milieu. Sometimes, I perceive and experience the place and its people by becoming one of them and sometimes I return to myself and observe them from a window and thus, detached myself. But then, some traces remain to make life unfortunate or beautiful, depending on how you understand the place.

So my travel guide would necessarily include people and conversations over some good food and a smooth drink, all of them are as intoxicating as Pablo's poetry. The journeys happen to be the genesis of my writings, fictional or otherwise. Hence, you will not find a list of posh restaurants here, how to book your seat in an air-conditioned bus, how to travel from one point of the city to the other, what to shop and what not to shop, etcetera. I’m awful in these things. 

I will start with my home, the overcrowded, sweaty, egoistic, city of joy, Calcutta that still carries the legacy of colonialism through buildings, language, temperament, street names and many more.

Of course, it’s easier for me to sketch a travel guide of a place that I have experienced in and out.