THE TRAVELLER

What should be the appropriate usage for the word ‘traveller’? ------ one who travels? But that is not what I meant to say. Yeah of course a traveller travels. He goes from one place to another (animals also do the same but with a different intention, of course).

Every traveller has his own field of interest. Some love hills, some seas, some forests and so on .

---  So all you need to travel is to have interest.

--- What?! Only ‘interest’?!

--- No Sir, of course I’m kidding. You need to have the money too.

Oh ,oh! Wait, there is another class of traveller for whom ‘money doesn’t matter’ and yes this time I’m not kidding.

They travel with their eyes wide open or sometimes with their eyelashes beating hard, blinking abnormally fast. There are some with closed eyes too.

No, no I’m not trying to puzzle you.

You take the case of Jishnu, a historian by profession. He stares hard at the old buildings trying to figure out what these would have looked like some hundred years ago. Once a new bride, now in wrinkled skin and lost teethes, she has seen the changes; India’s independence, the British Raj and some even the Mughals or the Nawabs.

He is the one who reaches his place of interest, sometimes may be the Durbar of some Nawab, the battle field of Kalinga, the lustrous and dazzling dancing rooms…and many such unknown places which only he can travel and also without being noticed.

And what would you say about Rahul? He travels a lot. Sometimes he even forgets his food. Travelling from one planet to another!! (I don’t know what he thinks but may be just trying to find a clear view of the universe from some point in space with the spiral galaxies and accumulating dust…) Yeah, an Astrophysicist by profession, can’t fit in the real world well. But that is what he is, a traveller in space.

I think many of you who are reading this, if you are a Bengali, then you must have read about ‘Amal o Daiola’. My next has a similarity with it.

I have a friend Bappa, a voracious reader, an adventure enthusiast, and a skilled footballer. He also went to a few trips near the Himalayas and was planning to do some more. But ‘man proposes and God disposes’. Because of rigorous playing he had a partial ligament tear and now he can’t trek anymore.

Hear stories, read about them and close his eyes for further travelling…

Many of you would say they are ‘dreamers’. Of course they are. But aren’t dreamers travellers in their own world with their own rules and freedom. Every child is a born dreamer, till they are forced to accept the mechanical world. Very few struggle their way to a Jishnu, a Rahul or a Bappa.

And sometimes minds are a superb place to travel too. What do you say?