Travel

When I was a child, a lot of our not-so-long-distance travelling was done by the state transport buses. And later when the rail lines came, some of it by train too. One’s only pass time in a bus was to either sleep or watch in a daze as the landscape whooshed by.

It was utter joy, to press my cheek to the thin iron railings across the window of the bus and feel the wind try to rip my head off. The strong metallic smell of the railings would stick on to me for a few hours. The feel of the wind on my face would stay on for a few minutes. Though the route would be the same each time, the places we rushed through always looked different. There would be something new to gape at each time. The black tarmac, fringed by white sand or red gravel depending on where we were, followed by dense green, followed by sun flecked sky. That is the lasting memory of those journeys along the highway, though blurred because that was how I would see them through the window.

Distances have shrunk. Earlier, a one-and-a-half-hour journey to the neighbouring district was a long one – one packed clothes and tooth brush into an overnight bag, one looked up bus timings, the journey would be tiring. Now, you wake up in the morning, decide to go make a visit, hop into the car, think nothing of the one hour because it is probably as much time as you would take on your daily commute between office and home, and are back home by evening.

The whole reason I started on this when-I-was-a-child trip is because it seems incredulous to me that children these days seem to have no interest in looking out the window and just looking at things. The minute the engine wakes up and the vehicle moves, they are bored. “Let’s play a game, I am bored, give me something to eat, I am bored, are we there yet, I am bored.” Look out, look at all the pretty sights, look at the people! I can still gape out for hours, I still stick my head out to feel the wind, I still love to watch the road fly away beneath the wheels.

Last day, stuck in a traffic jam, we watched the people in the car next to us watch videos on the LCD screen hanging in the car in place of the rear-view mirror. I watched in disgust – bad enough that people go on holidays to exotic locations only to get there and watch TV, now they need to be staring at a screen even when travelling around city. But S watched with much interest, and said, We should also have a DVD player in our next car, that way our kids won’t get bored when we are going somewhere. I let out a silent scream, but S didn’t even notice the look on my face, he concentrated on the traffic. Wonder how many arguments lie ahead!