Eastern Vagabond

Essays on travel, cities, memory, and the unnoticed textures of the world.

Category: Musings

  • Vagabond

    The advertisement for Thai Airways has been making the Reader’s Digest back cover for quite some time now. The catchline always stirs something deep inside.

    So many faces to see,                                                                                                                           too many places to be.

    It’s perhaps an old desire to be a vagabond.

    Ever since the onset of early adolescence, I have found myself away from home, living in boarding houses. At times, i had to rent cheap hotel rooms in urban sprawls that smelled of semen, cigarettes and shaving creams. I eventually grew to love that just like i loved how the morning sounded there amongst the delightful monikers hurling about distastefully painted corridors and the raspy swearing voices piercing paper-thin hotel walls. Even if it sounds dirty, life is an immaculate piece of clockwork there. Miss a minute and the dining hall is already closing down. The pandemonium dies after eight in the morning, only to return at eight at night. In between the two pandemonia, the hotel, devoid of the hubbub of the early morning hours, feels to have slipped into some kind of deep meditation. Later in the evening, with people teeming back in, dining hall gets to be the center of all activity. A scene out of it can get a jovial laugh out of you or a nasty vomit depending on your disposition. However, the best part about being a vagabond is not the crudeness of places you have to put up with; it’s experiencing the richness of souls you come across. Among the cheapest underclass, you meet the free-est of the spirits and the universal wisdom, if there is any thing such. It’s only beyond the point we have nothing more to lose do we reveal who we truly are and there in such hotels, i have taken a glimpse into what mankind truly is and capable of. 

    Being a vagabond is more about removing the human filters around us and within than traveling far and wide. As long as these filters are in place, the world we move in is not the same as the world that God created. All his life, a bourgeois walks a bourgeois world, a jet set, a jet set world, and an underclass, an underclass. These insurmountable filters shatter the harmony of our world by dividing it into several parallel universes that never intersect, keeping us from experiencing its phenomenal beauty as an organic whole. Breaking free of them is an essential part of what would truly be an insightful transition from being an ordinary traveler to a true vagabond. Being able to admire a diverse cross-section of humanity, irrespective of the social strata they belong from, simply as people, is the first step in this spiritual journey – a journey that is sure to transform the one who undertakes it.

    Godspeed.

  • Madness & Sanity

    In the following essay, i will examine the terms madness and sanity, their evolutionary backgrounds, whether a harmonious equilibrium between the two is achievable, and the role played by each in our survival as a species.

    Sanity, in colloquial sense of the word, means to be in your right mind, conforming to the standards, being a part of the mob and going with the flow. Madness, on the other hand, is being socially aberrant. Wear a suit in mosque, sherwani in x-country and shorts for an interview and you’re already up for the title. To understand this painfully immense pressure one feels about conforming to certain standards of the society, and hence called sane, we will have to delve deep into the secret vaults of history from the point of view of evolution.

    Millions of years of evolution have hammered in us human beings, instincts that have helped us fight off extinction. Programmed to protect us in potentially hostile primitive environments, our instincts have managed to steer us clear of the lethal grip of natural selection and ensured our survival as a species. However, the civilized world today has rendered most of these instincts much less useful, if not exhausting. Remember the last time, you walked up the ramp for a performance and you looked pale as ghost. It just so happens that every time your brain detects a fear signal, it draws in all your blood from the skin so as to minimize the blood loss in case of injury. There is no way you can tell your fear instinct that the stage fright is technically different from the fright of a pouncing jaguar; that you are not likely to bleed therefore it should probably stop drawing further blood from your face which is reducing you to a nervous stuttering wreck on the stage. Adhering to the community, just like that, might once have been important for our ancestors to survive. Hunting together, bringing up children and securing a safe habitat were all legitimate needs and community living provided for them well enough and hence embedded itself successfully as a compelling instinct in our nervous systems. After we moved on to cities with governments and sophistiated procedures in place so as to protect us from possible harm, leaving little, if any, job for the instincts to do for our survival, the real conflict started to emerge. There were people who still wanted to pursue the same homosapien-ic life except in a more sophisticated fashion, wearing a bow-tie, cologne and all. There were people, on the other hand, who though appreciated the role community instinct had played thus so far, now wanted to break free of it to allow the current of evolution push them further on. Those who stayed put, they believed, would be those who drowned. The people who upheld this radical idea acquired the title of madmen.

    Contrary to the popular belief, true madness is not the absence of sanity. It’s just the triumph over it. You can be a madman if your madness defeats your sanity and is served by it all the same. Once you pull off this balance, evolution will make sure that your children don’t wipe out from Earth as the dinosaurs and mammoths did millions of years ago.

    P.S.: I’ll hopefully elucidate the role of love and madness in evolution in a series of posts. I understand that the essay needs more explanation. Please let me know if you find anything that does not make sense to you.

  • A Canvassed Dusk

    “Do you see the red line floating across the golden ball of sun? This thin streak that splits it into perfect halves like a neatly cut melon?” He fell silent contemplating the moment, the texture, the rich acrylics.

    “Can you imagine what was it that she thought, that her brush dipped in red ripped through the heart of the sun, and it must not have taken a single stroke, you see. She must have swept it twice. Or thrice maybe, for that matter. Do you know what exactly makes a fragile brush in a delicate, feminine grip stab and rip and tear like that?”

    “No.”

    “I don’t either but it must be something really intense. Something that has set the sky ablaze, the wild grass crimson, the lake murky, the kayaks fluttery and the sailors, silhouettes against a scarlet sky.”

  • On life and reading a book for the second time…

    Reading a book for the second time makes a good metaphor for life.

    Your pocket money runs out and you don’t have much options apart from dusting off your bulging shelf and digging out an old piece from a long assortment of pale, dog-eared books. You start off cockily, thinking you are few steps too ahead and before long, you feel the need to take a break. So you walk out and hang around a local bookstore, eyeing and drooling over their new collection. You walk down the lane to a nearby cafe, peep inside the coffee-shop next to it, and pass a bus-stand along the way and strangely enough, all you can see everywhere is glossy paperbacks and buried noses within. Some people, out of their general courtesy, make a special point in shoving their new books up your face such that you could almost smell the typical off-the-press aroma and you wonder why God chose you for the misery. Soon the night falls and you find yourself back home, lying in your bed, staring the humdrum ceiling with a pair of bloodshot eyes, trying to count the revolutions of a fan which mysteriously transforms itself into a Frisbee just in time in an attempt to conspire with the universe to make you feel perfectly miserable about your impoverished, insomniac existence.

    You think you were better off with the book you had started for the second time so you pick it up again anyway and suddenly there is that missed link, a cryptic clue you thought in your first-rush you quite got it but as it turns out you hadn’t really, that catches you completely off-guard and the whole story, almost dramatically, starts to fall perfectly into place, making a lot more sense making you believe it was all worth it. And you begin to think what a chicken-head you had been to be so stupidingly sure of yourself when the game had just begun and are in complete awe for the roller-coaster ride your journey turned out to be. It’s about time you have an incredible experience and some very wise words to tell the world out there when sleep gets better of you and your weary eyelids draw shut only to let every single detail of that marvelous night dissolve into a dream, a forlorn triviality in the worm-hole of time.

  • Her Radiant Smile

    The sun had just set in leaving a pink hue to the sky. I was walking through a narrow, gloomy street zig-zagging through a slummy neighborhood of Rawalpindi and loving the absolute stillness and quiet that falls there with the twilight. It was then that I came across that little girl standing beside the ice-cream man’s cycle with her arms stretched out towards him with a crumpled ten rupee note in her clenched little fist – her voice shivering with excitement. “Uncle, ice-cream!” A subtle smile crept across my face. She was no doubt the loveliest thing in the dullness all around.

    And just then i realized that things never change…just people do. The dimly lit narrow street, the ice-cream man and his colorful cycle, the melodious tune that flows around, limited pocket money and the sparkling eager eyes, each and everything had been there for ever. It was just me who decided to grow up. The melodrama of life has been playing since eternity. Characters come, play their part and then get new roles as someone more fitting takes theirs. I stopped by and waited for the episode to end. Happily.

    Unfortunately, the ice-cream man told her to go back as she did not have enough money. Her radiant smile faded into the gloomy street as she quietly turned back. Something sank in my rib-cage.  But then it hit me. It hit me that fate might be giving me a chance to change the destinies. Now I could just pretend I saw nothing, scratch my belly and move on or I could be the change; create a new character that might as well live forever as did the character of the ice-cream man on his colorful cycle and the little girl with her limited pocket-money and sparkling eager eyes. So I cautiously stepped in, paid for the little girl and waited for her to return. The play seemed to have paused for a moment as if i, by stepping into a role i wasn’t assigned to play, had offended the writer. It felt all wrong. But just then, the miracle happened. She turned on her heels almost robotically, came back running, grabbed her ice-cream, smiled at me and the world smiled along…

    And from then on, this world was a beautiful place at least for the children who would just stand by the colorful cycle and someone would appear almost out of nowhere and pay for their ice-creams.