Nice pic...

Oh, the Places You'll Go!

Congratulations!
Today is your day.
You're off to Great Places!
You're off and away!

You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose.
You're on your own. And you know what you know.
And YOU are the guy who'll decide where to go.

You'll look up and down streets. Look 'em over with care.
About some you will say, "I don't choose to go there."
With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet,
you're too smart to go down any not-so-good street.

And you may not find any
you'll want to go down.
In that case, of course,
you'll head straight out of town.

It's opener there
in the wide open air.

Out there things can happen
and frequently do
to people as brainy
and footsy as you.

And when things start to happen,
don't worry. Don't stew.
Just go right along.
You'll start happening too.

OH!
THE PLACES YOU'LL GO!

You'll be on your way up!
You'll be seeing great sights!
You'll join the high fliers
who soar to high heights.

You won't lag behind, because you'll have the speed.
You'll pass the whole gang and you'll soon take the lead.
Wherever you fly, you'll be the best of the best.
Wherever you go, you will top all the rest.

Except when you don' t
Because, sometimes, you won't.

I'm sorry to say so
but, sadly, it's true
and Hang-ups
can happen to you.

You can get all hung up
in a prickle-ly perch.
And your gang will fly on.
You'll be left in a Lurch.

You'll come down from the Lurch
with an unpleasant bump.
And the chances are, then,
that you'll be in a Slump.

And when you're in a Slump,
you're not in for much fun.
Un-slumping yourself
is not easily done.

You will come to a place where the streets are not marked.
Some windows are lighted. But mostly they're darked.
A place you could sprain both you elbow and chin!
Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in?
How much can you lose? How much can you win?

And IF you go in, should you turn left or right...
or right-and-three-quarters? Or, maybe, not quite?
Or go around back and sneak in from behind?
Simple it's not, I'm afraid you will find,
for a mind-maker-upper to make up his mind.

You can get so confused
that you'll start in to race
down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace
and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space,
headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.
The Waiting Place...

...for people just waiting.
Waiting for a train to go
or a bus to come, or a plane to go
or the mail to come, or the rain to go
or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow
or waiting around for a Yes or a No
or waiting for their hair to grow.
Everyone is just waiting.

Waiting for the fish to bite
or waiting for wind to fly a kite
or waiting around for Friday night
or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake
or a pot to boil, or a Better Break
or a sting of pearls, or a pair of pants
or a wig with curls, or Another Chance.
Everyone is just waiting.

NO!
That's not for you!

Somehow you'll escape
all that waiting and staying.
You'll find the bright places
where Boom Bands are playing.

With banner flip-flapping,
once more you'll ride high!
Ready for anything under the sky.
Ready because you're that kind of a guy!

Oh, the places you'll go! There is fun to be done!
There are points to be scored. there are games to be won.
And the magical things you can do with that ball
will make you the winning-est winner of all.
Fame! You'll be famous as famous can be,
with the whole wide world watching you win on TV.

Except when they don't.
Because, sometimes, they won't.

I'm afraid that some times
you'll play lonely games too.
Games you can't win
'cause you'll play against you.

All Alone!
Whether you like it or not,
Alone will be something
you'll be quite a lot.

And when you're alone, there's a very good chance
you'll meet things that scare you right out of your pants.
There are some, down the road between hither and yon,
that can scare you so much you won't want to go on.

But on you will go
though the weather be foul
On you will go
though your enemies prowl
On you will go
though the Hakken-Kraks howl
Onward up many
a frightening creek,
though your arms may get sore
and your sneakers may leak.

On and on you will hike
and I know you'll hike far
and face up to your problems
whatever they are.

You'll get mixed up, of course,
as you already know.
You'll get mixed up
with many strange birds as you go.
So be sure when you step.
Step with care and great tact
and remember that Life's
a Great Balancing Act.
Just never forget to be dexterous and deft.
And never mix up your right foot with your left.

And will you succeed?
Yes! You will, indeed!
(98 and 3 / 4 percent guaranteed.)

KID, YOU'LL MOVE MOUNTAINS!

So...
be your name Buxbaum or Bixby or Bray
or Mordecai Ali Van Allen O'Shea,
you're off to Great Places!
Today is your day!
Your mountain is waiting.
So...get on your way!

---Dr. Seuss

Which brings me back to the No.1 city in the world I would like to live in!!!

Not for a New Yorker the white picket fence and a two-car garage home on a sprawling suburban acre of land, where the closest place to get milk and bread is over a mile away. This is a city where if you can't go down the stairs and get what you need, you're likely to move residence; where 7 out of 10 of your neighbours look nothing like you, and nothing like each other either.

While on the topc of neighbours ..can you imagine my surprise the day I moved to my new apartment complex FYI .., it’s in the city , and not the desi preferred neighborhoods of Alpharetta, Dunwoody etc..and my next door neighbors have rangoli at the entrance and those gold welcome leafs with gods pictures and swastiks and what not that typically decorate doors of a lot of homes in India …

A New York Diary
________________________________________
Maya Mirchandani

Senior Special Correspondent

Thursday, December 7, 2006:New York

For the last five years, the entire occidental world has debated and discussed the new global order through the lens of Samuel Huntington's paradigm of a clash among civilisations, whether in the context of the war on terror, the war in Iraq, tensions with Iran, the cartoon controversy, or the galloping tensions over the wearing of the veil by Muslim women in Europe.

So much so that this week's CNN's coverage of the Pope's visit to Turkey is headlined "When Faiths Collide".

But in a country that has produced both Samuel Huntington and the most vocal followers of his ideology, also exists a city like New York.

With its own cultural dynamic, sense of community and style - no matter where you come from, how you talk or what you look like, New York manages to find space for you.

How else can you explain a Pakistani kabab diner in the heart of predominantly desi Jackson Heights pulling out of the oven a huge roast turkey, covered in tandoori masala?

As I was ordering a plate of kababs for a visiting friend and myself, I asked him whether that was a special order of some kind. The all in one chef/manager/proprietor of Roti Boti told me, with an ever so subtle smile, "Bibi aaj Thanksgiving hai, na!" Can we carve you a slice, Professor Huntington?
________________________________________
Two and a half years ago, a piece in the Metro section of the New York Times advised other Americans visiting the city for the Republican Convention on city etiquette.

Having been a resident here for just a short while myself, I brushed it off as Democrat disdain for hillbilly Republicans thronging New York to endorse a man New Yorkers can't stand, as President for a second term.

Now, having lived here a couple of years since then, things are clearer. True New York is Democrat, and true its citizens don't have much patience for President Bush, but the etiquette advice all that while ago was right on the money!

The speed at which to swipe your subway card through the turnstile so that you don't hold others up, walking at a pace that other pedestrians - local new Yorkers in a constant rush to get somewhere - find acceptable (that's the easiest way to spot an outsider), wearing black-always at night, but also advisable during the day, crossing the street anywhere and anytime that traffic is clear instead of waiting for the light, and so on and so forth.

This is a city which is willing to make any outsider one of its own; provided you follow its simple set of rules. Newcomers to New York, refer to the NYT archives of August 2004 for a full list of dos and don'ts.
________________________________________
New York City might as well be the Independent Republic of New York. It's a complete antithesis to Americana in a way that most other Americans find hard to believe.

Not for a New Yorker the white picket fence and a two-car garage home on a sprawling suburban acre of land, where the closest place to get milk and bread is over a mile away. This is a city where if you can't go down the stairs and get what you need, you're likely to move residence; where 7 out of 10 of your neighbours look nothing like you, and nothing like each other either.

A ride on the subway could be a virtual tour around the world in a couple of hours. The 7 train is even called "the international express". It starts in Times Square, comes through Greek Astoria, goes through South Asian Jackson Heights and ends up in Chinese Flushing.

The F train travels through the city from Forest Hills, an old white American neighbourhood in Queens, through International territory Roosevelt Island (many, many UN officials live there) to Korea town in Manhattan, to Arab Coney Island Avenue to Russian Brighton Beach.

Each area bears the cultural and culinary flavours of its inhabitants. With food as the eternal elixir and dining out a tradition in this city rather than a treat, a scientist friend of mine summed it up quite succinctly.

"Where else can you find American customers, Mexican cooks in an Indian restaurant in Chinatown," he asked!
________________________________________
There is certainly something to be said about the social fabric of this city. I often wonder why the controversy over wearing the veil hasn't taken on the same contours here in New York, in the way that it has across many European cities.

It's a city that has seen one of the worst acts of terrorism committed in history, and felt the closest thing to communal tension in the days immediately after 9/11.

I know first hand how tough those days were. Five years ago, everyone who looked "Muslim" was suspect. I decided to wear a salwar kameez for a dinner party and found it difficult to hail a cab. Subway riders would rather leave the seat next to me empty than come sit next to someone they weren't sure of. But around the rest of America, things were far worse - we all told ourselves - and braved another day.

Today, a group of friends can get together at a local pub and spend an evening singing Farsi and Urdu ghazals, reading Korean poetry and send out an email inviting people to an evening of "Poetry from the Axis of Evil" without a care in the world.

It's hard to say whether it is because of its overwhelming liberal democrat population, or because of the fact that people of every colour and creed live in such close proximity to each other, that "live and let live" becomes the only way to live here.

It is true that cases of discrimination still flood immigrant lawyers and activist groups on a daily basis, but it's also equally true that for every case that does, there's inevitably a New Yorker raising a voice and fighting against such discrimination.

They may win their cases, they may not - but taking on the challenge is what makes New York resilient.

I don’t know why I feel nostalgic for B-grade Hindi Film songs….maybe it’s because I miss the weekends spent watching film trailers in practically every channel ( music or non music ) in India . I know I can get a whole B4u/Sony/Zee and all the new stuff package for 50 bucks a pop give or take. but I guess I don’t miss the channels that much…plus I don’t have a tv right now… don’t plan on buying one soon either ( unless I get back my old one) which is a whole other story… any way I heard this song on Musicindia online…I guess the singer is a relative of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan..sounds a lot like him…I guess Akshay Kumars character is abroad and misses home or something…talking about being abroad…. In a few days it’ll be three years since India stopped being my country of residence…… I left home ( i.e. the house my parents live in ) the night of my 23rd birthday ..left India a day later…. Oh to be 23 again!!!!!! But then again…age ain’t nothing but a number :)

Main Jahaan Rahoon ( Lyrics )
Movie : Namaste London - 2007
Music Director : Himesh Reshamiya
Singer(s) :Rahat Fateh Ali Khan & Krishna
Lyricists :Javed Akhtar

Mood/Type : Sad
Mein jahan raho
Mein kahin bhi hoo
Teri yaad saaath hai

Kisi se kahun
Ke Nahi kahun
Yeh jo dil
Ki Baat hai

Kehne Ko saath
Appne Ek duniya chalti hai
Per chupke is dil mein tanhai Palti hai
Bas yaad Saath hai
Teri yaad saaath hai


Mein jahan raho
Mein kahin bhi hoo
Teri yaad saaath hai


Kahin to Dil mein yaadon ki
Ek suli gad jaati hai
Kahin har ek Tasveer bhahut hi dhondhali pad jati hai
Koi nai duniya ke naye rango mein khush rehta hai
Koi sab kuch paake bhi yeh maan hi maan kehta hai


Kehne Ko saath
Appne Ek duniya chalti hai
Per chupke is dil mein tanhai Palti hai
Bas yaad Saath hai
Teri yaad saaath hai

Kahin to bete kal ki jade
Dil mein hi utar jaati hai
kahin jo dhage tute to
Malayen bhikar jaati
Koi dil mein jagah nai baaton ke liye rakhta hai
Koi apni palko per
Yadon ke diye rakhta hai

Kehne Ko saath
Appne Ek duniya chalti hai
Per chupke is dil mein tanhai Palti hai
Bas yaad Saath hai
Teri yaad saaath hai

Safety Blankets

Update: Odhani..is a Gujrati song....(i thought as much ..but read somewhere it was a punjabi song..and it's not like i'm fluent in Gujrati:)..so i didnt check further...but my first guess was right....)

I thought I’d just run through what the past week has been like…at least some of it…. Seriously if I were a character in an Enid Blyton story book..my name would have been Miss Worry-A-Lot or something… so here it is things are pretty ok for the moment and I have no immediate problems to worry about…and for some bizarre reason my mind creates all these kinds of niggling worries this is totally out of my element (well not totally) but this kind of freaked me out because I usually don’t think of worst case scenarios… anyway after a few nights of bad dreams ( now I understand what it feels like to have them ) and feeling blue.. I decided to get my teddy bear (the same as the one pictured above) out of the showcase and back to its original place( ok I know a 25 year old sleeping with a teddy bear might indicate even more serious problems… and for a person who as a child never felt the need to or had any type of security blanket ..the pink bear did provide a lot of comfort ) oh and btw..my flatmate is coming tomorrow …so it should be good ..(Yea I wouldn’t recommend staying all by yourself in an apartment ).

Anyhoo , like how in my previous blog I was consoling myself about being in t-town , today was a landmark day in that I was consoling my self about being in the A-T-L, honestly it isn’t that bad the same way ttown wasn’t that bad : )..also I had heard of the place even before I came to America, it’s a major city in the South East at least , and home to CNN and Coca Cola..etc etc. .OK enough convincing myself..

I’ve gotten used to the schedule of getting up early as well… and the train system here. .Today was the first day I took my mp3 player with me while traveling… I didn’t carry it with me previously because I thought I would miss the announcements I the train ..But I’ve figured out the stops by now ..and the announcements are pretty loud :)…

Today morning , I saw two messages sent by my friends from undergrad….one was an email that brought back some bittersweet memories and the other scrap was from a junior (very much junior) about how she missed hostel life… my first impulse on reading the bittersweet email was ..’Jeez . even if now I feel like forgive and forget..it would mean all this effort for nothing , I mean things could go back to before but then all this effort of trying to stay apart would be wasted… I hate wasted effort!!.’ , at the “missing hostel comment’ ..I couldn’t empathize at this point ..the time I missed hostel was the two years after I left undergrad and was at home with my parents in Udipi.. right now I miss Udipi.. I read the following line in a blog I was lurking around days ago “No matter where you are , there’s always someone you’ll be missing” or something to that effect…

So here I was with my (generic) Mp3 player…and all I had to listen to were these 100 hindi remixes, and very few songs I actually wanted to listen to( one Kid Rock and three Fleetwood Mac songs)… most of the songs were directly loaded from a party playlist my ttown roommate had created… anyway the songs made waiting for the shuttle less tiresome.. and sometime during the end of the day on my way back from work ..i chanced upon this song . not something I had heard before (definitely from after I left India)its called Odhni Odhae To , ( I later find out it’s a Gujrati DJ Suketu remix) , it was a timepass, catchy remix number and I replayed it quite a few times…it was one of the songs I found perfect for journeys…long journeys…. in India…with the concrete roads and the trees and forests in the side like the ones in my native place…long journeys to my native place… oh yea I’ve made them by bus …from Dharwad ( the place where I studied for my undergrad degree)….DHARWAD!!! Why , in Dharwad I would have danced to this song in one of the “Discs” or parties we had once ever so often …( OK ,folks from undergrad who read this will find this slightly sad and lame)…but while I may not have ‘partied’ the most in undergrad.. I DID!!!… I really enjoyed myself in those parties and did dance my heart out.. with my classmates, guys and girls , from whom I have for various reasons distanced away from … I’ve met many people since then and have been to clubs in so many other places ..but I never could get my groove back…it was like I had lost it forever in Hubli ( the place where those parties were held )…not in the last two months in party city Wellington ,I was totally devoted to work the first eight …not in Tuscaloosa , though I did make an effort to go out when I had a chance… Those undergrad parties once a semester where my one chance at truancy with hostel rules ..the one night I would stay out late … not tell my parents ( though parental ESP did catch me at times , its funny though ,how my parents gave up the security of knowing where I was day and night once I left India ; I think it would take a lot of courage and trust to do such a thing); at Rs 150-200 a ticket going to those parties didn’t come cheap on a student budget ..but somehow I had a reputation for being the girl along with another friend who always went for these things… this fact was brought back to my attention by a rejected orkut testimonial!!! ..i don’t know if it was a good thing or if people thought we were the only morons who actually bought tickets and went stag to these things , but we sure had fun in our own way and that’s why we kept going…

It’s been a long time since those parties …people seemed so different from how they were in college when they danced , and for a town which didn’t have much of a social scene these parties were a good thing, I probably spoke to some of my peers for the first time then.. Things have changed now …. Two of the nicest guys I met in those parties have passed away, everyone’s scattered across the globe, some people got married , some couples broke up, some others became couples…and its been months or years since I’ve really spoken to anyone from that crowd…..

While I know I was naive then and it would be easy to think that everyone else was more worldly wise ..the fact remains that how much we held on to illusions of maturity or worldliness at that age, we really were innocent ..and now I wonder what it would be like to once again be that naïve FOB( from Dubai .but in a bad way : )) nineteen year old girl , with dubious dressing sense ( I still have dubious dressing sense ,but it was worse then, and my parents would probably never let me out of the house with half the things I wear…), partying away with her friends at Hans or Naveen in Hubli : ) …no I don’t miss my hostel days…but I relish the memories…

Which reminds me..one of the first things I wanted to do after getting a job.was to join funk or modern dance classes. .guess THAT isn’t going to happen soon…
Also , for the amount I’ve dissed on undergrad the fact remains …during the process of moving to ATL ,being the credit card maxed, last assistantship stipend- have to move into big city Apartment complex- student that I was ..I was at a point in time short of funds : ) before I could ask my equally cash strapped student friends or approach relatives. The person who volunteered to help even before I had the slightest inkling of a need was a girl who stayed in the same hostel as me for four years and has known me for eight years. I guess she knew enough of my credit worthiness to lend me the substantial lump some that I needed : ) ….( Has anyone else noticed how easily it was to borrow and lend rupees ,than it is to borrow and lend dollars : ) )

Travel Quotes

‘There’s no place like home… There’s no place like home ‘, and while I don’t have to keep repeating it like Dorothy did in the Wizard of Oz.. I know that the lines are true…nonetheless here are some travel quotes that I’ve found interesting, some even ring true…. …

"Travel is the realm of the improbable adventure, the quick fix, the ship passing in the night. It entitles you to meet interesting people, whom you would never meet, even if you laid traps or advertised for them. Not only do you meet them, but also unmeet them, all in the space of, it often seems, a mere compacted evening. As there is so little time, bodies in motion drop their guard and immediatly get on with their stories. Then the proverbial ships part, each to its destination, never again to brush each other's wake."
- Lawrence Millman, "Last Places”

". . . I am going away with him to an unknown country where I shall have no past and no name, and where I shall be born again with a new face and an untried heart."
- Colette

"Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of food, your closet full of clothes - with all this taken away, you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That's not always comfortable, but it is always invigorating."
- Michael Crichton


"Internal burning . . . wandering fever . . ."
- Kalevala

"If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things."
- Henry Miller


"Eat dessert first
Life is uncertain"
- Anonymous

". . .life is short and the world is wide"
- Simon Raven

"When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. . . In other words, I don't improve, in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable."
- John Steinbeck

"Traveling is like flirting with life. It's like saying, 'I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.'"
- Lisa St. Aubin de Teran

"To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world."
- Freya Stark


"Traveling carries with it the curse of being at home everywhere and yet nowhere, for wherever one is some part of oneself remains on another continent."
- Margot Fonteyn

"A man travels the world in search of what he needs and returns home to find it."
- George Moore 1852-1933: the Brook Kerith

"All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it."
- Samuel Johnson

"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost"
- J. R. R. Tolkien "Lord of the Rings"


"All the above is, of course, a gross simplification. There are deeper reasons to travel - itches and tickles on the underbelly of the unconscious mind. We go where we need to go, and then try to figure out what we're doing there."
- Jeff Greenwald "Shopping for Buddhas"

"There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign."
- Robert Louis Stevenson

"The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready. "
- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

"Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going."
- Paul Theroux



"Muhammad says, 'Love of one's country is a part of the faith.'
But don't take that literally! Your real 'country' is where you're heading, not where you are.
Don't misread that hadith."
- Rumi

"Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest."
- The late modernist painter Georgia O'Keeffe, in an introduction to her work displayed on a newly opened museum dedicated to her art in New Mexico.

"Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure."
- Aldous Huxley

"Sailing round the world in a dirty gondola oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!"
- Bob Dylan

"Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience, and the best travelers . . . seem to be those able to hold two or three inconsistent ideas in their minds at the same time, or able to regard themselves as at once serious persons and clowns."
- Paul Fussel

"If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears."
- Glenn Clark

". . .If people and their manner of living were alike everywhere, there would not be much point in moving from one place to another."
- Paul Bowles

"A study of the Great Malady; horror of home."
- Baudelair, Journaux Intimes

"Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe."
- Anatole France

"When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don't know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in. . ."
- D. H. Lawrence

". . .the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home."
- Paul Theroux

"To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries."
- Aldous Huxley


". . .travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living."
- Miriam Beard

"I travel a lot; I hate having my life disrupted by routine."
- Caskie Stinnett

"Better far off to leave half the ruins and nine-tenths of the churches unseen and to see well the rest; to see them not once, but again and often again; to watch them, to learn them, to live with them, to love them, till they have become a part of life and life's recollections."
- Augustus Hare

"We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment."
- Hilaire Belloc

"When you are everywhere, you are nowhere.
When you are somewhere, you are everywhere."
- Rumi

"Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name."
- Alice Meynell

"Old men and far travelers may lie with authority."
- Anonymous

"That same preface also contains a single line that really does sum everything up: 'Some other places were not so good but maybe we were not so good when we were in them.'"
- Jeff Greenwald - Big World dispatch #20


"He gave the impression that very many cities had rubbed him smooth."
- Graham Greene

"A good traveler has no fixed plan and is not intent on arriving."
- Lao Tzu

"Trust in Allah, but tie your camel."
- Old Muslim Proverb

"A good holiday is one that is spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours."
- J. B. Priestley

"There are only three things which make life worth living: to be writing a tolerably good book, to be in a dinner party of six, and to be travelling south with someone whom your conscience permits you to love."
- Cyril Connolly

"What you've done becomes the judge of what you're going to do -- especially in other people's minds. When you're traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road."
- William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways
"The journey not the arrival matters."
- T.S. Eliot

"Travelling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things - air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it."
- Cesare Pavese

"The border means more than a customs house, a passport officer, a man with a gun. Over there everything is going to be different; life is never going to be quite the same again after your passport has been stamped."
- Graham Greene

"To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive."
- Robert Louis Stevenson

"Remember that happiness is a way of travel - not a destination."
- Roy M. Goodman

"Once in a while it really hits people that they don't have to experience the world in the way they have been told to."
- Alan Keightley

"Every exit is an entry somewhere else."
- Tom Stoppard

"The fastest way to travel is to be there already."
- Terry Pratchett

"It is not down in any map; true places never are."
- Herman Melville

"The first experience can never be repeated. The first love, the first sun-rise, the first South Sea Island, are memories apart, and touched a virginity of sense."
- Robert Louis Stevenson

"Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think."
- Lawrence Durrell

"Is there anything as horrible as starting on a trip? Once you're off, that's all right, but the last moments are earthquake and convulsion, and the feeling that you are a snail being pulled off your rock."
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

". . .Destination is merely a byproduct of the journey."
- Eric Hansen

"Too often. . .I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen."
- Louis L'Amour

"What am I doing here?"
- Rimbaud writing home from Ethiopia

"All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware."
- Martin Buber

"It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places."
- Paul Theroux

"One of the gladdest moments of human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of habit, the leaden weight of routine, the cloak of many cares and the slavery of home, man feels once more happy."
- Sir Richard Burton

". . .I have learned that the cost of everything from a royal suite to a bottle of soda water can be halved by the simple expedient of saying it must be halved."
- Robert Byron, on bargaining in the Middle East, The Road to Oxiana, 1933

"People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home."
- Dagobert D. Runes, US writer

"We are a plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner! I can't think what anybody sees in them!"
- Bilbo to Gandalf on their first meeting

"Here I am, safely returned over those peaks from a journey far more beautiful and strange than anything I had hoped for or imagined - how is it that this safe return brings such regret?"
- Peter Matthiessen

"It is a strange thing to come home. While yet on the journey, you cannot at all realize how strange it will be."
- Selma Lagerlof

"It may be that the satisfaction I need depends on my going away, so that when I've gone and come back, I'll find it at home."
- Rumi

"If there is anything worse than the aching tedium of staring out of car windows, it is the irritation of getting tickets, packing, finding trains, lying in bouncing berths, washing without water, digging out passports, and fighting through customs. To live in Carlsbad is seemly and to loaf at San Remo healing to the soul, but to get from Carlsbad to San Remo is of the devil."
- Sinclair Lewis on the toil of travel

"An involuntary return to the point of departure is, without doubt, the most disturbing of all journeys."
- Iain Sinclair

"The Road goes ever on and on
Out from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
Let others follow it who can!
Let them a journey new begin,
But I at last with weary feet
Will turn towards the lighted inn,
My evening-rest and sleep to meet."
- J.R.R Tolkien

"The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land;
it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land."
- G. K. Chesterton

"I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world."
- Mary Anne Radmacher Hershey

"One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it's left behind."
- Charles Dickens


"Travel is the most private of pleasures. There is no greater bore than the travel bore. We do not in the least want to hear what he has seen in Hong-Kong."
- Vita Sackville-West

". . .the understatement, the self-ridicule, the delight in the foreignness of foreigners, the complete denial of any attempt to enlist the sympathies of his readers in the hardships he has capriciously invited."
- Evelyn Waugh, on the properties of a good travel writer (speaking of Eric Newby)

"We found in the course of our journey the convenience of having disencumbered ourselves, by laying aside whatever we could spare; for it is not to be imagined without experience, how in climbing crags and treading bogs, and winding through narrow and obstructed passages, a little bulk will hinder, and a little weight will burden; or how often a man that has pleased himself at home with his own resolution, will, in the hour of darkness and fatigue, be content to leave behind him everything but himself."
- Samuel Johnson, on packing for travel

"These spiritual windowshoppers,
who idly ask, 'How much is that?' Oh, I'm just looking.
They handle a hundred items and put them down,
shadows with no capital.
What is spent is love and two eyes wet with weeping.
But these walk into a shop,
and their whole lives pass suddenly in that moment,
in that shop.
Where did you go? 'Nowhere.'
What did you have to eat? 'Nothing much.'
Even if you don't know what you want,
buy something, to be part of the exchanging flow.
Start a huge, foolish project,
like Noah.
It makes absolutely no difference
what people think of you."
- Rumi

"A year to go around the world! A whole twelve months of scenes and curious happenings in far-off foreign lands! You have thought of doing this, almost promised yourself that when you got old enough, and rich enough, and could "spare the time," you too would go around the world. Most of us get old enough; some of us get rich enough; but the time! the time! - to spare the time, to cut loose from goods and lands, from stocks and dreary desks, quit clients, patients, readers, home and friends - ay, and our enemies whom we so dearly love! Full many a promise must be broken and few the voyagers round the world."
- D.N. Richardson, "A Girdle Round the Earth", 1888

"In the old days, people used to risk their lives in India or in the Americas in order to bring back products which now seem to us to have been of comically little worth, such as [brazilwood and pepper, which] added a new range of sense experience to a civilization which had never suspected its own insipidity. . .[From] these same lands our modern Marco Polos now bring back the moral spices of which our society feels an increasing need as it is conscious of sinking further into boredom, but that this time they take the form of photographs, books, and travelers tales."
- Claude Levi-Strauss on the motivation of travel


"Back home in the Wild West, time whips by with the relentless and terrible purpose of a stranglevine vine filmed in fast motion. A week, two months, ten years snap past like amnesia, a continual barrage of workdays, appointments, dinner dates and laundromats, television shows and video cassettes, parking meters, paydays and phone calls.
You can watch it from Asia. You read the newspapers, you think about your friends back home - marching along in the parade of events - and you know it's still happening. It's happening there. On the other side. Yesterdays, todays and tomorrows are tumbling after each other like Sambo and the tiger, blending into an opaque and viscous ooze. There is no such thing as now; only a continual succession of laters, whipping their tendrils around the calendar. The clutches of the vine. . .
In Nepal, the phenomenon is reversed. Time is a stick of incense that burns without being consumed. One day can seem like a week; a week, like months. Mornings stretch out and crack their spines with the yogic impassivity of house cats. Afternoons bulge with a succulent ripeness, like fat peaches. There is time enough to do everything - write a letter, eat breakfast, read the paper, visit a shrine or two, listen to the birds, bicycle downtown to change money, buy postcards, shop for Buddhas - and arrive home in time for lunch."
- Jeff Greenwald "Shopping for Buddhas"

"[The traveler] may feel assured, he will meet with no difficulties or dangers, excepting in rare cases, nearly so bad as he beforehand anticipates. In a moral point of view, the effect ought to be, to teach him good-humored patience, freedom from selfishness, the habit of acting for himself, and of making the best of every occurrence. . . Traveling ought also to teach him distrust; but at the same time he will discover, how many truly kind-hearted people there are, with whom he never before had, or ever again will have any further communication, who yet are ready to offer him the most disinterested assistance."
- Charles Darwin

"Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living."
- Miriam Beard

"Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life."
- Jack Kerouac

"The autumn leaves are falling like rain,
Although my neighbors are all barbarians,
And you, you are a thousand miles away,
There are always two cups at my table"
- T'ang Dynasty

"Travel, instead of broadening the mind, often merely lengthens the conversation."
- Elizabeth Drew

"Own only what you can carry with you; know language, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag."
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"The map is not the territory."
- Alfred Korzybski

"Travel is glamorous only in retrospect."
- Paul Theroux

"If you come to a fork in the road, take it."
- Yogi Berra

"It is no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase 'as pretty as an airport' exist."
- Douglas Adams, "Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul"

"He won't fly on the Balinese airline, Garuda, because he won't fly on any airline where the pilots believe in reincarnation."
- Spalding Gray

". . . people don't take trips--trips take people."
- John Steinbeck

"I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list."
- Susan Sontag


"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a cash advance."
- Anonymous

"Most travel is best of all in the anticipation or the remembering; the reality has more to do with losing your luggage."
- Regina Nadelson

"I think that wherever your journey takes you, there are new gods waiting there, with divine patience -- and laughter."
- Susan M. Watkins


"There is no such thing as 'the Queen's English'. The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!"
- Mark Twain, on English

"Travel - to go, move or journey from one place to another."
- Anonymous



By the time we are, in our superior wisdom, decided to make a start, we discover that those who have gone fearlessly on before, have, in their blundering way, traveled a considerable distance. If you start now, you will know a lot next year that you don't know now, and that you will not know next year, if you wait. The William Feather Magazine.

A traveller without observation is a bird without wings. Moslih Eddin Saadi (1184-1291)

A wise traveler never despises his own country. Carlo Goldoni.

When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable. Clifton Fadiman.


Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.
* Bertrand Russell



"It's a battered old suitcase and a hotel someplace and a wound that will never heal."
(Tom Waits)

"No one speaks English and everything is broken."
(Tom Waits)

"I love to travel, But hate to arrive."
(Albert Einstein)



"Don't tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you traveled."
(Mohammed)


"Travel is the frivolous part of serious lives, and the serious part of frivolous ones."
(Anne Sophie Swetchine)


"If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel."
(Will Kommen)


"It is solved by walking."
((Algerian Proverb))

"Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God."
(Kurt Vonnegut)



How beautiful it is to do nothing and then rest afterwards. Spanish Proverb
The further one goes the less one knows- Lao-tzu (sixth century BC)

I love to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts. Heman Melville

It's a death trap it's a suicide rap We gotta get out while we're young `Cause tramps like us baby we were born to run -Bruce Springsteen



Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore Andre Gide

The people here are bound to think this is the best place, or they wouldn't be here, would they? William Sutcliffe

A ship in harbor is safe -- but that is not what ships are for." --John A. Shedd

Let your heart guide you. It whispers so listen closely. -- The Land Before Time

A guest never forgets the host who had treated him kindly. Homer

Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time -Stephen Wright

Heroes take journeys confront dragons and discover the treasure of their true selves -Carol Pearson

I'd rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth. Steve McQueen

If an ass goes travelling he will not come home a horse Thomas Fuller

It was kind of solemn drifting down the big still river laying on our backs looking up at stars and we didn't even feel like talking aloud Mark Twain

Love has given me wings so I must fly. -- A Knight's Tale

NOT I NOT ANYONE else can travel that road for you You must travel it for yourself. Walt Whitman

O public road I say back I am not afraid to leave you yet I love you you express me better than I can express myself Walt Whitman

Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry but by demonstrating that all peoples cry laugh eat worry and die it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other we may even become friends. Maya Angelou

Simplicity is making the journey of this life with just baggage enough. Charles Dudley Warner

The only journey is the one within. Rainer Maria Rilke

The universe is a big place perhaps the biggest. Kurt Vonnegut

Travel has a way of stretching the mind. The stretch comes not from travel's immediate rewards the inevitable myriad new sights smells and sounds but with experiencing firsthand how others do differently what we believed to be the right and only way -Ralph Crawshaw


We don't go anywhere. Going somewhere is for squares. We just go! -Marlon Brando The Wild One (1954)

We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time T. S. Elliot
What we do in life echoes in eternity. -- Gladiator


Travel and society polish one, but a rolling stone gathers no moss, and a little moss is a good thing on a man.
- John Burroughs

To roam giddily, and be everywhere but at home, such freedom doth a banishment become.
- Dr. John Donne



Traveling makes men wiser, but less happy.
- Thomas Jefferson


We've traveled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation.
- Tom Stoppard

The one before the movers show up

Okay its 2am and I have to sleep , but I have to capture this moment …. As you can see this post follows what seems to be a recurring theme this week …so at 11 pm Thursday evening I start doing what I should have done the minute I heard I got a job and had to move ; i.e. begin packing in earnest so that I would be ready for the movers who will show up 8 am Friday morning .i.e the next day !!!

I was busy returning library books, locker keys ,borrowed CD’s etc. today morning and collecting books from kind and accommodating homes ,back to my own.

My bookshelf took me a while to sort , basically stuffed my clothes into luggage , and I plan on getting up 6 am tomorrow so that I can sort out my cosmetics and jewelry ( junk jewelry!! I don’t have heap loads of gold here, but yes I hope to find my non-junk jewelry earrings and bracelet somewhere in the dresser drawers…

So the point of the exercise was to separate my stuff from the possessions of my two other flat mates and get rid of unnecessary things…I found my single glove from New Zealand.. tried it for size( it felt snug) …decided not to throw it(again!) . I found a recommendation letter a professor from undergrad in India had written while I was applying to graduate school …it was interesting to say the least .I’ve had to take recommendations from my NZ professors as well before coming to Alabama , and looking at one of the originals from India , just shows what a long journey it has been.

I saw my acceptance letter to school here, my social security application form (filled with the address of the people I was staying with when I first came.) and my tickets and boarding passes from when I first came to the US,

I did throw away a few papers ,but not much else ,which makes sense considering I’m such a packrat.

Three years worth of possessions move to Atlanta tomorrow.

Two years.... and counting...

Today …apart from being my graduation cum getting a job treat day was the second anniversary of my arrival in the US …yipeee!!!… no really , I guess this was one of the anniversaries that deserved to be remembered….last year I was in India at this time …so in effect this is the first and most probably only anniversary I’ll spend in Tuscaloosa….

I remember two years ago I was at the airport in LA… first just assimilating the fact that I was in an AMERICAN airport ..i.e. I was in America…. I spent most of my dollars tasting Haagen Dazs ice cream for the first time in the airport lounge….I was stuck there for twenty four hours after a twenty two hour flight, because my flight to Atlanta kept getting delayed /cancelled .. Well made it to Atlanta and Birmingham and finally Tuscaloosa …( not all the way to t-town via Delta..but you understand)…And the rest as they say is HISTORY : ).

For the traveller.....

A passage from "The Prophet" by Khalil Gibran

A friend gave me the book before I left Wellington, the following passage resonated deeply then , and I guess it isn't surprising that I chance upon it once more....

"Almastafa, the chosen and the beloved, who was a dawn unto his own day, had waited twelve years in the city of Orphalase for his ship that was to return and bear him back to the isle of his birth. And in the twelfth year on the seventh day of Lelool, the month of reaping, he climbed a hill without the city walls and looked seaward; and he beheld his ship coming with the mist.

Then the gates of his heart were flung open, and his joy flew far over the sea. And he closed his eyes and prayed in the silences of his soul. But, as he ascended the hill, a sadness came upon him, and he thought in his heart:

"How shall I go in peace without sorrow? Nay, not without a word in the spirit shall I leave this city. Long were the days of pain I have spent within it's walls., and long were the nites of aloneness; And who can depart from his pain and his aloneness without regret? Too many fragments of the spirit have I scattered in these streets, and to many are the children of my longing that walk naked among these hills, and I cannot withdraw from them without a burden and an ache. It is not a garment I cast off this day, but a skin that I tear with my own hands. Nor is it a thought that I leave behind me, but a heart made sweet with hunger and with thirst. Yes, I cannot tarry any longer. The sea that calls all things unto her calls me, and I must embark. For to stay, the hours burn in the nite, is to freeze and to crystalize and be bound in a mold. Fain that I would take with me all that is here. But how shall I?

A voice cannot carry the tongue and the lips that gave it wings. Alone must it seek the ether. And alone and without his nest shall the eagle fly across the Sun".

*********************************************************************************

Ithaca

When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,
pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the angry Poseidon -- do not fear them:
You will never find such as these on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the fierce Poseidon you will never encounter,
if you do not carry them within your soul,
if your soul does not set them up before you.

Pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many, when,
with such pleasure, with such joy
you will enter ports seen for the first time;
stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensual perfumes of all kinds,
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
visit many Egyptian cities,
to learn and learn from scholars.

Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to anchor at the island when you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.

Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would have never set out on the road.
She has nothing more to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with so much experience,
you must already have understood what Ithacas mean.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1911)