For the last few years, December is turning out to be quite an eventful month for me. Be it my rural internship in Udaipur (Udaipur in December is a heavenly place), my Vipassana stint last year followed by a short adventurous trip to Western Gujarat or by beginning the month by attending some wonderful events in Mumbai, this month has added great value to my life. This month has also been the time when I get to discover some really soulful and different kinds of music. Even if I see it the other way then college for me has been a struggle in terms of getting a sense of belongingness year after year and December with its eccentricities offers a decent escape.

December is also the time when I feel the most creative, confident and connected to myself. It is a good time to think and write. I am able to express myself better. I can tiptoe through the traffic of vagueness in my mind and be productive. I am smitten by the bug of new experiences and I find this month as the best time to travel in India. The starting of the month is when winter begins to make its way into a lot of places in the country but it is still in its crawling stages. It is mostly after the third week that the cold gets into its full blaze. While travelling if you carry proper covers, you are good to go. In any case I find bearing cold easier than exposing my head and neck to be charred by the sun.

This year I wanted to try something new and obscure. I had two options. One, to go to Western Rajasthan with my college friends and two, to experience living a semi-forest lifestyle near Puducherry in South India. Although, I could have gone for both of them (there was no overlap of dates) but then I am already in my twenties and it is a time when it starts getting a bit uncomfortable asking your parents to fund your trips. In any case, I am not a very good group traveller and prefer journeying solo with my books and playlist. And then the idea of living in a forest was in itself too tempting to not head into.

As the month is coming to an end, I would say that December until now has been pretty overwhelming. I have had chance encounters with two of my favorite authors - William Dalrymple and Katherine Boo, I have attended some wonderful events, met friends I was looking forward to meeting from a long time, had my share of discovering new types of music, feasted my stomach with some incredibly tasteful and delicious food, clocked over 100 hours of train travel, lived in a forest for over a week and ticked off Pondicherry and Auroville from my to-visit list.

As of now I have decided to use the remaining days to write about these different experiences that I could delve into. Essentially because this is the time when most of the instances are still fresh in my mind and I really want to transcribe a lot of the conversations that took place before they vaporize. I also would like to put an afterthought or two in ink. I have scribbled down a lot of what I have experienced and observed and I want to organise all of it so that it should make sense to me when I read them 5-10 years later. Also, I have recently had a chance to attend a session on the artifices of travel writing and for most of the travel or stay that I have done I have always made an effort to see them all through the lens and viewpoint of penning things down later. So all that I will be writing will also be an attempt towards expressing places, people, encounters, food, concepts, music and my own philosophical musings in the style of travel writing.

This note is kind of an introduction to all that I am planning to write. It is said when you don’t have an idea of what you’ll be doing, you have to initiate doing it in someway or the other. This was just to kick start and to structure what I want to write next.

The way I see it, I will be dividing my writing task into -

  1. Over a 100 hours of train travel and the ghosts sneaking by.

  2. Tagore as translated by Gulzar and the music which followed and flowed.

  3. William Dalrymple and a voyage into travel writing.

  4. Sadhana Forest - Adventure, Reflection and Awe.

  5. Auroville - The politics and economics of spirituality.

I don’t know how much justice I’d be able to do with all of them, yet somewhere inside I feel excited at the prospect of writing about these things. I think the primary reason is because while writing and thinking I will get to relive them once again. I will end this particular note by quoting one the many great lines from Jon Krakauer’s book Into the Wild -

“The core of man’s spirit comes from new experiences.”