A good paycheck...
a great bachelor life...
a few trips to scenic places arranged by your travel agent...
a good looking neighbourhood girl you can ask for a cup of sugar, when you already have a sackful in your kitchen...
and an even better looking girl-friend who won’t ask for fancy things(quite a fiction ehh!!)? Is that all?
Of course not for people like us who have kangaroos on their top paddock, as people define us. There is a subtle joy in seeing things differently and enjoying them in a different manner. People ask me,’What is the sense of a roadtrip when you can hire a vehicle, or board a train and reach the destination without sweating out?’
I choose not to argue with such people for they will never understand that the real delight of a journey is not in reaching the destination in one piece, but the road that you take, no matter how much it wears you out. People who sit in the back of a cozy SUV, or helplessly try to peak out of the window blocked with grills in a train asking each other, Are-we-there-yet, will never be able to know what it takes to enjoy the road to the destination.
Life is never a bed of roses, but isn’t always on thorns either. We don’t achieve victory every time, then why do some people give up and some choose to try one more time. It is not always the victory that is delightful, but sometimes the road that stretches miles and miles, that bends backwards and asks you to come again. For once in your life, try pulling over in the middle of the journey and hear the road whisper in your ears. Hear the song that she is singing for you. You will learn how much she loves you, for you chose her. You will forget the ache in your back in a moment if you see the world around you. It is so different from the one that you live in. There is no crowd, there are no buildings, there is no rush for reaching office and there is no one to ask you where you have been.
On 16th of this January, We added one more roadtrip to our album of memories. Sanchi, as the world knows it better, is a village in Raisen district 46 km outside Bhopal. It is believed to have been built by Emperor Ashoka in 3rd century BC. The Buddhist Monument was built to house the relics of Buddhism. The architectural marvels are of great importance and architecture students from all over the country come here for case study. If you want to know more about Sanchi, either visit it or buy a book because I am not going to write about it anymore. My post is dedicated to honour the road, not the destination.
A night ahead of the roadtrip, Chowdhary messaged me to reach Karond flyover at 10’o clock next day. A little later Nizam of Bhopal, as I will address Siddhartha Soni, messaged me to meet at Platinum Plaza which was further confirmed by Roopa. We were supposed to reach platinum at half past nine. Roopa reached on time and I was late by five minutes. The Nizam, who was crying loudest not to get late, was 20 min late himself. After a further delay of half an hour, Shahul, Kamlesh, Ayush, Batham and Khushwant arrived. Now there were 3 bikes and 8 people, so after a lot of strenuous calculations for statistical distribution, Khushwant and I pillioned behind Shahul, Nizam and Batham climbed behind Ayush and Apoorv enjoyed the entire pillion seat behind Kamlesh.
We set off for Karond Flyover, flying over every cop we met in between as the cops usually don’t like people saving petrol by using fewer bikes for more people. We arrived at karond, only to learn that the other half of the group hasn’t reached there yet. But finally everyone arrived and we rutted to sanchi. 13 people on 7 bikes.
Sanchi is at a distance of 42.6 km from the flyover. We reached Sukhi sewania at around 11 ‘o clock and Jarda started bickering for food. He was hungry so he wanted to stop by. We all were hungry, but our hunger for pestering Jarda overpowered that which we had for food. So we kept driving saying that we will eat only at Sanchi. Jarda was red hot like a heated iron ingot, and we laughed our hearts out looking at Jarda.
The road beyond sukhi sewaniya keeps getting beautiful with every inch you travel. There is a spell in those green pastures, a charm in those plateaus. So much that you cannot take your eyes off them. In the meanwhile, we reached deewanganj and Jarda didn’t stop crying. And neither did we stop pestering him. We moved.
As we neared the tropic of cancer, we realised that Shahul got left behind. In no time the phone rang and shahul gave a bad news. His mudguard had dislocated and was touching the tyres. The rubbing produced so much heat that the plastic mudguard melted as if someone heated it with a gas welding torch. There were fair chances of the molten plastic lodging between the treads of tyre and burning through the rubber. It would have been a disaster to have a flat tyre in the middle of nowhere. But somehow he reached where we were waiting and we removed the mudguard itself. After a few photo clicks at tropics of cancer, we moved ahead to barkhedi.
Celebrating after removing the mudguard
Finally we had our breakfast at Barkhedi at 12 noon and moved to Salamatpur. Life at these small villages seems pretty normal in the daytime. But the real challenge is to survive the night. As locals told us, temperature goes down tremendously.
‘Sheher mein thandi ka matlab bhi nahi jaante log’(city people don’t even know the meaning of cold) as a local villager of deewanganj would be telling us on our return journey. Spare the cruelty of cold that people in these villages have to bear, there is an additional scarcity of basic infrastructure that they can’t even imagine to have. 12 hrs of power cut and school buildings that you’d wish weren’t there will give goose-bumps to any city-dweller, if asked to live here. But surprisingly, they hardly complain about it. India might become superpower in 2020, but these people will still live in 12 hr power-cut, and city people will keep wasting electricity like a municipality tap wastes water. Indian is full of tragedies.
We reached Sanchi at 1 PM where Milan joined us. We spent some time at the stupas and went to a nearby dhaba for lunch. Gagan Dhaba, as the name was ,looked more like a haunted house, with no one around. We searched nearby and found the cook and waiter hiding in the dark nooks of the kitchen. Pretty Weird! The food wasn’t pretty good, so I won’t recommend it. Try somewhere else if the bile juices in your stomach don’t start digesting your stomach itself, as it had occurred in our case.
It was getting dark as we rutted back to our city. The cold air felt like liquid nitrogen, freezing every bone in our body. Although we had our warm clothes on but that was enough to subjugate the city-cold. The cold winds kept torturing us, and I was thanking Detani for driving the bike. The cold was getting colder than coldest, so we kept stopping at every village for tea. Those who smoke kept on pitying us for not smoking, as they claimed that smoking keeps your body warmer. But I’d rather have frozen lungs than lungs quenched in coaltar. No offence, but this is my personal opinion.
By the time we had crossed salamatpur, the sky was dipped in black ink and at around 7’o clock as we neared deewanganj, the lights from the village painted a magnificent sketch on the black canvas of night. As we sipped tea, we took warmth from a small fire lit by people to keep themselves warm. The onus of giving warmth to 7 people was now on the flame which was no bigger than a forty-rupees-Flower-Bouquet, made with roses, I must add. We chose not to put load on the flame and moved on. 
Our Final stop was at Karond flyover where we had light snacks and redistributed ourselves on bikes to transport each other to homes.
Although the food was aweful, we couldn’t play cricket as we had planned to and the cold was torturous, but we still enjoyed the trip. As I have said it earlier, it’s the road that is the most enjoyable part in a journey. The joy of reaching destination is just a small part of the enjoyment. The small things, or hindrances if you may call it, actually make a roadtrip immortal in our memories. Years later we will look back and smile at these moments, moments that we’d hope we could live again.
DEDICATED TO ALL MY FRIENDS
