Chasing photography.

Delivering pickle was not why I found myself sitting on a two-wheeler with a woman half my size driving me around the city of Bangalore, a city where half the bus is reserved for women. I did however contemplate what the feminist brigade would have to say about my predicament. Progress, if they exclaimed was clearly off the mark. Man arose to the top of the food chain through dedicated planning. I was being paraded on the proverbial donkey for the lack of one.

I read a book and inspired by it decided almost on a whim to travel the length of my country “Chasing the Monsoons”. The book was written by a foreigner and with rants about not being a prophet in ones own country and believing all along that a journey planned, wasn’t traveling, it was commuting I decided to head into the unknown. I left home one cloudy morning for what was to be a three month long journey only to find myself immediately soaked to the bone in rain and stupidity as a result of not packing an umbrella/raincoat and slippers. I was clearly traveling light, very light.

Bangalore a city in southern India was to be to be my first stop over to procure items I hadn’t added to my inventory. Once heralded as the retirement capital of the country, Bangalore transformed into a commercial capital afterwards with a population comprising mostly of post pubescent working teens. Like any famous retirement capital it is known for its ubiquitous pubs, a nightlife that shuts down by 11 and roads that seem to only go one way. Fortunately for me it also happened to be the city my cousin sister chose to live in and as such a meeting was inevitable. My mother sent along some Pickle made in Chennai bought in Mumbai and to be delivered in Bangalore. Globalization wasn’t doing wonders to my skin. But as any Indian boy will know “Pickle Delivery” is a right of passage that every young Indian man must undergo to be accepted in his tribe as chief pickle deliverer.

After being scorned at for my lack of a plan and paraded through the streets, I was abandoned on a road with some shops and shopaholics to obtain my rain gear. I walked around trying to find said items with the sun tattooing its name on my skin like a crazed lover, the dusty air purging my lungs of pollution and my spirits high above the clouds. I couldn’t find an umbrella, it seemed that stocks hadn’t arrived and as a result of suddenly developing a sense of fashion discarded a perfectly good pair of slippers only to rush to the station to catch a train for Trivandrum, the first city in India to receive the monsoon showers. Some things are best experienced while traveling.