“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” – Mark Twain
Among all the obscurity of a hot summer afternoon in narrow, flexuous, hidden streets of chandni chowk, India, what a travel-heart seeks is salvation. Gazing at a pond in the sulking after rain chaos on a roof-top café gulping a perfect “masala chai”, is where a mind might become defunct of the beauty, a traveler, on the other hand, has a prolonged inner conflict with a deluge of consequences, making some bizarre picture of this serenity.
These eyes are vicarious of their heart. Festivals, food, originality and origin, lifestyles and livelihood, woods, history, art, the sanity and insanity enclosed within its bounds, all places have a great deal of being appreciated for, and those pensive eyes might just find the grotesque insights in the most ordinary.
Brain and beauty are inextricable, at all these times. I’ve been to a place total stranger to me, and yet source of my origin, my ancestral village in the middle of an Indian Province Rajasthan, named “Chichdauli” after the drought that caused massacre and yet rehabilitated, because life goes on. My visit, as it was, turned out to be the motif of my destiny. My once spooky taste buds crave for the “Chhaach” and “rota”, exclusive food of that area. These delicacies are cooked on the induction using forest wood and in earthen pots, so satisfactorily natural.
This place was not different from any other village of Rajasthan but undeniably it had its own charisma and those peaceful hymns enchanting in the wind, are ineffable and unforgettable! Snapshots appear of that bright day like inclusions in my sub conscious, the carved-tree that stood there from years as a mark of human existence in the vicinity, a mark of existence of my ancestors near-by, the alembic hill-temple and the scenario of red-yellow earth. Amongst the most dried out villages in the past, it still retained its warmth; rains came along and likewise spring. My milieu was here and forever it stays, wherever I go.
