A Walk By The Road

Its almost two months after coming from my totally eventful trip to Arunachal, and after that trip, my trekking ship has anchored right in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. A friend advised me to read Bill Bryson’s Travel books which would help me to add some humour to my stories. And so I did. Didn’t my other blogs bring a smile to your face? …. Don’t even bother answering that. But the books I read did give me a wonderful idea of keeping a distance from the busy city life. What did it suggest? It didn’t suggest anything anything particular , but I noticed that the Author, Walks Everywhere. Got totally inspired by this. If a American Guy can walk 10-12 miles a day, just for the fun of it, then why not, we…totally baked in the sun, Puneites?

So then, nowadays I walk. Not a walk in the woods, but a walk on the carparked pavements of Pune. My route? It ranges, but for most of the part is from fergusson college to my house. It passes through the most busiest and the most “honked” part of town. I seriously think that if you ever want to know how many kinds of horn there are in the world the best place to “hear” them is Deccan. And I might be one of the main causes… all the footpaths have been damaged that during the summers you “might” see thousands of butterflies mud puddling in that path. The time I travel is in the evening and hence, all the discos and hotels and pubs and even the library is in its full mood. Doing a part time course in photography, I am there to take part, in the regular lectures that take part during the course. The timing is also partly weird, starting at 6:30 pm and ending at 8 pm, hence parting me from my usual little tekdi, to the immense pleasure of my Tekdite friends. So then, the route I travel from goes through the whole of karve road, to deccan to fergusson college road and then to FC. I start at quarter to six, and walk to 5 km road, enjoying all the fun that you might experience on the Indian roads. A small mound of mud, right on the road, that “incidentally” gets formed while putting up a fibre optic line, a biscuit wrapper with no biscuits inside, a pamphlet welcoming you to the world of utensils and clothes and food and toys all together in an open ground. A person washing the front of his shop, a guy endlessly trying to convince a gal to go on a date with him, a driver lost in the lanes, a lady with so much clothes that she doesn’t know which way she is heading. A dog, who cant ignore all the beautiful smells from the restaurants, a bird who keeps wondering, where the Hell are all the trees gone, a flutterbly, who wants those nutrients from that dropping in the middle of the road, but is afraid of that fact that it might not get to smell another flower, in some second’s time. All this and many more happenings take place in the small stretch of more or less 5 kms.

Boasting about how tired I am to my friends when I reach college, gives you a pride that no one is as mad as me, to just walk that much distance because he is too tired to go and get his learning license from the dreaded RTO.

So if you, ever decide to walk and conserve that much amount of fuel, do let me know, and we’ll share a few laughs….