Laterite streets, Face masks and Supari

FACE MASKS:

Holier than thou...

Architect Sam examining the craftsmanship of the masks used in Naman, a festival of Holi.

The whole range

LATARITE PATHS

reds and blues

Fluorescent moss

Location:

Jakadevi, Maharashtra 415620

https://maps.app.goo.gl/hYidoeZnxWbmvuCd6

A slow start

The recent times have been quite overwhelming for everyone, the world around. Enough has been written and expressed and finally it comes down to individual perceptions of the context. Our perception and beliefs have been quite contradictory to most and we do not wish to offend anyone in the porcess... but we strongly believe that Covid-19 has been successful in infecting a mass mindset with fear and paranoia, has been successful in infecting communities with distrust, has widened the chasm of us and them (doesn't matter who-us and who-them). It is nothing but a rechristening of an existing disease. The reasons why as a nation we blindly chose to follow the rest of the world in stupid, impractical mantras of social distancing, mindless mask wearing and lock-downs is anybody's guess. Clever people have made the most of the paranoia and continue to do so. It is an ideal situation for people in power where without much effort there is prevalent division and distrust amongst populace and the

Our trip was postponed by a month and a half. In June we quietly left for Mulshi and have been living a blissful farm life ever since. 

Sunset at Ratnagiri

Our Architect friend Sam, moved to Ratnagiri years back and every time we are passing by we make it a point to stop by and engage in off the beaten topics conversations.

Our Isuzu

Motorcycle was our primary choice as a mode of travel. Motorcycles by default induce slowness - the pure discomfort of riding through inner roads force you to keep speed slow,  enjoy the journey, take frequent stops, interact with people. The inability to hoard stuff gives you a chance to ask profound questions of how much is enough and of actually letting go. It makes you vulnerable, dependent on the surrounding and makes you approachable to every class/caste/kind of populace. The most important of all is that if offers no barrier between the riders and the landscape, each waft of breeze, the smallest drop in temperature, the smallest bump on the road, every passing smell and sound is perceived and linked to the experience of the place. The memory of the journey, of a place then encompasses all of this.

However, with Arzaan a motorcycle was impractical and unsafe. The next choice was a jeep and we spent literally a year and a half trying and testing all affordable jeeps. Jeep got us hooked on to the idea of all wheel drive and trying off-roading. What a motor bike could achieve purely by its size and nimbleness was achieved at a different level by the 4x4s. We were not limited to follow the already driven paths. This opened up the world of pick-ups and tempos. At one point in our mental journey we designed an entire fold-out house on the tempo traveler. To cut it short, we settled on Isuzu D max pick up - a bit of luxurious choice and seemingly going against all our principles of non-hoarding and being accessible. But in the last year of driving it around we have seen the plus side of it. It fits in a lot many people and we end up giving rides to random people as well as on few occasions to cattle along the way, making many more friends and breaking barriers.

And so our journey begins in mid-April amongst the panic struck environment of Corona virus. An unplanned journey with undecided destinations and routes, hopefully lasting a lifetime. People seem to get extremely unsettled when we tell them that we have no idea where we would go and when we would be back. The idea of an unknown future is discomforting. The ultimate question that leaves us dumbstruck is Why? Why are you taking up this journey? Is there a message, is there an assignment, is it a world tour? Their discomfort is compounded when we say that there is no reason behind the journey. What about Arzaan's education - well the journey itself should be enough an education. What about your sustenance? We have enough to survive first few months and then we will wing it, that would be the real journey - of rediscovering the idea of sustenance, of earning. There are many questions that we want to ponder over - will write as we come across them.

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The beginnings

A thought of living a life on the road, a nomadic life, was born out of our 2010 motorcycle trip when we spent 3 months traveling through the country on internal roads avoiding urban areas, state and national highways and hotels. We spent our nights at dharamshalas, masjids, gurudwaras, at random people's homes and at times under canopies of nice trees. A life as an unplanned journey - discoveries at every turn, nudging and questioning our every belief, pushing our boundaries of comfort and tolerance and above all, getting lost. A decade has past since our 2010 trip. This time around the journey is meant to be life long and with Arzaan - our 7 year old son who shows us how to walk into the unknown without a safety net. 

Living in a city like Mumbai consumes you into its speed and continual action - most times unnecessary. We make our life complex, complicated in a city - and very soon loose our firm foothold on the most basic, simple meanings of existence. We keep ourselves immersed in seemingly important work, juggle multiple lives - quite gracefully most times, try and balance passions of 'want to' with an every day 'have to', steep ourselves in intellectual debates, thought provoking conversations, plan for immediate and distant future... and in all this we forget to stop, breathe and literally do nothing. Doing nothing is extremely difficult - Marzban and I gave up all our commitments (well almost) since last 3 months and every day we caught ourselves taking up new ones, however small, almost instinctively - unconsciously. If nothing else we would indulge ourselves in pure recreation of meeting friends, eating out, movies, concerts and finally take refuge in mindless browsing of the net. We tried consciously for a week to see what does it mean to detach, detach ourselves from all our habits and mindless actions and what does it mean when we purge all thoughts, all pre-conceived notions of should-would, all actions, but the speed at which the city moves around us does not allow stillness of any sort, it took us in to its whirling instantaneously. So the idea of moving away from a place of action to a place of stillness. Slow was by default, as much a verb as an adjective.