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.