The Blog

Being a part of everything, tiring

I don't know. I think maybe I've been wasting my time, just doing nothing

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One of the battles I frequently find myself in, with myself, is to keep track of all my things. I forget where I put them the moment they leave my hand and when I need them again, I have to go through all possible pockets (pants, bags, wallets, etc) to eventually find them in one place I would have never checked, not even considering it a possibility. I place things so absently that most of the time I can’t even remember that I was carrying them while at the same time I can pull out images from my memory of things my friends can’t find and remind them about it. “yeah I saw your key under the books on your table” or something like that.
It is very frustrating, to be constantly looking for things. My friends who sometimes visit me tell me I am very organized (not true at all) after they have a look at my cupboard and my neatly arranged assortment of wires, batteries, gadgets, etc. This is only because I am constantly looking for them and honestly if I don’t give them a home I will never find them. It’s for my mental stability because it does not matter how many times I spot my scissors in a month, I can never find it when I actually need it.

My family has always made fun of me for this, after they have expressed their disappointment. I have always lost something while traveling, especially something they got me for traveling. This time is no different. So far I have lost the following things:

• My left earphone
• Bottle of lotion
• Chapstick
• Toothpaste (I bought it in Chennai and lost it before reaching home)
• Charger for my watch (unconfirmed but likely)

I don’t know how I do this. I honestly check my bag 5 times before leaving. I was even notified that I have left my earphone, stopped driving while I was on my way to Chennai, unpacked and confirmed that I still have it; only to realies that the notification was for my left earphone after I reached my friend’s home in Chennai. I really want to punch myself.

Hey, this is Anirudh from future for a post writing announcement.
I have found the charger after I finished writing this. Lucky me.

Being on the road and trusting terrible gear, Chennai and more

Having bad, unreliable gear is worse than having no gear at all. The point of having any gear is to make life easy. To think that you can make do with subpar quality or makeshift arrangements is the biggest trap you can fall for. Imagine you want to hike. Fine no problem. Now if you are hiking you might want to camp as well. You start to plan and realize that to camp properly you will need to carry a lot of things: Food, water and warm blankets. You look at your shitty laptop bag and think yeah this will do, which is where things start to go wrong. To fit everything in you carry less food, less water and maybe no blankets. Now you are hungry, thirsty and cold. Next day you are annoyed because you did not have fun. Only if you had looked at your shitty bag and told yourself that camping is not possible with this, you would have had a great hike and come back home. Are you dead? No. Did you have fun? Lmaao.

Trying to carry my luggage on my bike was more or less the same, I relied too much on my shitty bungee cords. I had enough time before leaving to get proper cables and brackets for this task but I fell for the trap. Most of the time while riding, I had to stop every few kilometers and adjust my cables because my bags would start hanging from one side. Things got out of place on the slightest bumps and my shoes were all over the place because I did not think of packing them until I started my journey.

Ropes snapped, and people on the road informed me that my shitty laptop bag is about to fall. Did my stuff truly ever fall off, not really, Was I driving peacefully knowing that my pack is secured and didn’t have to stop every 10 kilometers to check if it is still in place? Lmaao, yeah sure.
I eventually got myself better cables and figured out how to place my bags so that they don’t move. I learned three knots as well (finally!) which REALLY helped. I can’t express enough how much and how quickly my life improved after learning a few basic knots, outside of riding as well. It was something I had wanted to learn for a while. I am not a knot guy yet, but I think I’ll be soon enough.

Horrors of cable managements aside, being on the road was very satisfying. I have been asked if it gets boring. It does at times. Sometimes I see beautiful landscapes after long stretches of talking to myself (helps stay sane and awake). Witnessing them makes me feel it was all worth it, even if it was boring for a while. I sometimes (rarely) stopped and tried to soak them in but it gets really hot in riding gear if you are not actually riding and it’s hard to enjoy them when the sun is slowly cooking you up so the stops were only a minute or two at most. (I also fear that some idiot will hit me if I stop for long which also contributed)

I spent one night in Chennai with a friend. He generously let me stay at his place. We briefly spoke before I passed out due to exhaustion. When I woke up in the evening, we walked down to the beach near his home and spent some time there. I am not a big beach person but I have realized that they are very accessible places to wind down and find some peace time. I feel finding a place to relax in the city is impossible and you have to travel far from it but having a beach next to your home or in your city gives you a space to get away from all the hustle and bustle.
There we spoke how soulless metro cities feel. Concrete monoliths scattered around you, one no different than the other. In beaches you can easily forget those monoliths exist. You see people do normal things. Sit, walk, play, sing, swim. Having fun in their own ways with their families. A sight I rarely get to see in Bangalore. I would have stayed in Chennai longer but my plan required me to be on the road again the next day and reach Ongole.

I stayed for a couple of days in Ongole with my friend’s family. It was a nice time, though slightly unfortunate because I could not speak much to them. They understood some Hindi and I understand no Telgu. I wanted to talk to them about many things but it was difficult to explain my thoughts. Regardless, I felt at home. I ate a healthy amount of dosas, idlis and vadas during my stay and thoroughly went through childhood pictures of my friend.

My only regret is not staying at these places longer, I would have loved to explore Chennai and places around it. I will consider not cramming so many things in a week again for my sanity but I am a terrible planner.

On my last two days of riding I traveled through some of the very remote areas of southern Chhattisgarh. It was beautiful and a little scary at the same time. The region is knows as the “red corridor” because of high naxal activities and though I was not really worried about it, I had no network for about two hours in that region which heightened the sense of things going wrong. Nothing happened though, the worst thing was the road which really did a number on my back.

Diwali and Home

After eight days of riding, I reached home just in time for Diwali. I had stayed back a couple of times (once in Delhi and once in Bangalore) during the holidays since 2022 but now I think that it’s not worth to skip over family time. The opportunity to visit comes only once or twice every year and I have felt guilty for passing up on it in the past.

Luckily, this time my cousins also came home which made it even better. They are really funny, catching up with them and retelling stupid stories of each from our childhood is something that I had missed. I even drove to two different cities (not very far though) and dragged my sisters back home. Not a problem since all of us are more or less unemployed at the moment but it still required some convincing. I spent my time here cooking with my mother, driving around with my cousins and catching up with a few old friends from school, though that didn’t go as expected.

I think all of us (my friends and I), living in different places, have reached that point where it’s difficult to relate with each other. We are still very good friends but I think they don’t really understand things I talk about and I don’t understand what they talk about. I wish it was not like that but I guess there is not much one can do. I think it’s also the fact that you can’t really relate and catch up with your friends in an hour once every year. lmao. Anyway, meeting them is still better than not meeting them and they made me laugh a lot. I really wish I had more time to spend with them.

Post publishing edits

I have been informed that my post had typos. Below are all the edits:

* Fixed: louts to lotus 
* Capitalized: `C` of chapstick 
* Added: `Toothpaste` to list of lost items
* Removed: `'` from `want` in the line `Imagine you want to hike.`
* Fixed: `I did no think of packing them` to `I did not think of packing them`
* Fixed: `realise` to `realized` 
* Fixed: `A sight a rarely get to see in Bangalore.` to `A sight I rarely get to see in Bangalore.`
* Fixed: `I would    have loved to explore Chennai and places around around it.` to `I would have loved to explore Chennai and places around it.`
* Fixed: Chhattisghar to Chhattisgarh
* Fixed: hightened to heightened