GOkarna

So, are you coming or not?
Yes.
So there i was waiting at the KSRTC bus stop, taking my never before evening walk, up and down the bus stand, watching as the irascible conductors, in their khaki uniforms , screamed out the names of the places their buses were headed. I never understood why they would want to do that since when they would, it would be like bullfrogs croaking out their mating calls to unheeding females. As you can imagine, no one really understood their proud croaking. So it was back to scrutinizing the hundreds of boards declaring the thousand destinations in this impossibly crowded country.

After spending a good 30 mins doing just that , Pooja , the girl who thinks the only thing i do is criticize her work apart, calls me and says that they've bought tickets from a private agency somewhere else. (when Sabu gets angry , a volcano erupts somewhere, from an Indian comic character's reactions) .Well, I wasn’t the least perturbed, No sir, I wasn’t , if you happen to ignore Mt.Popacatapetl spewing angry mountains of red, boiling lava. And don’t blame me when her next piece of work, faces the sharpest edge of my mouth.

So I walk to the main road, my heavy bag, drowning me in pain, as my obstinate back made its twisted presence known and cigarette shops on the way denying any knowledge of the mysterious "Ayurvedic tablet" that my friends wanted me to procure unwittingly from the neighborhood shops. I met them at the VRL agency and its man Friday took us through the most cramped side lanes, packed with vehicles, a labyrinth of streets that led us to the mammoth bus.
"I'm so excited", she said.
"Hmmm", I murmured. "I just want to get my sleep till I get there. I’ve been missing nights of sleep".
"What a dampener you are!"
So we left for the unknown Paradise, and settled down in our green seats, with the awkward head rest troubling my back. I shrugged it aside, waiting for my beauty sleep.

But little did I realize that my gift from the road for the night was the power to jump as high as a kangaroo on steroids. It would have been a tremendously joyous occasion during my college high jump competitions, but for now, well, you might say it was a trifle unwanted.

At a point where I could not even distinguish between two mighty jumps off the seat, and as I was up in the air, I pondered over an Ad campaign against the government infrastructure by VRL that read," is Vinay Really Levitating?"
After a sleepless night, of playing frog, hare and kangaroo, and of betting on whose head hits the roof first, we finally reached our destination.
GOKARNA.

The place in the myths where Vinayaka was said to have tricked the demon Ravana into leaving behind a Shiva lingam .In spite of the might exerted by Ravana (Maha Bala), the Shiva lingam stayed fixed, hence the name Mahabaleshwar. The pull exerted by Ravana, is said to have caused the Shiva lingam to resemble the shape of a cow's ear and hence the name Gokarnam.

After a night of loud yelling and cursing using the vilest words possible , a slight faux pas occurred when , as I initiated a conversation with my neighbor I came to know that he was a priest . And blooming praise to the lord, he knew English perfectly well.

The Gokarna town was a gold mine for a photographer and I went crazy with my shutterbug instincts. They all seemed comfortable with it, since the place was infested with foreigners with their small silvery shining digital cameras, anyway . After a good photo op we headed towards om beach , and stopped at a point where the sepulchrous expanse of the gokarna waters smeared itself across our canvas. I on my little flighty adventure, climbed down a steep incline into a menagerie of huts that dotted the path below.

A crowd of firangs, dressed in sarongs and cotton cloth fashioned to resemble nothing ive seen before, yet managing to cover vital parts. The strains of a guitar wafted in the air, and the inevitable thought entered my mind. The ultimate desire of the materialist world had found this solemnly carefree land to fulfill. The aspiration to live free and unhooked, doing whatever one felt like in a country where the judgment of another , did not even begin to matter.

As I walked across, a man passed me, almost oblivious to my existence. He was most likely Aryan, with blond hair and blue eyes, his hair tied in locks in a large crown above his head like a maharashtrian petha, its gold flecks glistening among the dirty brown, and a few dreaded locks flicking onto his face. His face was premature with hard angles for jaws, yet sparse and puberty-ish hair sprinkled forth from them. There was no age to him, and he seemed aged yet adolescent at the same time. He seemed peaceful and seemed not to care about my presence.

As I peeped around I noticed that these huts had walls which were made of hard weaved cane. Inside were mosquito nets that straddled mattresses placed on the floor. A candle lay half melted beside it. The mud floor was absolutely barren otherwise, exposing the frugality they imposed upon themselves in search of a life without deadlines and communication, privacy and detachment. As I headed back up , choosing a slightly steeper slope, intending to challenge myself since the josh was unable to escape, I saw the same man again.

Now he had stripped to the basics. He now wore only white silk underwear that barely covered his vitals. He stood there in the clearing, is head straight and arms by his side, a curled snake upon his head. The sun peeped in through gaps in the trees. His white body gleamed and shined and seemed to acquire a particular luminescence that I cannot ascribe to anything I have ever seen. Slowly he raised his arms, moved his body slowly, almost trying to feel every bit of it as he moved. Slowly, almost agonizingly he moved, and I watched and could not get myself to believe that I was there, I such a holy corner of the incredibly culturally fortified India, watching this celebration of the senses by a supposed intruder, who believed and acted as he wished. I somehow found peace in it, like I have just picked a grain of sand among the drivel that lies on a city road, unbelonging yet, somehow comforting.

We resumed climbing upwards in the general direction of the highest point from where we could survey the entire sea. We passed a man, disheveled and intoxicated who from the corner of his mouth, muttered as if he were speaking to the warts on his sole, “Ganja chahiye kya?”
It was almost like I didn’t hear him, and yet I knew it was that he said. I still could not attribute it to him as he sat there smoking his Gold Flake, looking like he never uttered a word all this time, and was just sitting there like a mouse. One should always believe the more than clichéd phrase, practice makes perfect, or when it is apparent there can be nothing better than it.

The afternoon swept on, discovering new heights and protruding rocks from which to view the magnificent ocean. Finally we settled down on a low promontory of rocks that extended into the sea. They were completely covered with small white tufts of hair like threads that imparted to it a kind of softness, a pattern that meandered with the undulating rocks.

A friend of mine, slightly on the healthy side of plump,( this is me banking on the fact that my blog is read only by one tall , lanky guy who happens to connive in its making) refused to make her way down to the rocks. Such were the times for which the Adidas tagline comes in handy. “Impossible is nothing”. Unfortunately I had the grave displeasure of finding out the reason why television lines are best kept to television.

And if you were an adrenaline junkie-trekker-athlete, trying to convince a girl whose t-shirt read ‘By the time I’ll be thin, fat will be in’, to climb up or down a hill, you would need a damn good reason to do that and then an ambulance to try shove back the hand she ripped off you.
Once my hand was back on, we sat at the edge of the rocks. Now, another friend Rebana, was the more adventurous version of Virginia Woolf, and she sat at the extreme edge of the moss covered wet, slippery rocks, seemingly waiting for a bitter end. Incredibly before I could say anything, A wave, probably enraged by human proximity, leapt up, grabbed her and pulled her
into its gaping mouth.

In a moment she was inside, sucked into its eddies, churned a bit, and for a second she disappeared under. I, sat there stunned not moving when she was pulled in. The moment I lost sight of her in the water, my mind flashed a message to my body to move, to jump in . And before my body could react to it, it was like the water, in distaste, spat her out. Her hand reached out, a form heading towards me. Suddenly I was holding her hand, the tightest I’ve held anyone before, squeezing the blood from her wrist, yet she was slowly slipping and I was clenching it harder. Absurdly, she began laughing or crying, I still have no idea, since I was more preoccupied with trying to haul her up. That close shave , she cherished somehow, I could see her revelling in it. A near death experience. In a world of the experiential this beats them all. And I almost envy her. Almost.