Quest for life

Sometimes I wonder what is it that makes people travel. Is it the natural curiosity to see other places, an urge to find what lies beyond familiar surroundings, better prospects in comparison with the current situation, need for a change, boredom, attraction of unknown, or in modern times it can also be a reason to boast amungst friends. People have different reasons to travel. Some travel to explore the world, find out about the unknown or unfamiliar things. Learning about new things is like being a child again. New things and alien cultures can surprise you and enrich your experiences. Trying new things and meeting new people expands awareness and makes you a more accepting person.  Some people travel to get away from the routine. They want to unwind and travel brings that much needed break to rejuvenate. They escape their daily lives for some period by traveling and it does give their mind and body a boost required to live a healthy life. Such people reduce stress and gain

Recently met a very charming French lady and we started talking about her travel experiences in India. She is a well traveled lady. I have also had few foreign travel experiences and although my ex-boss keeps teasing me about my travels saying that I have wings on my feet I feel that I do not travel enough. I should be in Modi's team to be considered well traveled:). I keep hoping PMO will call me and consider me to be part of the team:) ! Anyhow, back to the French lady and her experiences. While talking about our experience of different places and different cultures we started talking about stereotypes. We both agreed that stereotypes do exist and some of them are fairly common to that particular culture. Hence Stereotypes can be taken as fairly typical of various cultures. This can be a fairly offensive statement for few die hard liberal people who think that we can't generalize people and nations like that. Intellectuals may consider it too simplistic to believe in stere

Recently, one guy told me that when he was a child he used to race with the rains. As soon as he said that I could picture a lanky dark guy in loose cotton shirt and shorts, barefoot, racing with rains and enjoying this pleasurable shower on his face and body and caring about nothing but following the direction of the rains. For those who have never seen tropical rains in the mountains it would be difficult to picture this but for those of us who have seen sheets and sheets of rain changing directions with the winds know that racing rains can be fun. When the rain is pouring and you can see it changing directions or speeding to one side or the other, children do race the rains. Have you noticed that as we loose childhood and innocence we also loose the ability to enjoy being in the moment and behaving carefree as we did when we did race the rains. Children have this amazing quality to live in the present. For them the concept of time is mostly defined by their ability to enjoy the p