It’s not the dream, it’s the drive

Those days, we kids couldn’t drive cars with a tap on a mobile phone. So, what did I do? 

I took my trusty tricycle to a corner of the house next to two windows, and tilted it. One of the two rear wheels was the steering. The window in the front was the windscreen, the other my side window. I leaned out with a hand signal at every ‘turn’. There were also those dramatic vroom-vroom and screeching-brake sounds. It was all in my head, but it felt so real.

Even today, when I’m actually at the wheel of my car, it’s those images that fill my mind.

Dreams are the map and the destination. They are somewhere far away, and urge us to keep going. They pull us along.

Back when we were growing up, we were asked, “What’s your ambition?” We had our favourites; mine was 'train driver'. Decades later, for my son it was 'astronaut'.

HOW THEY EVOLVE

Dreams aren’t static. They change with time. My father listening to the news on All India Radio (now Akashwani), quietly kindled another dream in me. I pictured myself “right where the news happens”, and being part of all those big and small moments I heard about on the radio. 

When I used to tell my friends what I had heard in the news, I was in fact well and truly on my journey to the destination, though I hadn’t realised it then. I made it in due course. Maybe not as a foreign correspondent, as I had fancied, but surely as someone who was always close to words and stories; even today.

It’s rarely just one dream. It’s many; one leading to the other. For a tennis player, it's playing in a Grand Slam. Then, it's winning just one. Then, it's aiming for more. 

For me, it was initially the dream of driving. I let it grow from tricycles to cars, from storytelling to journalism.

THE PLEASURE OF CHASING IT

There are still plenty of dreams. They don’t end, do they? But what I have learned is: it’s not really about the dream as a shiny trophy locked away in a glass case. It’s about the journey: the hope, detours, tiny moments, those emotions.

They don’t have a form. They can’t be displayed for everyone to see. But that’s what gives the journey its colour, and fills the heart, as you look through the windscreen, imagined or real. 

They are actually bigger than the dreams!

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From office deadlines to travel timelines

I've always loved to travel, but while I was working, it was a challenge. Getting time off was tough, and even when I did, it was usually for only a few days. The thought of returning to the office was always on my mind.

Now that I'm retired, I have all the time in the world. In June I did a two-week tour of four places in Maharashtra, and the next month it was a road trip through Kerala.

THE WAY I TRAVEL HAS CHANGED

While on our way back from Mangaluru to Bengaluru in 2019

When I was working, any trip that lasted more than a day was usually by flight to save leave days. Now, it’s by train. I don’t mind however long the journey is.

Train travel requires a lot of advance planning. Bookings open 60 days in advance, and, unless you plan that many days ahead, chances of getting a ticket are slim.

The IRCTC website and app are good enough. Some third-party apps are helpful if you are waitlisted. They use AI to predict how probable it is to get a reservation against cancellation.

A few months ago, while planning my trip to Maharashtra, I hit a snag. My original plan was to visit Pune, Thane, Shirdi, and Sambhaji Nagar (Aurangabad), starting and ending in Bengaluru. But I realised there wasn't a direct train from Sambhaji Nagar to Bengaluru, so you'd have to go back to Pune. This made no sense. So, I reversed my plan: Bengaluru - Pune - Sambhaji Nagar - Shirdi - Thane - Bengaluru.

My seven trips abroad were solo official ones. Two personal trips, and the domestic ones have been with family. While some people love to go solo, others hate them. I'm flexible. Both have their pros and cons.

GETTING READY TO GO

The build-up to a trip is always exciting! The bookings for travel and accommodation, getting and packing the essentials like clothes, toiletries, first-aid kit, and ensuring adequate cash, though there is always the option of online. For foreign trips, it's a travel card and forex. If it’s multiple cities, then the entire sequence has to be planned to make the most of the time.

Before a trip, I do my research. I used to travel without much preparation and would later regret all the things I missed. Reading up on a place doesn't spoil the surprise; it only enhances the experience. Being there in person is still a whole different ball game with its own surprises.

I'm not a big fan of shopping. If I buy something, it's a unique souvenir or memorabilia. I especially love collecting fridge magnets or something that represents the place's unique character.

At the Museum of Goa in 2018

I always carry a book, either a physical one or an e-book, especially if I'm travelling alone. However, I rarely get a chance to read. My days are packed. I'm usually out by 7 or 8 a.m., visiting as many places as possible, and I'm back at the hotel by 7 p.m., exhausted. There's hardly any energy left for reading or listening to music, leave alone watching TV in the hotel room!

I don't make playlists or shopping lists, but I do create a "tour list" on Google Maps. I save places of interest to this list. It's incredibly helpful because it gives me a visual picture of which place is where. This makes trip planning much easier.

WHY I TRAVEL

The biggest reason I travel is to learn about local customs, traditions, languages, food, and landscapes. India is so vast, and each of its 28 states and eight union territories is incredibly diverse and multi-cultural. I still have 11 states and four union territories left to visit. Hopefully, I will get there soon!

This post is part of the Blogchatter Blog Hop

My favourite places are historical monuments and museums. They put the present in historical context and help me better understand the world around me. I also love landscapes, beaches, and mountains. They are great for taking photos and are perfect for relaxing and unwinding.

Travel is more than just a break from the monotony of daily life. It's a brand new experience that broadens our understanding of people, places, and cultures. 

There's a well-known quote attributed to the American writer Henry Miller: “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” He believed our perspective, not the place itself, shapes our experience.

This is why you don't always need to travel far. Our own neighbourhoods often hold surprising treasures just waiting to be discovered!

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The spirit of sports and games

Leave alone Insta and TikTok, there wasn’t even television then. There weren’t T20s or ODIs, either. There were only the five-day Test matches, and we, a bunch of cricket-crazy friends in school, kept track of the scores by listening to radio commentaries. For that, we even had to learn the numerals in Hindi from zero to 100, since the commentaries were alternately in English and Hindi.

India registered its first Test win overseas in Dunedin,
New Zealand, in 1968. Photo credit: Indiatimes

There was no need for TV. The descriptions of commentators like Anand Setalvad, Suresh Saraiya (he frequently used the phrase ‘as well’), Sushil Doshi, Ravi Chaturvedi, J P Narayan, Jasdev Singh, Skand Gupta, Akash Lal, Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi (mostly as an expert commentator), Murali Manohar Manjul, and others were so vivid that we could visualise the match in our minds.

There was also the famous team of BBC Radio's Test Match Special commentators: Brian Johnston, Don Mosey, Henry Blofeld, Christopher Matin-Jenkins, etc. TMS still there on BBC Radio, but it's not available online -- on YouTube or radio apps -- for overseas listeners because of rights restrictions.)    

I even had a pocket transistor, which probably came in the late 1970s or early 1980s. When a portable transistor radio itself was a piece of wonder (the earlier valve radios were so big one couldn’t even lift them easily), the fact that we could carry a small version in our pockets was simply unthinkable!

WINDOW TO THE WORLD

We knew not only where Dunedin is located but also how the word is pronounced! We also became familiar with places like Old Trafford, Port of Spain, and islands such as Antigua, Trinidad and Tobago. We learned what a county in England is. (These are all places where India play cricket matches.)

We even picked up the time difference between India and various cities of the world, including the one-hour gap between local time in England and GMT. Cricket taught us a lot of geography, in fact.

When India won the World Cup in 1983 (a clichéd topic now), the headline in The Hindu was “India at the pinnacle of glory”. I didn’t know what the word pinnacle meant. I looked it up in the dictionary and learned a new word.

All thanks to cricket.

SPORTS AT SCHOOL

In Sainik School, Kazhakootam, Thiruvananthapuram, where I studied, sports and games are compulsory. Cricket, football, hockey, basketball, volleyball, tennis – all of them. Besides, there were athletics like short- and long-distance running, hurdles, high jump, long jump, pole vault, and also boxing, gymnastics, and cross-country races.

Though I have done them all as part of the school curriculum, my favourites still are tennis, cricket, hockey, badminton, and athletics, though of course I follow other games as well.

The feeling one gets during and after a match or event is one of accomplishment – of having pushed oneself to the limit and given one’s best. It often surfaces in the form of beads of sweat running down the body. The tiredness is strangely relaxing as well as invigorating.

MORE THAN JUST A GAME

Sports and games are not just about the competition. They teach soft skills such as perseverance, endurance, teamwork, camaraderie, and, most importantly, sporting spirit. We pick them up while playing.

Sportspeople put in so much hard work through gruelling training schedules. They are constantly trying to do better and better, forever. Some of them have had surgeries, raised families, battled mental health issues, and yet returned to training and worked their way back on to the field. After all that, they have shown amazing agility and athleticism, and gone on to win matches.

Hats off to their indomitable spirit. Sports and sports personalities are truly inspiring.

THE PAIN OF DEFEAT

P T Usha misssed a bronze in 400 m hurdles by
one-hundredth of a second in the 1984 Los Angeles
Olympics. Photo source: Getty Images/Olympics.com

If, after all the hard work, it was a win, it was all hunky-dory. But when it was a loss – and worse, when the margin of defeat was the narrowest – that was never easy to reconcile with.

Imagine days, weeks, months, and years of hard work not bearing the fruit one dreamt of. One famous instance that comes to mind is the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, when India’s PT Usha missed the bronze by one-hundredth of a second in the 400 metres hurdles. That was the narrowest miss one can think of. Yet her timing of 55.42 seconds was a national record.

(Unlike now, in those days, our teams didn’t win so many medals at international events. So, you can imagine how disappointed we were with Usha missing a bronze in the Olympics.)

Sports and games teach us the golden rule: be gracious in defeat, applaud the winner, and move on.

A rule applicable to every aspect of life.

GROWING OLDER, STAYING INSPIRED

This post is part of the Blogchatter Blog Hop

Today, age has caught up with me. I can barely do 20%, or at most 30%, of the intense physical activities I once could in my younger days. That’s a reality I have learned to come to terms with.

But I haven’t given up on following sports and games on TV – whether live action or, when I miss them, the highlights.

They continue to infuse in me so much positivity and energy – to always do my best and move on.

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The city that went back in time

There wasn’t anything unusual that night.

There was heavy rain. That was normal here, in the city of Ruganuleb, during this season. The bustle of traffic had slowly faded as the night crept in.

But there was something unusual the next morning.

AI-generated image

Though the overnight rain had stopped and daylight was gently streaming in, not all the lights in the house were switching on. The few that did had very dim brightness.

As always, I switched on the Wi-Fi and mobile internet on my phone. Neither worked.

Had someone switched off the router? No. But not all the lights on the router were blinking.

For all the 5G connectivity that internet service providers boast about, this is what I get in the morning! Hopefully, it will be fine soon.

Perhaps yesterday’s rain had wreaked havoc overnight. Let me check the news channels on TV.

Oh! The TV runs on Wi-Fi. No hope there.

Radio? None of the stations were playing.

What’s happening? It looks like some real havoc.

My first thought was to call someone on the mobile, but that was out of the question.

I opened the apartment door and stepped out. A few of my neighbours were already outside, looking puzzled.

Everyone had the same question: why is nothing working? No one seemed to have an answer.

THE FIRST DAY OF BREAKDOWN

One of the engineer-neighbours called it a major CTF (Connectivity Tech Failure). It looked like all connected devices had stopped working.

There was electricity, but the voltage was low. Water was still flowing in the taps.

Could it be a cyberattack?

No one knew whether only this city was affected or if the whole country was under the same shadow.

A few people with landlines tried calling friends in other cities. The calls didn’t go through.

By 9 a.m., when I was about to drive to the office, I was warned that none of the traffic lights were working, and that there was chaos on the roads. Better to stay at home.

But what about office then? What about the project I had to send to Helsinki?

Work from home? Impossible — no way to inform my colleagues, my manager, or anyone at all.

I parked the car back. People were gathering outside on the streets, still whispering about a possible cyberattack. But by whom?

By evening, the situation was clearer — and grimmer. Still no mobiles, no radio, no television. News travelled only by word of mouth.

Children stayed home. Parents didn’t risk sending them to school.

A college student in our building walked the 2 km to his campus. He reported chaos on the streets. Offices were open but not working.

No trains. No flights. The city had virtually come to a standstill.

AFTER A WEEK

Friends and relatives showed up at our doorstep unannounced (no way to contact us). They were curious about the strange blackout. From them we learnt the truth: the “connectivity tech failure” was only in Ruganuleb. The rest of the country was unaffected.

Their mobiles too stopped working the moment they entered the city.

One friend showed me a news clip from YouTube he had downloaded. It said engineers were trying to restore the network, but each time one section was fixed, another went down.

It was as if a virus had invaded the system, one they could not trace or neutralise.

This was a pandemic of a different kind.

During Covid, people kept apart out of fear. Now, there was no fear — but plenty of confusion.

At least during Covid we knew the cause. This time, no one knew why Ruganuleb alone was suffering such a collapse. Even the best global experts had failed to fix it.

TWO WEEKS ON

A friend drove five hours to his company’s branch in Nehncai. He couldn’t find space in the office, so he worked from his friend’s house instead.

AI-generated image

Schools and colleges reopened slowly. Bus services returned in a limited way.

Traffic lights still didn’t work, so policemen stood at busy junctions, directing vehicles — like in the old days.

Radio and TV stations were trying to revert to older systems. Not easy, but maybe in a few weeks.

Newspapers returned. That was now the only source of news — even old news was welcome!

Ruganuleb had become the biggest story in the country; and the world.

Rumours spread — a cyberattack, nature’s way of restoring balance, it was supposed to happen as predicted in a “What the Stars Say” column.

AFTER A MONTH

They say every adversity is an opportunity. During Covid, we discovered remote working and institutionalised WFH. This time, the breakdown pushed us in the opposite direction.

People met face to face. Families sat together for meals. Children played cricket, football, and badminton outdoors, even basketball with improvised hoops on trees.

No UPI payments. Only cash.

Banks brought cash in from other cities. Special counters opened, with queues forming from 7 a.m.

Cinemas were shut, as there were no projectors or reels. Some even began searching for old 70 mm projectors.

The good news: landline phones began functioning again, in phases.

AFTER TWO MONTHS

This post is part of the Blogchatter Blog Hop

It was a whole new life. Had we adjusted? Yes. Easier than during Covid.

Tourists began arriving, curious to see life without devices. They stayed with friends, relatives, or in hotels, and went back with tales of wonder and resilience.

Word of mouth became Ruganuleb’s new advertisement: Come here to experience life from 50 years ago!

But was a solution found?

No.

The Head Minister of the State held a press conference, not to promise restoration but to celebrate Ruganuleb’s new global fame.

For the first time, a city’s population decreased because people left in search of better opportunities.

Here, tourism replaced technology as the government’s top priority.

Plans were even announced to give residents identity cards and to introduce visa-like permits for outsiders, to preserve the city’s new “non-tech” environment.

SIX MONTHS LATER

The Head Minister and the the city's Chief Administrative Officer declared that all efforts to restore connectivity had officially been abandoned.

A new city had been born.

Even if there was a "virus" in the system, they said, it would have “starved to death” by now.

“This may or may not have been a cyberattack,” the Head Minister announced. “But it is surely a change for the better. And we are glad for it.”

Welcome to Ruganuleb — the city that turned back the clock.