My Father’s son.

As a kid I was really young, restless, full of wild ideas and curious to the point of being ridiculous. To seek what lies within, I broke, smashed, untangled, unscrewed and decimated every piece of gadget that my father owned, be it a camera, watch, radio, fridge. Just about anything that ticked or tocked or purred mysteriously. Then at the impressionable age of four (my renaissance), my father did two things that changed my life forever. He bought me a gigantic globe and he took me to the Himalaya. I quite liked kicking and gnawing the plastic ball till he showed me how it was not meant for kicking around the house but it depicted the earth on which we all lived and traveled. He showed me India and some of the main cities. Of course, my birthplace did not find mention on that ball. Then he showed me the oceans and the seas and the continents and told me about the people who lived in those places. Suddenly my curiosity about the world around leaped quantumly from the household gadgets into the realm of the living world. Distant places seemed near since my finger could travel in a blink from China to Chile and even the Pacific depths seemed quite fathomable. I would twirl the globe endlessly on its axis and with eyes shut, put my index finger on any part and make it stop. Then I would open my eyes and see where my finger rested. I would then painstakingly note down the name in my diary under the ‘places to see’ list. In the evening when father huffed and puffed home, atop his German made Phillips bicycle, I would rush out and share my day’s travel with him. If he had the time and was in an amicable mood he would tell me of those places and people. Though I know now that most of what he told me was fabrication of his own imagination, yet they were riveting enough to make my yearning grow exponentially and as the years accumulated travel grew into a passion.