The Journey

Sometimes the journey takes up more than one meaning, and the same journey means differently to different people. For some, it’s a journey to their hometown, where their mothers await them with wet eyes, for others, it’s a beginning of a new era of separation. Some carry the excitement of going back to where they belong, and for some, it’s travelling farther and farther, until you can look back.
And then there are others, who just travel for the sake of traveling, and these people are called ‘wanderers’, ‘adventurers’, ‘banjaras’ or what our airlines nickname as ‘frequent fliers’ or what corporates call ‘Consultants’:P The people who get disconnected from everything, slowly and steadily, and become a part of nowhere – the mid-oceans, the train-track, the national highways dust.
While travelling, one goes through a couple of feelings, each one coming at different point of journey and at different intensities. Longer the journey, the more desperate it makes you to reach your destination and the more variety and intensity you experience. As I go back chasing my inner self, trying to attain Maslow’s highest level of motivation, leaving all the four lower levels behind me, challenging his theory, hoping someday I will have one of my own. This level- the highest level is called, self-actualization. To attain it, one needs a lot of courage to question your outer self, the self whom you spent 23 years of life building brick by brick, mortar by mortar.
Going back to my hometown – Ludhiana-the city of cheerful Punjabis, city of woolens and cotton, city with markets flooded with wedding suits and saris, city with people busy eating samosas, gulab jamun from the still- popular college road guy, the city with the highest probability of seeing around businessmen flaunting around their Mercedes, the city carrying black smoke in its air with highest concentration in SO2. Cutting long story short – a proud city with proud citizens – and cutting it shorter – a hometown. I will tell you why, because there exists no city, howsoever small it is, where if any resident starts writing will stop in a fewer praise lines. Because most of us feel an amazing connection with our hometowns that make us believe it is the best, and attract us towards itself knowing the fact that its not as big as the metros we live in, it’s not as fast as metros are (metro cities not the trains). Anyways, coming back to self-actualization – attaining your true inner self. Maslow said that one needs four levels as a pre requisite before attaining the highest level. Well, I respectfully disagree- by which I mean – I would like to achieve it without having fulfilled all my physical desires ( as they will never end, hopefully :P ), which are hunger, thirst, sex,etc. :D . Second, without achieving fame, social acceptance, esteem, pride and ofcourse, money. I would like to show how its done. By it- I mean the attainment of topmost level and not the satisfaction of lower ones :P

To Be Contd....