There was a time, a long time ago when I had a suitcase that was always packed and kept ready to go at short notice. I would come home from some business trip or the other and arrange to get the clothes to be washed out of the suitcase to be replaced by fresh ones from the wardrobe and the suitcase would be immediately ready for another trip.
Since most suitcases coming out of airplanes looked alike, I even had a personal identification belt woven around the suitcase, so that I could quickly offload it from the luggage carousel. Despite such precaution, I have had the mortification of the suitcase being sent off to a destination other than where I was going and having to make do for temporary arrangements till the suitcase could be found and brought back.
My long suffering wife would put up with much of my cranky behaviour whenever I was at home, blaming it on a permanent jet-lag.
Such a life stopped in late 1998 and since then I have travelled almost entirely for pleasure and / or to attend to family matters. I have got out of the habit as it were. Just a few weeks back, I was emptying an old suitcase as part of my simplifying exercise, and found a portable iron, a fully loaded toilet kitbag, a pair of bathroom slippers and an identification belt in it and went back on a nostalgia trip for those bad old days.
Now the situation is entirely different. The last time I thought of a trip to South India to be with my brother who underwent surgery, Ranjan suggested that I do not buy a return ticket as the last few times, I had inevitably advanced the return dates to come back to my comfort zone. I have now become an armchair traveller waiting for some unsuspecting and captive audience to wax eloquent on my travelling days with some gory details of managing rural India without hotels, trains or buses and food that gave me a permanent Irritable Bowel syndrome!
I think that I have earned the right to be such a bore.
This topic was suggested by me for the weekly Friday Loose Bloggers Consortium where currently nine of us write on the same topic every Friday. I hope that you enjoyed my contribution to that effort. The seven other bloggers who write regularly are, in alphabetical order, Ashok, gaelikaa, Lin, Maxi, Padmum, Pravin, Shackman and The Old Fossil. Do drop in on their blogs and see what their take is on this week’s topic. Since some of them may post late, or not at all this week, do give some allowance for that too!
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