There was a secret reason for undertaking this trip, one that was so close to my heart and so deep within my subconscious mind that I forgot about it in my waking moments. I had a nomadic childhood, both in terms of how much my parents moved around the country and how much I moved within my wild imaginations. And my earliest memory is of me looking at photographs of faraway mountains and sinking into them. That kid is who I am, deep within the tension and the turmoil on the surface. They say you must remember who you are before you begin to write. It centers you, and you write from your core. But what I am is many things. Which one do I hold on to? There are too many mes in me. I love balance and dualities, paradoxes and ironies – I love symmetry - and so I notice them. But the more I notice them, the more they act on me and fuel my two sides. Which one do I listen to? Each one of me argues an opposite view, and I stand and listen to the raging dialog that wreaks havoc inside me. Am I the storm? Am I the constellation of mes? Or am I the listener? I must be - I've always heard. But I've fallen in love with my own voice, and there is no greater sin for a listener and greater risk for a writer.
I tire sometimes; my feet drag heavily and my legs bleed over the sharp edge of knife-blade that I walk on, always divided, balancing two opposing sides of me. Some nights there are two voices inside me. Two opinions always. It is exhausting to live this way - with two thoughts and two ideologies and two laws and two morals. It is exhausting to live with two of my selves, and therefore, by extension, to live with only half of myself. I know how to want someone with only half of myself. I know how poisonous it is to the whole. This I am scared to admit. This I am scared to voice out loud. Because there is a deep cave in the oceans of my mind where I know all purpose and reason and secrets and rules lie hidden, and from there comes a thought that tells me that all my poisons and demons are born from this head-splitting duality, and these are the beings that teach me to write. And I don't want to not write.
My earliest memory is of me sitting on the sofa in my aunt's house on a humid Chennai evening, resting an Indian Railways catalogue against my knees, and looking at the pictures of faraway, monochrome places with magical names like Nainital and Darjeeling and Sonamarg. The catalogue hinted at ways of reaching them, hinted at their proximity and their distance in kilometers and in days, and in the number of trains one would have to change. The photographs hinted at the idea of standing there, at the foothill a of nameless, snow-capped mountain; they hinted at the ease and the possibility and hinted, at the way I could reach out through the photograph and touch the mountain; and I remember a profound sadness filling me, capturing me, silencing all thought and reason, and I remember sobbing, silently, uncontrollably; thick drops of tears smudging the ink and the mountains and the numbers, because I couldn't see any way in which it was possible for me to stand in front of the mountain; I was too small to move to something so enormous. I couldn't see how it was normal, how it wasn't an absolute punishment, a suffocation and strangulation, that it was possible for something as beautiful as that mountain to exist at the same simultaneous moment of my existence so far away from it. I couldn't understand, couldn't wrap my head around how something could exist without me being present in front of it; that something could exist without me.
The turmoil of the two 'mes' suddenly dies when I think back to this moment, because this is where I was, and this is where I am. This is where the two of me were born, in the inescapable vacuum of being separate from something. I cried that day not because I wanted to see that mountain, but at the terrifying shock that I wasn't that mountain. When did we separate and move so far away from each other?
I carry this moment with me like a talisman. This memory is my anchor. There are moments of insanity over stark nights and days when my insides are divided and are shred into two and I don't know which way to turn to, and I cure these flirtations with madness with my talisman. Insanity seduces me, and I am scared to write those words down and allow them to form a sentence, but there it is. And now that I've said it and written it perhaps they will come back to haunt me; or perhaps, in this release they will stop haunting me. But for now, I am me, and there are no opposing voices. I still carry the pain of that separation with me, and on long winter afternoons I stare at the gathering clouds, and I wish I could sprout wings and fly to them, fly through them, and lose myself in clouds and clouds so the earth is not visible anymore and perhaps then I will feel united again with these beings; these beings I feel a kinship with. In the silence of deep woods, with birdsong rising and falling in echoes, in the presence and the gravity of a mountain, in the vastness of the sea, in the illusions of mist, in the playful games of clouds, in the music of thunder, in the evanescence of lightning, in the poetry of rain, all pain and memory and people and moments disappear. I forget who or what I am. I cannot merge into the cold rock wall of a mountain, not yet, but to be in the radius of its presence is a shuddering comfort. This is why I travel.
There was another reason for undertaking the trip. It was an instinctual, primal motive – a deep-seated, singularly-human desire to discover the purpose - of life. And the answer I’ve found to this question is that there is no single answer – there is no single explanation that will answer the myriad questions that the many permutations of human consciousness generate. However, a new clarity is rising. What is absolutely clear is that the purpose of life is not in the mere and the routine, in the instincts of survival and reproduction, in the blind following of the impulses of nature. The real purpose is to find a way to become immortal through the instincts that are one step above the ones driven by nature – instincts like art, love and compassion, care, curiosity and laughter, play, intelligence and adventure. The purpose is to live life increasingly awake to every moment, to forever learn, to travel, to change, to evolve, to unlearn things taught by nature that are no longer relevant to the nature of today, to forever remain curious, to thirst for knowledge, to feel and to breathe, and to most importantly live an immortal life before dying a mortal death. To live on in the hearts of men and women in an elemental state – to know that beyond death I will no longer be me, but perhaps I’ll be a memory, a moment played out behind closed eyes, an emotion swimming in the blood of a person, or a lingering kiss; in other words – To be without being, to exist without existing.
My final reason for undertaking this journey – for undertaking any journey – is to exist enthralled in that fragile state between being and becoming. I am in love with journeying, with the idea of travel, with discoveries I make in the physical and the mental realms. I travel to remain motionless – to observe everything as it whizzes past. I travel to arrive finally, at myself.
All these experiences - all the dusty miles and the rainy nights and campfires and journeys, all the sadness and joy of moments and family, friends and lovers, all loss and gain - these are forces that teach us to live with intensity. To live with intensity. To live life blooded with passion. More and more I feel certain that we are here to learn to live this way, because we need to understand what it is to live with such concentration. More and more I feel certain that this is the purpose of the soul - learning and unlearning - because each of us, in our experience of life on earth, are tiny mirrors that reflect this knowledge back to some mysterious entity that we all connect to so that it can piece together an understanding of all existence.
Nothing in the universe will deny you your cry for a better life. Nothing in the universe will ignore it. When you look up from the depths of your sorrow and scream for a rope to be sent down, a ladder shall descend that ascends to touch the light of stars. This hope is the very essence of humanity. It comes rushing from the recognition of the soul that things could be better, that you deserve better, that you yourself could be better – a better singer, a better doctor, a better accountant, a better person. What use is a life that does not crave perfection? Are we allowed to be human and listless? No! This gift of life, this cognition of consciousness and conscience should not be squandered in the maddening rush that life has become whi
ch blinds us from those recognitions. We are children souls playing a game of curiosity looking for clues in the perfection of our backyard universe, piecing them together like a jigsaw puzzle hoping to stumble upon a mystic god. This pursuit, this singular effort to connect our most sacred being with something beyond and infinite, is the pursuit of microseconds of absolute perfection that we blessedly experience in the practice of art. Art is the divinity in man. It seeks only perfection. And perfection is the art in divinity. Art is the slow uncovering of seconds from seconds until that one second is revealed where you find yourself eyes closed but face-to-face with the entire multiverse, with the whole of creation staring back at you, and you resonate with it for that one precious moment like the notes of a guitar that fall upon each other like waves fall upon waves, indistinctly separate, indistinctly singular.
This massive understanding fills my presence these days. It defines everything that makes me. It is an intuitive understanding that comes from staring at mountains. It comes from destroying your old self and piecing it back together, leaving behind things you don’t like about yourself. It comes from liking yourself. It comes from the long and un-ending journey of discovering yourself. I tell myself, more and more, that there is an unending depth to us and we’ll find that out as soon as we begin to scratch the surface of our being. I tell myself never to come to the conclusion that I know myself completely. We are as vast as the multiverse, and the great gift of life is that we are given time first to become friends with ourselves, and then allowed to explore our own enigma and our depths. This exploration gives us beauty, gives us strength, gives us intuition.
All of this has been about me – this entire book. It has been about me discovering myself, and you’ve listened patiently, for which I am grateful. My words have been directions to my soul. Each paragraph is a landmark to the space my soul inhabits. Slowly, with enough words, I will arrive there where my soul resides. My intention has been to draw you a map to my soul, because this has also been about you; because in the way words fall upon words, you would have encountered some words and some paragraphs that may have evoked in you a sense of familiarity. You would have felt a pang of nostalgia as you realized that you have seen some roads and some landmarks in this map. You may have felt a familiarity of both thought and feeling, in which you must have nodded enthusiastically as you realized you have been through the same terrifying vertigo I have been through, that you have thought about things that way I think about things. You may have said to yourself – I’ve been this way before! That familiarity, that nostalgia that sparked in you in that moment of empathy, is an indication of the proximity of your own soul. Search nearby, and you will find it. We – you and I – are closer now than before we started.
Rohit Karthik Nalluri
Mysore
05.01.2014
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Thank you.
Rohit Karthik Nalluri
Connect with the Author
Thank you for reading The Anatomy of Journey. I really hope you enjoyed it. If you want to say 'hi', drop me a note about the book, or plan a road trip with me, here are my social media co-ordinates:
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About the Author
Rohit Karthik Nalluri is an author and poet residing in Mysore, India. His upbringing in various states of India provides him a unique perspective and insight into the many cultures of the country, an ability with languages and an unquenchable wanderlust. When he is not writing, he is reading, riding, traveling, singing in the shower or smelling the pages of old books. In the year since he published this book, he has diversified into designing and creating his own 3D Printer, videos of which you can see on his website. When he is not doing any of these things, he is (reluctantly) working in the IT industry. He has worked with companies like IBM, Sony and Wipro.
Other works by the Author
A Rain of Songs [A collection of poems]
Manifestations [A collection of short stories]
In Contemplation [A collection of Haiku]
Upcoming Novels:
The Foot of the Centaur series:
Foot of the Centaur I: Seven Wonders
The Anatomy of Journey Page 46
