Taking the scenic route...

My most memorable recollection of a travel story is probably the first time I traveled alone. I was in seventh grade and the beginning of my summer holidays had me buzzing with excitement. I could not wait to meet all my eleven cousins and goof around. But unlike every year, this time my family did not get together in my house and instead decided to meet in my uncle’s place in Kolar. This was great news to me as I had never visited the place before but the not so great news came to me the very next day when my parents told me that they had to travel to Shivmoga and could not take me to Kolar. But I was one tough cookie and there was no way I was missing out on the get together. And so after three days of dealing with my angry outbursts and tantrums, my parents agreed to let me travel to Kolar, in a train, alone.

         I remember feeling ecstatic and just a little bit nervous while boarding the train but the journey that followed took all my worries away. When you’re alone you pay close attention to every little detail around you. I remember not sleeping a wink on the four-hour train ride. My vision was mostly clouded by a sea of green every time I looked outside the window.  Kolar was indeed a beautiful place. It was a weird concoction of greenery and contrasting barren lands. The train ride was bliss. I vaguely remember my uncle’s driver picking me up from the railway station and I was beaming at the man. I felt accomplished.

     Robertsonpet is a small town in Kolar district and in it you will find a world full of peculiar details. Technically, Kolar is a part of Karnataka and so you would naturally expect the folk to speak Kannada but in reality, it is an extremely difficult task to even hire an auto rickshaw without conversing with the man in Tamil. In the four days that I spent in Kolar,  I realized that my uncle was nothing short of a celebrity in the small town. Being a rich man with a big wine store, he was held high in the community. This fact could also be attributed to the fact that the entire town of Robertsonpet is smaller than HSR Layout. The town had one mall, one small movie theater, one breakfast point, one hospital, a few temples and a few churches. The community here was so closely knit that the entire town visited my uncle’s place on the occasion of his house-warming party. The fact that there exists a world so different, with different people and different cultures in such a small geographic area is mind-boggling.

This little trip gave me so much happiness. It showed me a few different facets of human society and made me feel accomplished and will always be a cherished memory.