The Holiday Manifesto

Years back, whenever I was in between jobs, and that was a rather frequent occurrence, I used to take off for a trip to some far-off place all myself. Thus in 2000 when I shifted from Nazara to Free Press Journal (FPJ), it was a 15-day tour of Himachal Pradesh, roaming from Dalhousie, Khajiar, Mandi, Rewalsar, Varanasi and back. In 2002 on quitting FPJ, I landed up in Delhi wanting to etch my names in the annals of journalism, and all I could do was, manage a desk job at Financial Express. But on joining that place, I made short trips to Jaipur to view all the magnificent forts and also to Dehradun, rather Mussorie to meet Ruskin Bond. Sadly, my Delhi adventure was short-lived, and year and more later, I had to bid adieu and shift bag-baggage to Mumbai, but before I did that, it was a 15-day tour of the North East, from Guahati, Tezpur, Shillong, and more.

Alas for the past many years, I have been grounded so as to say. It is not that I haven’t been travelling; I scanned the cities of Trivandrum, Kochi, Nagpur, Baroda (Vadodara), Kolkata, Chennai, and also made trip overseas, to the US, New York and San Francisco, and China, Shanghai. But all these trips have been borne out of some work or assignment. Since, I was not unattached and there was a purpose behind these trips, somehow even the trip to New York pales in comparison to my adventure in Dalhousie. The reason is pretty simple, I haven’t switched job for a long time, it has been over three years at a single place (the longest ever).

And the trouble is: I have been leading a very ‘purposeful’ life for the past few years. Most of my actions and deeds are guided by some notion of worthiness; options are weighed on the scales of worthiness and selected based on their merit. Anything that is pointless or inconsequential in my life, the mind like some fresh IIM MBA keeps debunking those based on what gains will accrue over time. Thus, anything trivial or frivolous is instantly discarded. My friends term it as 30+ Syndrome, a situation where you want to be as uncaring as you were a decade back but can’t be as you have an eye on how life will pan a decade later.

So, as I am caught between these two worlds, I have decided to hang my shoes, albeit temporarily, for some 20 odd days. Taking a holiday from work, thanks to the numerous PLs that were languishing in my account, I have decided to make the most of these days by trying to achieve as little as possible. In fact, I intend to make these 20 days the most ‘worthless’ days of my life, I want to do all the things that I want to do, and not the ones that I should be doing. To start off, I have made a list of all the ‘worthless’ things that I intend to do. Here it goes:

Peace with Mondays

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