ontheroadz

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-luaxQ0ZmjzFMEpci6Q43A

In my last two posts i have shared my experiences growing up. And now its time to fast forward to the present. I call myself a failure as i have failed in my career as well as in my relationship which took a big toll on me. I was so messed up and decided to end my life. Ya its true i had suicidal thoughts.

But i could not do it i thought of options to take my life but i was too scared and a coward. That is when i decided to travel and i have no experience in travelling except for my small holidays with my friends to nearby hill stations where we would just get drunk and dance all night.

What i needed the most was to find myself but i did not know how. So one fine day i just take my bike with a backpack and i ride to Pondicherry which is 150 KMs away from Chennai and stayed at a home stay all by myself. This was basically my first solo trip and I did not do much there except for to take a walk to the beach observing people around me and having ice cream and yes i did sleep really well after a long long time. When i got back to Chennai the following day i felt different i found peace inside me. That’s how my passion for travel started. I was an amateur traveller though and i wanted to travel more and i saved up some money in the next few months and did my first solo backpacking trip to Singapore, Cambodia and Thailand also this time i started staying at travel hostels and making friends from across the globe. This became an addiction to me to travel and be around with people who would not judge me or ignore me and make me feel rejected.

In 10 months time i backpacked to 5 countries and every time i came back home i would only want to go back and explore and i stopped thinking about a 8 to 5 job and getting married and running a family.

I had decided that i make a career out of travel and film making and came up with “ontheroadz” documentary idea which would cover the landscapes across all the 29 states in India in visual format. One month after this idea sunk into my head i quit my job and decided to ride across India for a year.

Choose one out of the two options

At age 17 I am cast out into the real world the world I never knew existed, out of my comfort zone away from people whom I grew up with for more than a decade.Even after signing my school report cards for years my parents never realised that I was not good with academics. And the day came when I had to choose one option out of the two given to me I either become a doctor or an engineer. I knew becoming a doctor was impossible with 64% in my board exams so the obvious option I choose was engineering.

There were close to 1500 engineering colleges in Tamil Nadu at that time and every second person you meet on the road could be an engineer. There were so many of them out there and it reached a point where engineers were paid less than 6 thousand a month or even lesser. If we have to point our fingers at someone whom could we point at ..do we point it at our parents for not talking to us and understanding what we like to become? Do we point it at the society for incorporating such ideas into our parents that pressuries them into making decisions for us?do we point it at the government for having such a bad education system in our country which doesn’t prepare us at all?or do we point it at ourselves for not being able to stand up for ourselves?

The questions inside me

I am a 28 year old from Madras and I am going through a phase in my life which I don’t seem to understand.I have been an angry person all my life and I never could understand what made me angry.

I spent my childhood growing up in a typical Indian joint family in Madras where I have spent years of my life being told that I would be respected only if I worked with the government. I was young back then and the only things I wanted to do was play and go to school. I was a kid and my thoughts were not about a job nor about money nor anything luxurious. Is that not how a kid should be?

When I entered my higher secondary I was a teenager with hormones rushing inside me and I better understood things that I thought were silly before. I grew a beard and felt manly inside me wanting to impress the opposite gender and not a worry in my head thinking about exams or the future about which everyone around me were so serious about. So far I have had shelter,clothing,food,sports and friends and I was happy never wanting anything more. This was my world from kinder garden to 12th standard inside the same compound where I was protected,taken care of, taught from books inside classrooms. I believed in this world and never dreamt this would ever end and these are the people who are going to be with me forever and there is nothing outside of this. But there came an end to all of this to shatter the world I built inside my head for 15 years “the last day of school” I never could accept the fact that I have to go out into the actual world out there to face things that I never knew existed. To say the goodbyes and to accept the truth that I would never be able to enter the compound without permission was the first time I felt fear inside me and i started asking questions to myself. What is next? Where am I headed? Why is this ending?