Tuesday, October 16, 2012

DO IT NOW!

Maybe I was, indeed, waiting for time to catch up with me. Maybe I didn't really appreciate the visage of a lonely boat with its trailing ripples, set in the midst of a winding river, lined with palm trees and lush, lush greenery, stretching on both sides as far as the eye could see, from atop one of the most beautiful bridges on NH-17, topped off with the crimson-saffron sun bidding adieu after yet another day of dauntless service to the omnipresent sunbathers of Goa. Maybe the beer didn't get me drunk enough. Maybe the beaches didn't show me enough skin. Maybe the bicycle ride wasn't long enough or exhilarating enough. Maybe the colorful Frenchmen, Indian-Americans, South Africans, Gujju fashion designer types in need of a drink or twenty, the dogs at Palolem, Shukriya and ... (uh, I forget the other one's name!) just weren't colorful enough! Maybe the joy of watching a lovely fairer-than-a-Kashmiri-maiden Arabic mum teach her daughter who had just discovered the joys of puberty the art of sunbathing just right at the virgin beaches of Arambol just wasn't joy enough!

Or maybe it was the embarrassment of having the first ever 'proposal' in life coming to me from a chhakka, just past the corner where one would change course to get to the scenic BITS Pilani-Goa campus. Maybe it was the pang of 'what-if' that hit me when I realized I didn't have a girl to sneak me through the couple-entry barrier at Mambo's. Maybe it was the sadness at Andy Murray losing the Wimbledon finals that fateful night, which marked a bitter end to what otherwise promised to be a differently colored, differently scented, if I may, end to an evening with three fetching young English women. 

Or maybe, just maybe, I was waiting for today. When the nostalgia of that bicycle which I purchased on a whim would catch up to me. When it would really hit me what a 10-to-6 job is like. When I would begin to long for virgin sands, and nubile maidens of yore again. When the company of nothingness begins to mean just a little more than the company of everything. When you can pick up a pen and the words simply flow. When nobody questions how and why you come and where you go.

Either way, let me tell you this. If you haven't discovered Goa, go do it now. If you haven't discovered travel,  go do it now. If you haven't discovered Kings Beer, HELL, do it now! If you haven't smoked (something, anything!) at Curlies, do it now! If the black sands of Arambol haven't dirtied you in cleaning you just yet, let them, now! If you haven't sat nursing a drink at 9BAR, and stared down a cliffside at an angry sea with a kite circling aimlessly in the sky, and gotten lost in the beauty of it all, to the tune of even missing a couple making out next to you, do it now! If you haven't run into a bunch of foreigners and talked about nothing in particular for a very long time, do it now! If you haven't driven a rented Activa through the dark bylanes of Goa at 3 am, terrified for you life, do it now! If you haven't gotten knee-deep in quicksand, do it now! Finally, if you haven't stopped reading this and started packing yet, do it now! Or well, wait just a bit.

Let me tell you what NOT to do as well! My friend,

When you're alone 
And sitting on a rock
Open your shoes
And smell your sock!

Haha! Kidding, kidding!

Simply, GO G O A !!