Travelouge

In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom -Joseph Conard.

A journey back to Nanital has keep me guessing about this quotes. I have grown up in Nanital till the age of five years. There is always a sense of excitement attached to old memories. Especially, of the places where one grows up.

Memories are altered by present day reality and the sweetness is lost. We are grown up on the tales of childhood and in weaving an endearing and engaging past times. There is tale made by elders about ours association with these places. Only fogy scenes appear in the mind about childhood days when even memories were not even saving in the brain. Back then, life was blossoming with the present. Neither care for future and nor drag of yesterday.

When I want to re cherish those moments and reached to the place after twenty years, everything was changed. I was hoping for the time frozen land of my memories welcoming me with a cheer. All the landscape was different than imagined. Strangely, I met the faces who shared their time with me in long back. The passing age had taken place the effect and photographs of the memory were becoming altered with present.

I visited my LKG school back after 22 years. The school has become remain scant of the past. The walls are falling and the church appears as centuries old due to poor maintenance. The whole place appear as an archaeological site but the schooling is still continued. there. New people are there in the school and few classes have been converted to boarding. Memories have fallen into a abyss and given place to the reality.

I didn't visited my UKG school and old house due to this fear of change. A lot have been changed there. UKG school has been converted into hotel. And new constructions and roads have changed the old landscape. This was for the good for the people. I need store of memories to tell stories in the old age. Reality will tamper the timelessness of memories and tales.

May be I am in a making stage of romantic. Preservance slows down the decay yet life always looks full of energy in the past. Only youth and old can bear the risk of being romantic. One full with dreams, enthusiasm and idealism & another with experience and memories. A Realist turns into romantic is a sign of old age. My mind is aging faster than the body !

I am alone and thinking a line of Fyodor Dostoevsky : The characteristics of our romantics are to understand everything, to see everything and to see it often incomparably more clearly than our most realistic minds see it...