Packing ….only to unpack

Jamshed V Rajan — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 03:31:52 +0000

Packing one’s luggage is an art. Especially since, as the old Tata Indica advertisement proclaimed, we love to carry the World with us. The Tata Indica ad is so true…when I sat down to make a list of things to be packed…I first wrote down “The Globe.”

Rekha and I spent the whole of last weekend packing and believe me it isn’t something you would want to do. No, I am not referring to Rekha….but to packing.

Who will pack the bag?

After spending a Wednesday & Thursday fighting over who would pack what, it was decided that we come up with our own list of things to pack and pack our own bags. Friday was spent deciding who got which bags. Naturally, I ended up with the worst of the three high-profile luggage bags (for some odd reason we still have the bags that we carried in 2000 B.C. or was it A.D.?). Mind you, any bag that wasn’t part of an Allen Solly or Color Plus deal of ‘buy three formal shirts and get a stylish travel bag free’ is a high-profile bag for me.

With the bag decided, I sat down to make my list. The last time I had sat down to make a list was in 2004 while deciding the invitees list to my wedding. Back then, I had focused completely on the list and forgot the bride – and thus ended with the one I am stuck with now. Anyway, not wanting to repeat the same mistake….I drove down to Qutub Minar (20 kilometers from my place)….so that I could focus on the list.

My travel packing list

1) Undies – 2 Numbers (remember to wash after every use)

2) Socks – 2 Numbers (remember to hang in sun after every use)

3) Jeans – 2 Numbers

4) T-Shirts – 2 Numbers

5) Deodorant – 1 Number

6) Tooth Brush – 1 Number (See if it can double up as boot brush - to save baggage space)

7) Tooth Paste – 1 Number (Since the destination isn’t five star they don’t provide tooth paste. When will my mom learn to be as hospitable as the Oberois?)

8 ) Shoes – 1 Number (tooth paste will NOT double up as boot polish. Unless the shoe is white like Mithun Chakravarthy’s)

9) Mobile & Charger – 1 Number

10) Shorts – 1 Numbers (Get the darker one. Can’t afford to carry two)

11) Honey Bottles – 3 Numbers (My mother loves honey, especially when I gift it to her)

12) Wall Clock – 1 Number (Since I don’t wear a wrist watch)

13) Cupboard - 1 Number (That’s where I had kept the tickets but can’t find now. Plan to reach airport early and search for the e-Ticket)

The advantage of getting the list done by somebody else is that when you miss an important item, you can always say: “If I had made the list, I wouldn’t have missed that!” Since, I was making the list I had to be double careful.

Cleaning the Travel Bag

Once the packing list was made, I drove back home and started my bag cleaning exercise. I don’t know how you take care of your bags. In our house, after we are back from travel the bag is kept in an undisclosed locality. Despite our attempts to keep the location a secret, spiders, cockroaches & lizards somehow come to know of the place. Now you know why I suspect my wife to be a double agent.

When I pulled out the bag from the cupboard (oops! I just revealed the place – if you are a spider, lizard or cockroach please spare me!) I saw a thriving civilization. So much so, I even spotted some archeologists trying to unearth secrets from the bag.

Here are some of the items that I had to remove from the bag before I started packing:

• Boarding passes

• An unwashed handkerchief, which had become a mass of cloth (guess I had a terrible cold when I last traveled)

• Some coins & some rupee notes (wish I knew this when I was suffering from money-less-ness and my blood sugar had gone down)

• 3 Lizards

• 6 Cockroaches

• 2 Spiders

The best part of traveling is cleaning one’s bag for the travel. Especially, when while cleaning the bag the settled dust raises a stink and gives me breathlessness and eventually speechlessness. I feel as if I am in love again.

My travel bag & airport security

With my packing done (and Rekha having done her share of packing) we reached the New Delhi airport in time. Everything was going fine till the honey bottles were spotted at the security screening and suspected to be liquid bombs.

After I drank one whole bottle of honey and clutched my stomach in pain, the cops suspected it to be a decoy and ransacked my whole bag looking for the actual bomb. With fifteen minutes for my flight to take off….my packing was undone and I had to start from scratch. Thankfully, I didn’t have to make a list.

Flashback: My days in London

Jamshed V Rajan — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 18:41:58 +0000

Year 1997 was a watershed in my life. I was adjudged Tamil Nadu’s second best Naval NCC Cadet (don’t ask me why I wasn’t the first – even my father didn’t dare ask), I spent seven days in UK and three months in Canada. We will leave my Canadian sojourn for now and focus only on my British experiences, in this blog post.

Even when I was a kid my father taught me my first history lesson. He said that the ‘sun never set on the English Empire’. My father turned out to be a big liar. In the seven days I was in London, the sun didn’t even come out. My shirt, trousers and the umbrella were always drenched.

No wonder wherever I went, natives asked: “Nice weather eh?” So much so, I thought British TV channels should stop having the weather report – why make such a big fuss over the weather when we know it is going to rain.

Those of you who have never had the privilege of taking an Air India flight to Canada that developed a technical snag and had to be grounded for a week in UK….let me tell you that it’s a very damp country.

I think it was the first day of our stay and we decided to visit the Piccadilly Circus. Since my childhood days, I have had a thing for the Russian girl acrobats, and thus loved trips to the circus. Some of the popular ones I remember are the Royal Circus, The Russian Circus & The Jumbo Circus. If you have been to many such circuses you have probably noticed that the poor circuses employ Malayali girls with shaven legs.

Anyway, as I was saying…Piccadilly Circus was a total rip-off. There were no Russian acrobats and no wild animals and no clowns. That day I decided not to trust the British. Anyway, who would want to trust a country that was once run by a Prime Minister who carried his Army Rank behind his name – John Major!

While people like you and me dress down for dinner (that’s getting into our pyjamas and lungis)…the British dress up for dinner. Imagine, shouting back, “Momma, I am ironing my suit,” when she called you for dinner?

During my stay there, I also went to Stratford-on-Avon – the place where Shakespeare was born. You wouldn’t believe it…but there was no place to break coconuts, no place to do an aarti, and no place buy garlands. How was I to show my respects to the man? Literary alright…but what kind of a pilgrimage would that be?

This brings us to the question that begs to be answered, “which country would take its ‘plays’ so seriously?”

I also happened to pass over the London Bridge. It was amazing sight. I was reminded of the childhood days when we would sing: ‘London Bridge is falling down’. Later, I would come to know that the rhyme was written as a tribute to the number of times the bridge had fallen only to be put back in shape again. By those standards, we should have had nursery rhymes for our cricket team:

Our cricketing standards are falling down,
falling down, falling down,
Our cricketing standards are falling down.
My fair lady.

Build it up with Dhoni & Sachin,
Dhoni & Sachin, Dhoni & Sachin,
Build it up with Dhoni & Sachin,
My fair lady.

Dhoni & Sachin will retire away,
Retire away, Retire away,
Dhoni & Sachin will retire away,
My fair lady.

(The rhyme is actually a 12 stanza piece, that’s difficult to memorize)

By the time the technical snag in our airplane was set right, I had realized one thing…London is a boring place. Especially because living there was like living in Punjab still ruled by the Britishers!

Ouch My Toe! » Travel