The much desired break

Khaleej Times OPINION

The much-desired break…

Asha Iyer Kumar (Issues)20 September 2011, 6:57 PM

So, had a good time? I instinctively pop this question these days when I meet people who are just back from their summer vacation.

“Good… but very hectic. It is tough to relax while on a vacation,” drawled an acquaintance a week ago. His whirring words and contorted face spoke volumes about the actual quality of his one-month escape from work and routine here. As I nodded understandingly, he continued, “Life becomes normal only when I am back here. All said and done, home is where your heart is and your heart is where your routine is.”

“Of course, of course.”

“Imagine, a host of relations to visit, pilgrimages and promises to keep, calling on the banks’ relationship managers for pending services, parents’ and in laws’ health check up, children’s cough and cold, my own fight with a Delhi belly…add to it calls from the work place here. What do you expect in such a scenario?”

I smiled as if to say I understood, I could empathise with him. Vacations home are no longer those get-aways that they used to be. Life has come a long way from those days of a month long retreat one looked forward to and delighted in.

Not just a vacation back home, but most time-offs these days end up being frantic and tiresome, if not tedious. A relative and his family had been on a tour of the Swiss Alps and Paris last month. On their return we expected to see an ecstatic, over whelmed pack eager to take us on a vocal tour of the exotic sites, but what do we hear? Stories of a tour in which they spent all their time scuttling between places to cover the maximum, added to which were incidents of wallet picking in Geneva and their son lost and found in Euro Disney. Phew!

I have heard similar tales from several people who have been on various guided tours. I haven’t been on one, so I can’t vouch for them, but I have never been able to fathom what degree of amusement and fun one derives from a ten day all-Europe jaunt except the fact that they would return bleary eyed, with a list of places to talk about and scores of pictures to circulate. Herded from place to place, with the aim to pack in the maximum, I wonder if it is an opportunity to put their feet up and unwind, which is what a vacation should essentially be.

“Imagine a week like this every year,” I said to a friend two days ago. “Somewhere in the mountains or by the sea. No mobile phone, no laptop. No thoughts about people back home or the boss in the office, no fear of job loss, no worry about what the kids might grow up to be, or what we might do in our retired years, no anxiety about what our investments would reap, no dread of the future. In the lap of nature, in the presence of the divine, some books, music and no mind. Staring far into the sea by the day and the starry sky by the night, living in the present with no one but ourselves. Imagine a long interlude of tranquility, complete with our inner whispers, when nothing, nothing would 
really matter.

A total switch off from the mundane everyday madness. A week of letting go, a week of sheer bliss.”

“Sounds good. Poetic and romantic.” she said and returned to her mobile to type a text. She probably meant, good to hear, but hard to come by.

I wonder if it is such a difficult proposition – to drop the baggage of woes and worries and to retreat, to just exist with nothing to do, for a week. Imagine the renewed vigor it can infuse into one’s life, the calmness it can add and the new quality it can give to a demented urban existence!