In Xanadu

I have just finished reading 'In Xanadu' by William Dalrymple and this has put me in a fairly restive mood. For the whole of today, I threw all caution, studies and application forms to the winds and sat (or rather lay) spell bound, reading about WD's amazing journey across 12, 000 miles through Central Asia from Jerusalem to Xanadu in Mongolia. I guess the restive mood is prompted by the fact that I have always wanted to make a journey like this.

Having several deadlines to meet, I tried to sleep but was quite hungover the book. Cold barren deserts, fierce turbaned Afghans, jagged mountain peaks and great domed mosques all flashed before my eyes. Ever since I read about Peshawar in Afghanistan in I think 'Shantaram' followed by Dalrymple's own 'Age of Kali', I have wanted to go to central Asia and visit the great bazaars, travel through maze like alleyways lined with mud brick houses and (for some reason) watch bearded Pashtuns parade around with their AK 47s. 'In Xanadu' rekindled that longing in a big way. I grew depressed thinking that my current line of study was singularly unsuited to travel on this scale. 5 years in law with small vacations spent interning and now this MBA with no vacations did not throw up vast opportunities for a long journey using buses, trucks and walking as the chief modes of transport.

Indeed, even my dream of backpacking across North India looks a little doubtful. I have always wanted to (this phrase has appeared for the third time in this entry I think) journey from the west to the east - across Gujarat (well I am there now, but no time!!), through the Rajasthani desert (romantically on a camel, braving sandstorms), upwards through to Punjab (may be I can spend more time in Amritsar) and into Himachal Pradesh moving on to Kashmir, before coming down to Delhi (a one week pleasure stop). Then I would press on to UP - through Agra, Allahabad and Ayodhya into the great Chambal valley in MP. Somehow I would emerge from there and move into Jharkhand and Bihar (and probably make a foray into Nepal). There I would finally reach Bengal, visit the mountains in Sikkim, pay homage to the tea gardens of Assam and the rock music in Mizoram. From there I would fly, exhausted, back to Bangalore and renew myself on a strict diet of dosas and beer. Dreaming thus, I started wondering - if only I had studied history at Cambridge (like Dalrymple), if only I was white (these damn white people get clear passages every where), or better still - if only I had been a journalist, if only I hadn't taken up such strenuous courses and done arts at DU instead....As the ifs started crowding into my head, I switched the laptop on and decided to rant on this blog.

I Googled some of the places visited in 'In Xanadu' and then Googled Xanadu itself - the town where Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan received the Italian explorer Marco Polo, thus cementing the latter's legendary status as the first European to have first penetrated the Far East. In fact, 'In Xanadu' recounts Dalrymple's fantastic attempt to retrace Marco Polo's footsteps across Israel, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and China i.e. through the famed Silk Route. The book is rich in detail, full of anecdotes and seems to indicate that Dalrymple faced a considerably harder time than Marco Polo as he was travelling in 1986, when both Iran and China were extremely suspicious of Westerners (my white person wish is more to do with the fawning attitude adopted by most Orientals towards Occidentals in recent times, cha). Kublai Khan is of course known to us mainly through Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem which we all would have studied and recited in school - In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, A stately pleasure dome-decree... etc etc. I never really liked this poem for some reason. It wasn't half as exciting as 'The Highwayman' or 'Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner'. Anyhow, on Googling Xanadu, I found that it was the name of a 1980 disco musical starring Olivia Newton John. Initially dismayed by this, my curiosity soon gained the upper hand and I ended up reading the Wiki entry about the movie (a refreshingly random plot involving a nightclub, a Greek muse and a painter of record covers who falls in love with her and asks her father Zeus for her hand, all set in Los Angeles) and watching the title song for the movie on Youtube. It was the usual gaudy disco affair, full of disco balls and strobe lights and Olivia Newton John at her 'Physical' best. Ah well. Music leads to travel and travel leads to music. Where does an MBA fit in?

The MBA will sponsor my travels and show biz career. Just you wait.