On travel

Curly from work is only in third year – or would have been in third year if he deigned to attend classes in my city’s landmark college on landmark road (– guess which? )

But Curly decides no, he won’t go to study economics and the WTO but join a newspaper and write — which seems all right, and behooves a responsible kid but on the other hand, if one has a lifetime to work, must one start early?

After all it is only once in life that one is twenty, must one spend the year working in front of a broken keyboard on a broken chair in a dingy, poorly ventilated office. He has a lifetime to do that.

But then he says, I went to college for two years, did not attend class ( cos no one does, even the teachers), did what other kids do and wasted time splendidly. I’ve been there done that, tell me what else should I be doing if not working, he asks.

And I rack my brains hard enough. I worked too when in college, after lectures unlike Curly who’s younger to me by whole four years, I’m hardly the person to say, don’t work.

But if my college was like that, with assured attendance and an assured degree and no lectures then I might have traveled. Maybe saved enough money and gone to Europe, and the Central Americas. Maybe gone to the North east or the Valley or sailed in the Sunderbans, instead of hankering after all of that now, when even a month’s leave means having to pay for it.

SO I tell young Curly that is what you should do my boy. Travel. Forget college, you unlearn all of it in less than 2 months after one joins the workforce.

And after this sage advice I removed myself to continue reading about Mugabe’s Zimbawe, where Cholera is raging and poor George Bush, who no one wants to talk to, not even his own party people. And I cannot help feeling that the world would have been less dangerous if these two had traveled in their youth.