It wasn’t meant to be or was it?
By: Sandeep Madhogarhia
Tags: Travel, Lonliness, Friends, Taiwan, Life

Fast-forwarding, yet rewinding to 2013, course at Kharagpur was over and I landed-up at Reliance, Jamnagar, Gujarat. He, being a 4-year UG student and having screwed up during placement likewise, has already been there for a year. He was the only person I had known from before at that visually beautiful, fully facilitated (with all sorts of sports and recreational activities), green campus that had a world within its boundary walls. Having no one else to connect to, I started interacting with him daily for an average of about an hour a day for 5 months (he was busy with CAT, MBA preparation). Reliance Greens is a nice place to be if you want to relax in life, have a good stable job, with the campus taking care of all your and your family’s basic need of food, clothing, housing (Roti, Kapda, Makan) and Internet and much beyond, have a decent saving, good education for the kids and good medical facilities for your parents. He wanted more in life — much more. So did I. In misery together, with bigger dreams to accomplish (from a place that in retrospection seems like heaven) we planned and conspired to get out of Reliance Greens to greener pasture. In the process, we became friends. What 2500+ hours of Kharagpur couldn’t do, <150hours of Jamnagar did — from not liking/borderline hating him (borderline because hate is still a strong word), I grew very close to him, like kidney-buddy level close.

Story2: Your Own People at Unknown Places (Cities in Taiwan)

Corporate travelling is fun, or it seems initially. On your own time, you get to visit new places, try different cuisines, meet new people, make new friends and do whatever you want without being judged. After a while the high-rise hotels, the big lavish rooms, view of city’s skyline, the variety of choices at the breakfast buffet or all the hotel staffs having a courteous smile always no longer pleases you. Spending all day at work and being greeted with fake smiles the moment you get back begins to kill a part of you. You crave more. You desire real human connection. And to seek it out, I landed up in an 8ft x 4.5ft tiny little room at the sub-floor of a hostel run by this rude 45+ year old land-lady. There was a small green painted table and a suitably short little wooden chair that I always thought would break if I sat on it. There were yellow curtains on the window that looked out at a well kempt little garden with shrubs and creepers along the boundary wall. Rested on the wall were a couple of bi-cycles. At breakfast, the only vegetarian option the host presented was a scone and some coffee, with a disgusting look when I mentioned I don’t eat eggs. “Just have bread and fruit jam”, she said pointing to the beautifully arranged, small color bottles of jam she had made. She shoved a city map in my hand and bossed me to cycle for 25kms using a specific route to reach a point on the west coast of Taiwan to see the sunset. “Be back before 9:00 PM so as not to disturb other guests”, she ordered. Her rude tone was music to my ears. That is perhaps what I was craving for — that sense of affinity, assertiveness, Apnapan (a Hindi word; pardon my limited English vocabulary for lack of having an appropriate word to describe what I felt.)

At Bike Hostel, Tainan, I met a lot of wonderful people travelling from different parts of the world. Back-packers, budget travelers, biking enthusiasts, people travelling solo, with friends, with families, all scribbled something on the walls in the kitchen. One day there, I met 2 friends of my rude host — a young guy of mixed African descent with curly hair from Saint Lucia (small island in Caribbean Sea) and a lean looking Taiwanese girl with spectacles who could play a ukulele. (I didn’t know what a ukulele was back then — everything in the hostel was miniature include the guitar I thought!) We just happened to be there that night — Kate, Abby, Cindy and me. When we first met, none of us had any clue we would become good friends. Cindy helped me get a more permanent place in Tainan (a city in Taiwan) and became my local guarantor. She barely knew me back then. Abby would come up to Hsinchu (another city in Taiwan) when I moved there, and I would steal away time to visit him in Tainan. He would help me at 3 a.m. to get a bus back to Hsinchu to make it to work on time. Kate was into exotic species and I got her the best cardamom I could get from India (I told her about masala Chai — she used it in black coffee!). Abby, Cindy and I had gone out for dinner, partying so many times and made short but very memorable trip to Kenting (a city, Goa of Taiwan minus cheap booze). Kate would never join us. After I left Taiwan, we tried to meet whenever I visited Taiwan again and when circumstances didn’t allow, we all got stupid on FB video chat together. There is no point being a grown-up if you can’t be childish at times. And sometimes, technology does bring people closer!

Gros Islet — Abby’s home town (Image from Google Images)