The Bends

Nine thirty am somewhere in the Cantonment area. Bangalore rush hour. The light turns green and I cruise through on "cockroach", my motorbike, taking a deep bank leftwards, passing a truck, accelerating at the same time. Time stops, reshuffles, and starts again. I'm in the Nubra valley, high up in the Himalayas, north of Leh, north of Khardung La, they say it's the gateway to Central Asia. At the moment, only three motorbikes and fifty army trucks occupy this superb stretch of skyways hanging off the mountains. Cockroach is in form. I'm banking over on a curve and accelerating past a convoy of army trucks. I can see Subroto tailing me in my rearview, hornless and dependent on me to clear his path. Farther behind in the distance is Bansi whose bike is not doing so good at the moment leaving Subroto and me to speed onwards through the mountains like maniancs. I laugh and look ahead. An autorickshaw drives straight into my path perpendicular to the flow of traffic, I'm surrounded by two wheelers, three wheelers, four wheelers, horns blowing, smoke spewing. I glide down and land softly back onto reality with a smile. Nice dream.

Home Sweet... What?

Well it's hard to believe that I've been off the open road for over two-and-a-half years now. It seems that before moving to New York City and starting grad school I had the habit of taking off to a new corner of the globe, and to a new side of my own psyche, on a nearly yearly basis. So what the hell happened???

In laymen's terms, I guess I've finally been finding some things to get focused in... and that I'm not utterly bored with in a year or two... or that I will abandon because I can't see how it would fit into the next phase... the working world.

For me, the focus has been storytelling, through filmmaking especially, and the Still in Transit travel around the world with Abhi was definitely the start to that. Why am I writing about this now? Well probably because I'm about to finish my coursework in grad school in a couple weeks, and I can see that I am still happy with what I'm doing after these few years... and looking forward to finishing the Still in Transit documentary... let's call it the final rough cut.

Signing out on a tired, but good, New York City night.

Love,

Steve