go on world... SURPRISE ME

camberley

the kind of grey wet day which makes you very glad someone invented the

roof

go on word surprise me

so here we go...

hyderabad here we come

for 160 days in India

we have flights, visas, backpacks, novels, laptop, bugspray, mosquito net, etc etc... and the innocent-looking wannabe-tyrant of the lonely planet ...and are flying into hyderabad... and we're off

for five-six months... a longtime yeah?

with no great plans for where we go and what we do when we get there... to circle around hyderabad?... or head north west?... or slow west to hampi?... or straight east?... or north east to beaches?... or south, or south east?... cos we could go anywhere...

what glorious freedom yes?... to have no plan... no destination... no necessities... just 160 days of wandering and writing... for we both have shows to write

what absolute freedom, yes?

so its ...patnem beach in goa, almost definitely... hampi... sikkim... kathmandu... varanasi again... kolkotha... pondicherry maybe

or maybe none of them

so here we go... yet more roaming... i've already stayed in 53 different places this year... so here we go with more in a year than ever before

GO ON WORLD SURPRISE ME

and the last time i went to india

well

when i left Edinburgh for India

i thought

peace of mind is cowardice

enlightenment is self-delusion

oneness is moral abandonment

because peace of mind can only come from shutting out how awful the world is for most of its population

enlightenment is the product of being deluded enough to think you're enlightened

and oneness is like peace of mind, only possible if you shut out how terrible, how unnecessarily terrible, the planet is for most of the people on it

...

and when i came back i still thought

peace of mind is cowardice

enlightenment is self-delusion

one is moral abandonment and selfishness

but i also thought

humility is arrogance

...

yet i did have the fair-sized revelation that your

average yogi knows this only too well