Two days into the trip and, as I previously mentioned, two years of living done. You know how to live longer? Travel, make yourself new, open up to new sights and sounds and people. You may pass away at the same second of the same minute of the same hour and day and year as you would have otherwise have died… but your life will have been immeasurably longer, and maybe you die knowing you had really lived.

Ok. It has been less than 48 hours here in India, but true to any real travel, an hour might be a day back home. The gift of letting yourself move into a truly foreign environment is that you have chosen to be changed. It’s like diving into the surf on day with high seas… and the water is cold. You can’t inch your way in, of course: you run, you throw yourself into the next falling wave, get tumbled, rolled, hit the floor of the sea, pick up a suit full of sand, then stand up gasping and smiling.

Manny Muros:

It’s hard to believe that we have only been here 30 + hours…. It feels like we have had a week worth of experience already! The intensity of Bangalore was hard to digest with out taking short breaks in the sanctuary of our hotel….

This morning we boarded a bus to Tiru… It took us about 1/2 an hour to find the bus in the terminal. This is controlled chaos :)

Manny says, “It’s all everyone said it would be… and more.”

True. I am sitting in a small room the size of my bathroom at home, in front of a keyboard which has been used by too many hands, which has typed too many words, and which seems to forget every now and then how to type certain characters. You will notice that the letter “C” demands a certain emphasis, which I am not always keen to give it. There is a smell of incense coming in through the door – the owners of this internet cafe praying to the four directions, and the first scent to override the heavy perfume of diesel which follows the busses and the taxis, the cars and autorickshaws, the motorcycles and motorscooters down the road in a vast, all consuming cloud. Through the loud, there is an incessant sounding of horns, as everyone tells everyone to get out of everyone’s way.

“The gross body which is composed of the seven humours (dhatus), I am not; the five cognitive sense organs, viz. the senses of hearing, touch, sight, taste, and smell, which apprehend their respective objects, viz. sound, touch, colour, taste, and odour, I am not; the five cognitive sense-organs, viz. the organs of speech, locomotion, grasping, excretion, and procreation, which have as their respective functions speaking, moving, grasping, excreting, and enjoying, I am not; the five vital airs, prana, etc., which perform respectively the five functions of in-breathing, etc., I am not; even the mind which thinks, I am not; the nescience too, which is endowed only with the residual impressions of objects, and in which there are no objects and no functionings, I am not.”

~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Who Am I?