Heart of India » travel bug

eVenturing into 2011

Dianne Sharma-Winter - Heart of India — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 21:37:39 +0000

As a solo traveler from way back, I tend to absorb the shock of arrival without a lot of fuss these days. It always helps to arrive home in New Zealand during the summer months. The upside is being able to have time with my gorgeous grandchildren, while the down side takes its form in many guises. To go from buying my vegetables in a squatting position in the open air market for a few coins from my sisters the marvelous Subzi Warrior Women to the sterile silent and insanely over priced section of the supermarket is something I haven’t been able to do yet.

Luckily for me its summer in New Zealand and gardens are blooming gloriously, Visiting friends has meant a walk around their gardens, nibbling herbs and leaving with arm loads of plums and courgettes. I am cooking in a wild and wanton way, only preparing food that arrives fresh in this way; it keeps that creativity juicing.
I need that creativity to stay juicy and pumping at the moment while I settle chook like into my home roost and hatch my next little plan.
I am not one of those neo hippies who see signs in every random encounter along the road; when you LIVE on the road you come to understand the Buddhist saying that “Even travelers whose sleeve brush in passing have had a previous connection”. This doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone you meet is there to celebrate your life or to help you or even gives a flying fatoosh about you. It could simply mean that the person who has arrived in your life at this point in time, seemingly randomly, seemingly co incidentally is here to enact some less flattering karma that has nothing to do with helping you along the journey of your life. I have to admit that I have become rather selective about the people I will approach or strike up a conversation with whilst On The Road.

But in that lovely little town on Nong Kai on the border between Thailand and Laos I met a man whose conversation turned my head towards adventures in epublishing.
I saw his name in the register as I checked into the Mut Mee, his occupation caught my eye.
“A book designer?” I questioned Harps, the kiwi guy who was checking me in.
“Yeah you should meet him,” Harps.
Strange that as a writer I had never considered the idea of designing a book, possibly because I hadn’t moved past the wrangling with various publishing about the value of my manuscripts and into the hard core area of publishing. The idea intrigued me and so I sought him out in the restaurant later that evening, plonked myself down at his table and shamelessly picked his brains about the future for the publishing industry and the idea that writers may soon become endangered species if we didn’t keep up with the changes.
He pointed out to me the tourists in the restaurant traveling with e readers, he pointed out that I was already driving people to my website and had people reading my rants on the blogs I wrote. Why then was I still thinking in terms of the print media? Why wasn’t I thinking of an E Venture into self publishing?

Why indeed? Did I imagine it or did I actually hear Bob Dylan in the background of that restaurant beside the Mekong River? The times they are a changing, especially for writers.
Print publications are struggling, payment issues drive a lot of freelancers to their knees but with every downside there has to be an upside. There are still opportunities out there for the adaptable writer, for the writer who isn’t trying to support a family or pay a mortgage or even eat three meals a day there are still a few cracks in the woodwork that we can worm our way into.
So I have been quietly working away at trying to understand this brave new writing world and all the time the sales of e readers have increased while the price of the things go down making them more and more accessible to people such as myself who would never have thought to own one before. It’s exciting to think that even at my advanced age, I can still learn stuff!
This entire year has been a huge learning curve in terms of having an online presence; of how to put that ball of me into the cyber air and how to keep it in the air so that my name comes up in Google searches and other queries, epublishing just seems to me to be the next logical step. I have carried these particular stories around for long enough now that I want to set them free into the world so that I can get on with the other stories tapping for attention inside me.
At the moment I am in the final stages of formatting and cover design and plotting the launch campaign. Watch this space as I work my way through this e venture, I will be running a competition on this blog called Mystery Monday where you will get the chance to read the eversion of my book Chasing Shiva and offering other downloads for free.
It’s going to be a brave new year!

Bugs and Blessings

Dianne Sharma-Winter - Heart of India — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 03:36:36 +0000

The arrival of the monsoon has liberated all kinds of bugs and beetles from their jungle lairs. They leave the pine trees at twilight like squadrons of B52 bombers, their wing beat thrums in the silence of evening like helicopters and the sound they make when they hit the tin roof is like that of a small rhinoceros!

If you sit outside at night, they will dive bomb you as they hurl themselves towards the lighted window.

The worst thing is when they get inside and you have to deal with them woman to bug.
The other night, a storm and a power cut and lightening flickering on the distant Himalayas and a bug somewhere in the room. My hair stood on end and my nerve ends tingled in anticipation of the attack but soon I realised the bug was between the curtain and the screen on the window. No need to deal with it then, I relied on the beetles instinct to flap with insane futility at the window all night. I reckoned the pull of the light would keep him out of my range and yanked the covers over my head prepared to ignore him until I fell asleep or he gave up.
The whirr thud whirr continued as the lightening flickered on and off in the distance like lights of a distant house showing the way to a visitor.
Stupid bug, even if I was prepared to release it so that its mad flight could continue he would never reach the light that was his hearts desire. He would get trapped by some other light on the way, dazzled by its nearness and forget all about the lightening he yearns for now.
Whirr thud whirr, he danced to the beat of the lightening flashes. It was a dance of desire and futility and pretty much the story of a human life, I reckoned somewhat softening towards the bug. We are all in the darkness to various degrees, fumbling or flying towards the light.
Yeah baby, we do exactly that. We flit from light to light dazzled, bedazzled, drunk with desire and distracted at every point along the way and yet there in the distance is the miraculous light, the mysterious light. Anyway he will be dead by morning, I thought.
But he wasn’t.
And he had shrunk to manageable proportions, so I released him and blessed his miraculous journey.
Easy for you, I said as a parting shot.
I would trade pure blind instinct such as his for my ‘intelligence’ any day.

My heart is my Guidebook

Dianne Sharma-Winter - Heart of India — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 07:24:58 +0000

The travel bug bit me many years ago when I set off like Huck Finn on my first great adventure at the tender age of seven. Plonking myself beside The Great Western Highway which stretched from my Sydney childhood across the Blue Mountains to the west, I was unconsciously echoing Kim, the hero of Rudyard Kipling’s novel of the same name.

My parents didn’t care for a literary analysis on the whole event and I think I am probably still grounded from that day. Which is why I get a delicious thrill even now to be living life on the road, it still feels almost naughty!

It’s not that I haven’t tried the domesticated life; I married twice already and have two children who gave me four gorgeous grandchildren whom I adore passionately. Life has just turned out this way for me and I blame Ossie.

Ossie is a guy I met the very day that the travel bug came back and bit me HARD on the behind. I remember I was elbow deep in nappy san when on a frosty wintry morning in a dull little timber town when the postman arrived with a postcard from Greece. My old schoolmate had chosen the kiwi option of the big OE before marriage and I like many Maori women opted for early babies and extended families.

I looked at the blue of that water and felt the Travel Bug kick me squarely in the rear. I wept hot tears into the nappy bucket. Would I ever have a life that didn’t revolve around four hourly feeds and mushy bananas? And if I did, what would it be?

That night I met Ossie who sat in a corner of a party while everyone else glittered and gossiped. I approached him as the only other outsider in the party and we began to talk.

He had just returned from India and his eyes were lit with some inner fire. He talked for hours about his experiences and I listened with rapt attention. He was a messenger from another planet. India sounded so unlike the safe little bundle of islands that is New Zealand, so over the top, and so much more exotic than any island in sunny Greece. I wanted that look in my eyes too! My compass was set.

I went home and announced to my three year old son and nine month old daughter that they had to leave home and go flatting when they turned eighteen because I was going to India. The husband rattled the newspaper and harrumphed.

Nobody believed me, especially when later as a struggling solo mother even a bus fare was sometimes beyond my means. But I reasoned, if I said it every day then by the power of positive thinking it would happen. Anyway the universe had years to sort it out; all I had to do was believe.

When my daughter was 16 (two years ahead of schedule) I came to India for the first time.

India totally overwhelmed me and appealed to my sense of the ridiculous. It captured my imagination as a story teller and literary inspired traveler. It taught me I could follow nothing more than a line of poetry and arrive at a destination.

Even after sixteen years, India still retains enough of her enigma to be ever elusive and confusing.

I am living in India for a year, sometimes in Pushkar Rajasthan and Manali in the High Himalaya while I work on a quasi domestic, creative life and organise small group tours of India for women.