End of Phase 1 (Mumbai-Delhi)

I've got a million mails...finished up with the client ones...and want to release my thoughts so I can focus back on work (and release is the right word). Also, these thoughts just keep changing - what I felt as soon as I crapped (literally) in the open outside of Udaipur I don't feel now! And for good reason...Thank Gawd, Suz would say! I'll just write whatever gets transmited to my fingers from my head - sometimes it might seem like I'm writing for myself, sometimes to inform an imminent rider and sometimes to provide vicarious pleasure to those watchers out there - but if I have to choose as I write, it'll be mostly for myself so excuse me. Anyways, here is the route map - the blue is the path we took, the yellow dots are where we stopped for an extended period of time (2 clarifications - we stopped at Manor just 50km from Mumbai so it doesn't count, Surat was a forceful stop because of an insane traffic jam so it counts!).

So what do I feel right now - back in Mumbai. I kinda feel expanded - in every sense of the word - mind, heart and spirit. Independent India is at the cusp of the ripe young age of 60 years (tomorrow) - ripe because you can kinda sense that the efforts of development are about to bear fruit - I feel happy having experienced it. A motorcycle journey is different from car, bus, train, walk and definitely airplane journeys. You don't just experience one or two senses like sights and sounds or sights and smell - particularly in a car you are locked up from the world outside but in a motorcycle you experience all of the 5 senses while driving - you see, you hear, you smell and you feel - your skin feels the experience and sometimes you taste things too because your mouth is exposed to whatever!

I've made broad observations in terms of business, people and their aspirations and fears, the intermingling of old and new India, of a present glued to a past, of a present gearted to a future, of our land, our farmers, of different states, cities and the surprising consistency and inconsisency in people's behavior, food, sounds - in a rational calculated way these may or may not be correct but again the mind has far more computational power when it relies on intuition than when it does with rational thinking so the subtle signals might as well be right.