How in the hell do I manage to get so many leaves?

It’s no magic, really!

It is surprising how no one will raise an eyebrow when someone says they took two months off from work because of marriage. And if I say I took a month off from work to travel, the first reaction is something akin to utter disbelief. That concept apparently doesn’t exist here! For the past three years I have heard this question time and again, every single time I meet a new person and every single time I meet an old friend. It gets as irritating as it is funny. Travel is perceived as a time pass and not as the life changing experience that it actually is. This makes someone who travels look like an idiot wasting his life having fun instead of doing something important like watching TV or wandering in the mall. They keep telling me, “I don’t have as much time as you do! “. In my head I retort back saying “I don’t have as much tolerance as you do for the mundane!”

If these are the non-believers there are few others who assume things. Assumptions that I get paid to travel or that I get additional leaves or that I am in the travel industry or my personal favorite, that I don’t work at all, and I am on a perpetual vacation(How I wish it were true!).

Quite recently a friend told me, he took a long break of a year or so to sort out few things, during that time he did travel a lot and came back to start afresh with a new job. He cleared all the technical rounds and then came the dreaded HR round, where someone tries to figure you out based on few questions, and how do they really do that anyway? But the point is, he didn’t say he was traveling during the break, he told sob stories of family problems and he landed the plush job! He says they don’t understand. I agree, they don’t understand, after all how is it possible to assume all these things about me when it is really quite simple. 

So how in the hell do I really manage to get all those leaves then? Let’s do some simple math here.

Number if weekends in a year   – 52*2 (Saturdays and Sundays)

Number of public Holidays       – 12

Number of Leaves at work       – 25

Total                                        – 141 days!

There, is the mystery solved?

What this means is, in a given year, most of us are on leave for almost 40% of the time. We can travel for almost three months in a year. If you apply for a leave of 5 days, you are actually getting 9 days including the weekends. This means in a year you can go for 5 major trips of 10 days each. So you can go to Ladakh, Rajasthan, Sikkim, Andamans and one trip home, all in one year! And if there’s a festival or a public holiday around the corner, include that as well and you will get even more! See, it comes down to planning in the end. How well we plan in advance decides how many vacations we get. Now you know what’s the first thing I do at the beginning of the New Year and in case you don’t, I check the list of holidays, weekends etc and already decide when to go. Where to go is decided on go!

Being in Bangalore certainly has its advantages. Most places around here are just a weekend away. The treks in Western Ghats are doable in two days. Friday night we start and Monday morning we are back in office. No leaves to apply here, it is a weekend right?

Saving up the leaves and encashing them when I resign is not an option for me. I use up all my leaves and more if required but certainly wouldn’t let them be unused. My hometown is also just a weekend away, so there isn’t a need to apply leaves to go home either. All the leaves are used only for trips, not because I felt lazy in the morning to go to office or didn’t feel like working. If those were my excuses for taking a leave, then I wouldn’t have been writing on this blog today. I wouldn’t have traveled as much as I did.

You take all these leaves as well, you go home, get married or do something else that ranks high on your priority list. My priority list pretty much consists only of travel and that’s what I use the leaves for. There isn’t really much difference between what you and I do. You take leaves, I take leaves, we all take leaves, just for different reasons so don’t judge me next time when I tell you I am just back from a vacation.

You know when they say if you really want to do something you’ll find a way and if you don’t want to, you’ll find an excuse. That is true! I find my way to travel somehow. What about you?

More rants and related posts:

Top Five Annoying things to say to a Photographer
Travel and the not so pink and rosy side of it!
Food for Thought - Travel and Conscience!

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The One..Hundredth..Post!!!!

One Hundredth Post!

One of those shots that I never imagined I'd take. Taken during the Final Face-Off at Canon - Better Photography Photographer of the Year 2011 Competetion

Wow, it would take me sometime before the feeling sinks in. It would take me some more time to digest the fact that I have been blogging for three years now. I have been meaning to do this post for at least three months now and yet something or the other, worth mentioning has been popping up leading to me delaying the post just so that I could include it.

Let me start by thanking you, incredible readers, for reading my experiences, liking my rants and not to mention the extremely positive response to my photography. I have to tell you, without the initial support here I wouldn't have been the photographer that I am today. Over the innumerable messages and comments I received telling me I have inspired someone to travel more, is often times the reason for the smile on my face. 

But the actual reason there could be even a blog here and a 100 posts is our incredible country with its incredible diversity! Like I said, several times before, I never knew India had such abundant natural scenery. My dream destination was always Switzerland or some place in Europe, until I traveled within our country that is. Since that life changing trip to Ladakh, I haven't been able to get enough of Himalayas or Western Ghats or more such phenomenal scenery of our country. I have shared only 25% of what I have seen and I have seen not more than 10% of what our country has to offer! There is so much more that has to be seen and it will be seen, in the years to come. 

There was a time when 1000 hits seemed to a cause for celebration, today the pageviews border close to a lakh and a half, a reason to celebrate indeed. There has been a gradual increase in the search hits as the blog reached a page rank of 4. And also almost 65% of the traffic is new visitors while the remaining 35% do feel the blog is worthy enough to be revisited again.

So what's been happening?

Well, there are a lot of things to smile about. Few months earlier I was invited by Club Mahindra for their blogger's meet, and that's some recognition as a travel blogger. Few days before that I got an invite from Getty to be a contributing photographer through the Getty-Flickr Contract. Not that I am terribly happy with their pricing, what I am really psyched about is the fact that Getty thinks my photos are good enough to be sold, there must be some truth to it! 

Later that year, my 100 Strangers Project (which has been rather dormant much to my dislike) was featured in Deccan Herald with a small photo of mine. I'll admit it, it was always a dream, to be featured in the newspaper! ;)  Meanwhile Indiahikes approached me if I could guestblog on their site on photography. While I do not consider myself a master, I do have a thing or two to share. You can go through one of my published posts here.

Article in Deccan Herald on the 100 Strangers Project

Then came the biggest surprise when a professor of mine invited me to speak about my travels at my alma mater, IIT Madras. Going back and seeing my professors show such interest in what I do was really amazing. I think a few more people now know how amazing the scenery is after that talk, well I'd say mission accomplished!

Then came the biggest surprise of all, I was declared the theme winner for Canon-Better Photography Photographer of the Year 2011 Awards. The category I won was Landscapes : Play of Light. With this came an opportunity to travel to Mumbai and force myself to shoot something drastically different. Being the hesitant person that I am when it comes to shooting portraits and people, I had to photograph "Spirit of Mumbai" in three days. While I narrowly missed the "Photographer of the Year 2011" title, what I learned was that I could probably tell a story next time I travel instead of plain landscapes. The thought doesn't seem so daunting now that I did the same for three days, a step closer to being the Travel Photographer that I imagine to be. The experience has been spectacular and it demands an entire post and I shall oblige.

The Award Winning Shot from Spiti, Himachal Pradesh.

So what next?

As I read through my old posts and the new ones, the sense of wonder seems to be lost now. I used to carefully choose words imagining myself to be a poet and write nonsense which ultimately managed to evoke the emotion but today it all seems plain text with no emotion that I write. Although the photos now seem to be technically correct, the charm is lost. 

I seem to be riding on the laurels of being at extraordinary places at the right time, but soon the world will run out of extraordinary places and I, eventually will have to find my artistic vision to stand out. I am at a point where I feel the creativity, if there was any, is stagnant, the quality of the creations is not changing, for better or for worse. In the coming months I sure do intend to find my vision, my style or the lack of it and go back to those ignorant captures.

And I still haven't made up mind if I want to be a photographer or a travel writer or something else in between. It sure seems like an exciting time but it is also a time where I need to focus, focus on one thing that I want to achieve. So while try to focus, I will try to wander less and be present more. But this wouldn't stop me from writing more often, since I now seem to have all the time in the world till I decide.

Amidst all this, a realization dawned by observing the masters, one doesn't master an art because he is talented. He masters it because he practiced, he stayed at it with perseverance. There are many days when I feel this isn't going anywhere, but the end of the year showed some promise. With much practice I might just reach where I intend to be. This 100th post is a major milestone for me because I never expected to get here when I started but miraculously, one post at a time, today I'm here.

Sometimes I digress for no reason, and if you have managed to come till this line, you are one of my prized readers. Thank you, once again! :)
And while you are here, Congratulate me, won't you?

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