Escape Routes

Everyone in my immediate circle is all too familiar with a Monday to Friday routine, with different timings of course, depending on the timezone in which our interactions with customers take place. Fridays offer more relief than hope, of having seen through, lived through another tedious week. The anticipation of a free weekend is palpable, almost tangible.

After one has exhausted the list of weekend activities that the most critical existential crises play themselves out. The many options that weekends offer are - get togethers at friends place, movies, pubbing/discs, hobby cultivation (books, photography, music) etc more or less in the same order as one starts graduating to the adult from the youthful phase of life. By the time one starts approachng 30, this routine is hardly exciting and there comes a phase when all that we mention under "hobbies/interests" in our profiles actually become revulsive. That is when the masks that we wear to delude ourselves slip off, the charades that we perform week on week to assure ourselves of our interesting/happenning lives expose the hollowness within.

What follows is complete emptiness, a sense of ever increasing void within ourselves and we having exhausted our quota of activities long ago. An all pervading sense of ennui engulfs our lives. We start spending more time in the technology enabled virtual world (chatrooms, networking sites, blogs) with our backs to the real world, feeling let down by its inabilty to fill the gaps in our lives.

That is where weekend getaways come into the picture, the leisure tourism as we know it now. Although it is not a panacea, it definitely helps us to break the monotony, recharge ourselves and feel revitalised. Slowly this has develpoed into a full fledged industry finding many obliged buyers like us.

The idea has its appeal for two reasons: one being versatility and the other being novelty.

There is something for everyone. Rafting, paragliding and outdoor activities for adventure freaks, walk in the moonlight in the woods, bird watching and candle lit dinners on cliff tops for the serious minded folks, or just a pleasant stay at exotic locales with sauna, spa and jacuzzi thrown in. Whatever be your taste, there is good chance that someone has already thought of it, if not, would be more than willing to customise.

Since this is a relatively new phenomenon, we generally do not find things getting repititive. A little bit of creative tour planning goes a long way in capturing as well as retaining the interests of the clientele, who get their money worth. Most of us in the highly competitive sector don't mind such welcome interruptions in our normal routine. Almost all of us look forward to and carry vivid reminisces of the time spend in a Nainital, a Mussoorie, a Kasauli and for our colleagues down south, Goa, Munnar, Ooty.

Obviously we can't have these every weekend. An honest question: what is right frequency? Once in four months at least... definitely once in six months. That brings me to the second question: how many of us have actually had the chance to plan a weekend get away of our own choice (not the corporate spoansored, pseudo compulsory team outings) even once in the last 12 months despite having longed for it almost every week?

Even with all the money availibilty, it is our inabilty to afford these in terms of time that is causing the problem. Did some one say time? Weekends are ours, right, two days every week.

That is the point. It is the systematic denudation of all our creative pursuits by our professional lives that has made us so lethargic to take any fresh initiative, hasn't left us with any energy to allow us to make a serious effort to even redeem or salvage whatever we can. This is the height of the existential crisis, wherein we not only feel trapped but get accustomed to the trappings of the trap so much that we seal our escape routes from inside.

And whenever we manage to shake it off and run away, our world treachorously follows us all the way. We feel a voluntary compulsion to call back at our respective workplaces just to assure ourselves that the world behind hasn't come down crashing in our absence. No matter how much we would rue the incoming calls from our office colleagues to find out the location of a particular file on the shared drive, we would be left with shattered egos if no one missed us.

Our itineries are fixed and customised to suit our tastes. Even before we leave we know when we would be back. When we leave with a return ticket in our hand, we are not leaving in the first place. We are leaving a part of us behind. The feeling of escape can never be total in such a scenario.