Travelling Through Words- Shruti Saran
I used to make PPTs of trips with my parents as far back as my memory fades. A plump ambitious kid at the time. Dreaming of becoming a multinational banker and working hard for an MBA degree. Don’t ask me how fate works, because I met my husband, Arjun at a badminton court. A charming personality, who would soon become my guiding force. His passion for sports fueled mine. I eventually got engaged into badminton, running and various other sports, lost ten odd kilos and never looked back.
I found that I could weave my imagination into words and started crafting clichéd snippets and love letters for him, but he never backed down from appreciation.
Our love for travelling knitted us together strongly. We exhausted almost all the treks in Maharashtra. Dating for over 4 years just made our marriage inevitable. For our honeymoon, we undertook our first foreign trip together to France, which only left us thirsty for more. I wrapped up my MBA at NMIMS and began to work in a Japanese bank.
As time gushed like a breeze, we undertook many foreign trips, forging memories along the way. I planned everything down to the ‘T’. From where we would stay, to which places we’ll visit and the fastest ways to get there. I even download the metro maps, in order to optimise our time while traveling. I try to learn bits of the local language of the country we’re visiting, which is a new experience every single time. On every trip we hold onto our ritual of walking for more than 20 kms daily to truly soak in the aura of the outlandish countries. We feel truly embraced with profound peace. The bullet of realization, that I could blend my passion of writing and travelling, struck me with great intensity.
That’s where Instagram comes into the picture. I started uploading posts of my travels and entwined them into poetries in the captions. This tapped into the nostalgia of many, and they requested me to post more. Slowly and gradually, I made my account public, free for all to read and reminisce their days of travelling.
We all come from different walks of life and I truly believe traveling brings us closer. I would say our only formula to happiness is to remain optimistic, these times will pass, and then once again, we can scale the globe to create memories for a lifetime