Let the self-righteous, the patriots, the political hobos
cool their horns in the ice bucket of Facebook. They have their political
correctness. For the rest of us, there’s Ketan
Joshi. I’ve been among the few lucky ones to have observed his meteoric
rise as a humour travel writer. Started with the three-Amigos series. Now I
have his recent book One Man Goes
Backpacking. 3 Hours worth of pure, childish and nonsensical fun. That’s Ketan Joshi for you.
Humour’s next of kin is misfortune. The fun part of One Man Goes Backpacking starts when
Ketan misses his train to Calcutta. A vendor suggests he should board a local
train and chase the first train. Will he get it? That’s a whole different
subject. Statistically speaking, the possibility is as thin as that of swatting
down a mosquito in blind darkness. Ketan
goes to airport. His imagination brings up the disturbing picture of a journey
in general compartment. It’s fraught with a series of misfortunes - scary,
clammy and stinking of kerosene. The hilarious details make you go giggling. But
if you’ve ever had the pleasure of journeying without reservation, you’d know they
are terrible, revolting facts made edible with a pinch of humour.
Mosquitoes suck your blood but that don’t turn you into a
vampire. History textbooks, cogs in a vast propaganda-wheel, suck your brain
and turn you into a zombie. But One Man
Goes Backpacking is not a textbook. Ketan
Joshi minces no words, spares nobody. Dates and years don’t run along his
pages like numbers on a cranky jackpot. They are stories, interspersed with
Ketan’s own opinions and interpretations of them. To him it’s the story that
matters more. History is about discovering the origin. Even bungee-jumping has
an origin, a story. When retold by Ketan, history takes wings, flies high, then
drops like a laughter-bomb.
The imperial hangover of Calcutta, the sleepy, surreal lakes
of Sikkim, a pleasant elephant safari in Jaldapara, a strange second-hand
bookstore in Bhutan, the bygone royalties of Cooch Behar, an excellent Assamese
lunch at Guwahati – they are in the first part of this book. The second part is
on Allahabad, Varanasi and the Kumbh. Ketan’s scorn for Bengali social skills
and admiration for Bengali foods kept reappearing, the former more frequently
than the latter. A rather longish retelling of the Puranic story of
ocean-churning is resplendent with wittily crafted anachronistic dialogues. One Man Goes Backpacking by Ketan Joshi is the fascinating tale of
a solitary traveller; it thrills and tickles you at the same time.
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