Down with Sundays!

"Santa Cruz->Churchgate->Fort->Churchgate->Santa Cruz->Grocery store->Home"

That is largely my life, interspersed at times with assignments that take me out of Mumbai. Those assignments, though, are outliers at best. Most stories get done inside Mumbai. Now it is not as if I don't like this way of life, it was my own choice after all to move to Mumbai and jump into the spiral.

I think what spoils it for me are Sundays, those evil speedbreakers. When your hobby becomes your profession, Sundays are boring. They suck the life out of a comfortable rhythm of work. It is like being placed on gate duty during the most happening event of your school or college. When I walk out of my house on Sundays, all I find myself doing is staring blankly at faces on the streets, who in turn stare back at me in what seems to be a completely pointless exercise. To escape that agonizing experience, I sleep the whole Sunday off often to find a day of my life wasted. It is a wholly unsatisfying thing.

What I would love to do instead, is work continuously for 3-4 months without a single holiday, and then take off for an entire fortnight. There is so much to do in Mumbai. So many stories lurking behind the old structures in Bandra and Fort, so much of history to explore and be fascinated by. You need a long break to dig substantially into it.

I have spent more hours consuming the contents of the Times Food Guide, than I have spent eating out in Mumbai. I have mentally made long lists of eateries I'd like to experiment with. I hear there is a restaurent in Thane that serves food from Uruguay! It has been long since I ate at 'Momo's Point' at Kamla Nagar in Delhi, which is having me crave mad for Tibetan Food. It would be great to have twenty days off just to explore food joints in Mumbai and around, one after another. So on Day 1, it would be Lebanese for lunch, Uruguay-ese for dinner, on Day 2 it would be Konkani for lunch and Thai for dinner... and so on till Day 20.

Then I want to learn and play squash good enough to represent my company at one of those Press tournaments. 20 days of practise is enough to get me there. I cannot speak enough about the trekking and hiking options around Mumbai. It is also time for my yearly pilgrimage to the Himalayas, worshipping those mountains by walking on them till my legs can't take me another meter and camping in the snow and eating Maggi cooked on firewood.

I would give away all my Sundays and public holidays in return for just those 20 days when I can bury my mobile phone somewhere deep inside my wardrobe, put on my sneakers and pack a light rucsack and become laapata for some while.

But only for those wrecked things called Sundays!