Off The Beaten Path

Siam Reap. The First Time

My first trip to Siam Reap, and the Angkor Wat area was in August of 2001. This was during one of those regional meetings that used to take place every quarter. We had, in the region, a fantastic team. It was filled with some excellent professionals, and due to the team building efforts of my boss at that time, we had an excellent sense of camaraderie and comradeship. 

It all dissolved in 2002, when our division was divested globally. And then, poof, it was gone, like it had never been. But, memories stay with us, and as we grow older, they occasionally tend towards nostalgia for the good times gone by. 

It was hot and humid that August, and I am sure it is always hot and humid at that time of the year. I was sweating profusely, as I always do. My T Shirt was sticking to me, and was during the duration of the visit to the temples, slowly starting to melt into my skin. Worse was in the area below my waist, where my jeans and underwear fused into the sweatier regions, and became more and more uncomfortable as  the day went by. 

The only problem with these trips, is that you never get the time to walk around, and take all sorts of wonderful pictures, with different angles and points of view. To top it all, I was using an old Canon point and shoot. Quick and dirty.

So, the shot of Ta Phrom above, and Bayon below cannot be considered to be well planned shots. If, at all they look good, it is through sheer luck. 

Ta Phrom was originally called "Rajavihara". It was built as a result of the huge building effort by the king of the time, Jayavarman VII. Jayavarman was the first Buddhist king of the Khmer dynasty. His predecessors were Hindus. The building commenced in 1181 AD, when he came to power. The temples fell into disuse from the 15th century. Some people believe that the faces in the Bayon complex were representations of Jayavarman himself. Some believe that they were depictions of Lokesvara, the boddhisattva of compassion. Well, maybe they are depictions of Jayavarman as Lokesvara. 

 

Kingdoms come and go. The lucky kings get to be remembered, through paintings or sculptures. The poor sods who made the great works of art are forgotten. If they are lucky, they live to work again. Some of them did have their arms chopped off, or were blinded, so that they would never get to work again. 

We are what we make ourselves. We are made by the factors that influence us. We choose what to do with these influences.   

After Dark - 3

Finally, before turning in for the night, the Corporate Traveler, turned his gaze to the road outside Tokyo Railway station, and looked at the people rushing to and from the station.

And suddenly, the thought struck home that Einstein, with the Theory of Relativity, was as much a philosophical genius as a scientific one.

We, in our glorious vanity, assume that we are big, strong and important. In a sense, we are. However, we forget the scale of relativity. 

While we have industrialized over the centuries, and we are now looking at methods to clone nature, we start to arrogate to ourselves, a certain Divinity. That Divinity, which we, until now, ascribed to a concept we call God. 

Over the centuries, many of us have arrogated to ourselves, the Voice of God. Yet, if God truly exists, we would be but one part of the Great Cosmos that He/She/It has to manage.

We believe ants are small. To us, they are. To each other, ants are not small. 

Yet, in a different scale of things, we are like ants. 

Our Divinity, the Corporate Traveler believes, will be devoured by Time.

He then turns off the light, and falls into a dreamless sleep, only to wake up the next morning, a Slave to the Clock. 

After Dark - 2

After dark, when the corporate business traveller looks out across the railway tracks of the railway station, he starts to wonder. 

Where do people come from at such a late hour? Where do they go? Do some of them, like in his home country, use the railway station as a home? 

What secrets, if any, do some of them hide? Are they business travelers? Or, people returning after a holiday? Are some of them thieves & robbers? How many indulge in nefarious activities?

And how many will be blown up by a terrorist bomb or, by a terrorist's bullet? 

Railway stations are places where people pass each other in the night, by day, in the evening. We cross each other in a rushing mass of humanity, without noticing what the other person looks like. 

However, there are those who stand and watch. They look at people, as people, not as an amorphous blur. 

Our modern world, where speed accounts for so much, has taken away much of our humanity.

Possibly also, our continuously declining private space probably accentuates this desire to protect our personal space. So, we stop making eye contact with our fellow human. Personal music systems, books, our dreams are havens of retreat. 

So, where do you go to lonely traveler, and what are your dreams, wonders the corporate traveler, at the end of the day.

After Dark - 1

I took this picture while standing at my hotel window, in Tokyo, one night. Corporate travel can be a pretty lonesome affair, quite unlike other forms of travel, even if you travel alone on pleasure. 

The aloneness of corporate travel is not something that is generally advertised. But, amidst all the dinners and the wining and dining, there are these moments when you stand by your hotel window, and wonder what the hell life is all about. These are the moments when the blackberry has gone quiet, and when the telephone conferences are over. Or, when you don't have a dinner to attend to, and you reluctantly pick up a book to read. Unless you go to a bar. 

After dark, the city changes. The mice come out. The dregs of society come out. People who are working late, go home.

The city looks different at night. I sometimes think we are afraid of the dark, which is why we seek out the bright lights. We avoid the dark corners of the city, where the life in the shadows takes on a character all its own. 

Or, like mice, we scurry back into our homes, into our little cubby holes to seek comfort. The life in the shadows can be frightening indeed. There are elements in the shadows that challenge our normal assumptions about life, and leave us helpless and not knowing how to deal with this new and unfamiliar challenge. 

The ancients believed that the moonlight revealed things that were hidden by the strong daylight. They believed that this was the time of the Moon Goddess, and the time for magic. Things, fair and foul, were believed to be given new life in the moonlight, and the shadows of the night. 

As religions became more solar, our reluctance to face the dark probably grew to being a primeval fear.

So, the lonely business traveller seeks the bright lights, and looks at the railway lines from his hotel window at night.