It’s no magic, really!

It is surprising how no one will raise an eyebrow when someone says they took two months off from work because of marriage. And if I say I took a month off from work to travel, the first reaction is something akin to utter disbelief. That concept apparently doesn’t exist here! For the past three years I have heard this question time and again, every single time I meet a new person and every single time I meet an old friend. It gets as irritating as it is funny. Travel is perceived as a time pass and not as the life changing experience that it actually is. This makes someone who travels look like an idiot wasting his life having fun instead of doing something important like watching TV or wandering in the mall. They keep telling me, “I don’t have as much time as you do! “. In my head I retort back saying “I don’t have as much tolerance as you do for the mundane!”

If these are the non-believers there are few others who assume things. Assumptions that I get paid to travel or that I get additional leaves or that I am in the travel industry or my personal favorite, that I don’t work at all, and I am on a perpetual vacation(How I wish it were true!).

Quite recently a friend told me, he took a long break of a year or so to sort out few things, during that time he did travel a lot and came back to start afresh with a new job. He cleared all the technical rounds and then came the dreaded HR round, where someone tries to figure you out based on few questions, and how do they really do that anyway? But the point is, he didn’t say he was traveling during the break, he told sob stories of family problems and he landed the plush job! He says they don’t understand. I agree, they don’t understand, after all how is it possible to assume all these things about me when it is really quite simple. 

So how in the hell do I really manage to get all those leaves then? Let’s do some simple math here.

Number if weekends in a year   – 52*2 (Saturdays and Sundays)

Number of public Holidays       – 12

Number of Leaves at work       – 25

Total                                        – 141 days!

There, is the mystery solved?

What this means is, in a given year, most of us are on leave for almost 40% of the time. We can travel for almost three months in a year. If you apply for a leave of 5 days, you are actually getting 9 days including the weekends. This means in a year you can go for 5 major trips of 10 days each. So you can go to Ladakh, Rajasthan, Sikkim, Andamans and one trip home, all in one year! And if there’s a festival or a public holiday around the corner, include that as well and you will get even more! See, it comes down to planning in the end. How well we plan in advance decides how many vacations we get. Now you know what’s the first thing I do at the beginning of the New Year and in case you don’t, I check the list of holidays, weekends etc and already decide when to go. Where to go is decided on go!

Being in Bangalore certainly has its advantages. Most places around here are just a weekend away. The treks in Western Ghats are doable in two days. Friday night we start and Monday morning we are back in office. No leaves to apply here, it is a weekend right?

Saving up the leaves and encashing them when I resign is not an option for me. I use up all my leaves and more if required but certainly wouldn’t let them be unused. My hometown is also just a weekend away, so there isn’t a need to apply leaves to go home either. All the leaves are used only for trips, not because I felt lazy in the morning to go to office or didn’t feel like working. If those were my excuses for taking a leave, then I wouldn’t have been writing on this blog today. I wouldn’t have traveled as much as I did.

You take all these leaves as well, you go home, get married or do something else that ranks high on your priority list. My priority list pretty much consists only of travel and that’s what I use the leaves for. There isn’t really much difference between what you and I do. You take leaves, I take leaves, we all take leaves, just for different reasons so don’t judge me next time when I tell you I am just back from a vacation.

You know when they say if you really want to do something you’ll find a way and if you don’t want to, you’ll find an excuse. That is true! I find my way to travel somehow. What about you?

More rants and related posts:

Top Five Annoying things to say to a Photographer
Travel and the not so pink and rosy side of it!
Food for Thought - Travel and Conscience!