Travel on no money

It was at around 10 pm, with no lights on the street, no sound of humanity, and only the occasional roar of the tide, when we asked Mr Dhanavade, "Where is the nearest ATM, Sir?"
I, along with two friends, was concluding my two-day back-packing stay in Diveagar, a small beachside hamlet on Maharashtra's Konkan coast. It is the sort of sleepy villages you see in old movies, where a tightly-knit community lives off kitchen gardens, fresh sea food, and the money paid by a few families that drive down from Mumbai or Pune, looking for a quiet weekend. There are no hotels, no supermarkets, and no ATMs.
Mr Dhanavade, owner of Dhanavade Niwas where we stayed and ate delicious Maharashtrian food cooked by his wife, smirked. "I think a 100 km or so," he said. "You don't have enough cash?"
The three of us, still in college and living off a monthly allowance, had carried a pittance to Diveagar, assuming that the food and stay would be cheap. This was until we decided to stay a day longer, without as much as a thought about dwindling cash reserves, and low chances of finding an ATM anywhere around this near-isolated coastal village.

There was no better way to put it. "No Sir," I said, my head hanging half in shame, half in the stupidity of the city-bred assumption that one can always 'withdraw' in case of a cash crunch. The bill was Rs 1,450 including two days rent for a small room where we slept, and the five meals we ate. We had, totally, Rs 600. There was no limit to our sense of shame. The Dhanavade couple had extended their hospitality to random half-hippie half-rockstar youngsters. They took good care of us: the food I had still continues to be the best home-cooked sea food I've ever eaten, and Mrs Dhanavade's willingness to prepare tea at odd hours on request, taking time out from her household chores, humbled us. And now we did not have enough money to pay them.
I expected an upheaval. There was no ATM around, and no bank where we could withdraw cash from. Our bus back home was to start in an hour – the only bus in the day -- and we had college to go back to the next day.
Mr Dhanavade was staring at all of us now, one by one. He sighed, and looked at his wife. They nodded at each other.
"Can you take down my postal address please," he said.
"What?" I asked, confused.
"Please take down my postal address. When you go back, collect the cash and send it to me by money order. I trust you."
That was it. He got up, and retired to his bedroom.


The time when Steve visited India, is also etched in my memory. He had contacted me on CouchSurfing.com, a service that lets users find lodging (a ‘couch’) in other users’ places. Not paying for hotels this way means cutting down on the largest share of any traveller’s expense, with the added benefit of interacting with local, similar-minded people.
On the lazy summer afternoon when Steve arrived, I lied down and listened to him talk about Canada, and his life there. Between mouthfuls of the roasted Indian groundnuts that he liked so much, Steve told me how he worked as a tree planter for half the year, and used the savings to travel for the rest of the time. His tales never failed to inspire me.
“Planting trees for half the day, every single day, involves intense physical stress. I’m sure you know what mental stress feels like. But with your conventional job I’m sure you don’t know what it is to be stressed from hard, physical labour. You have to feel it, to know it,” he said, belittling my strenuous gym workouts into a mere fad. Sitting there in that sultry room of my flat, I could imagine him trampling through Canada’s dense forests, earmarking spots, and planting saplings. I could see him dig a pit, push-in a wet plantlet with all his might, and refill the soil -- all in flat thirty seconds. The sweat, the heavy breathing, damp air, muddy shoes – I could feel it around me while he spoke. And when he paused in between, to scoop up more groundnuts, I let my mind wander around those forests, and that country, walking with his friends, meeting his family, and attending parties. Canada seemed so familiar, yet so distant. Steve made me want to lead his life, to work for the environment, and not work in air-conditioned environment-unfriendly buildings. Yet India is no Canada. Will any job wait for me after I’m back from my carefree travelling? Nobody pays for planting trees. I wasn’t on a tour, I did not own any mode of transport, nor had I stepped outside my home. Yet, sitting in the room listening to Steve, the eagle soared over the forests of Canada.

Gem clips. Small yet big.

When you used a paper clip this morning, did you give it more than a moment’s thought? You would have opened a box of clips, picked up any one of them, and clipped your manuscript with it. You picked one of them at random – each one being as preferred as the other. Little did you know that the same clip represents a history of struggle for identity; each clip picked from among a hundred others could tell a different story.

Ask your grandmother, and she will say it was Johan Vaaler who invented the clip. True, Vaaler, a Norwegian who lived in the late 19^th century, was long known for that. He had received patents for it in Norway and USA. Encyclopedias and dictionaries since the 1950s mentioned him as the inventor of the paperclip, first in Norway and then internationally. However, this is a myth. True, he developed a version of the paperclip, but it is among many others developed around that era, and certainly not what you used this morning.

The common clip today is a “Gem” clip. We call it that just the way you call a photocopy machine, a Xerox machine. It was Gem Manufacturing, a British company, that started production in 1870s, and which holds the credit for popularizing today’s paper clip. The clip is so commonly used, that till this date we call it a “Gem” clip; obviously, a single British company does not supply it to the rest of the world! The first twist of the paperclip’s identity comes here. Nobody has heard of E. P. Bugge. Well, what we know today as the “Gem” paper clip was developed and patented Bugge of the United States, vide patent no. 3,057,027.

Vaaler’s version of the paperclip, like scores of other versions, was ineffective compared to the Gem clip. It lacked the last turn, and a subsequent long side -- making the clip highly flimsy. It would give its user a hard time trying to push it across thick paper.

Why did Vaaler become so famous then?

It was a fight for the Norwegian identity that made him a hero. The paperclip by then had become a very commonly used item, and claiming it to be an innovation from Norway gave great pride to Norwegians, especially in the aftermath of World War II. They wore it on their lapels as a symbol of resistance, when wearing flags pins was prohibited by the Nazi party.

Writers of history too did not leave out the opportunity, of building national pride in Norway by using paperclip as a symbol of their unity. There was a School Paperclip Project in Tennessee, USA, where students of a middle school collected 6 million paperclips to show solidarity against the holocaust. Soon enough, Johan Vaaler was portrayed as a hero of the Norwegian Jews – when he wasn’t even Jew. This was great attempt by war-struck Norwegians at using the paperclip for artificially constructing of national pride and identity. What is interesting is that a monument was erected in Norway commemorating Vaaler’s invention; the paperclip depicted here is in fact the Gem clip, and not Vaaler’s version at all.

A twisting and turning of identities, indeed!