Two ways of travelling

There are two ways of travelling. One is the highly planned, pre-scheduled tour where hotel rooms are booked in advance and each meal of the day is pre-planned. Every morning you wake up, you know what you would be doing for the rest of the day –
9:00 Breakfast
9:30 Bus leaves for beach
9:45 Bus reaches beach
10:45 Bus leaves for Entertainment Park and so on

The second way is to wander mindlessly like a nomad. Needless to say, I prefer this to the surgical precision of organized tours, which treat leisure and business travel alike. According to me, travelling is more about spontaneous urges than well thought over, scientific decisions. Its about letting your feet take you wherever they wish to go. The end result is nothing short of an adventure. What use is traveling if it has the monotony and predictability of your daily office life?
Perhaps the best advice I can give to a fellow traveller is the saying by Lao Tszu:
"A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving"

Wodehouse on commerce

The following is an excerpt from "PSmith in the City" by P.G. Wodehouse. My empathy for Mike (the bank employee) stems from the fact that my feelings for commerce are no different. Let me bring it to the reader's notice that Wodehouse too used to work as a clerk in HSBC. Therefore, these emotions might be regarded as genuine.
"There are some people who take naturally to a life of commerce. Mike was not of these. To him the restraint of the business was irksome. He had been used to an open-air life, and a life, in its way, of excitement. He gathered that he would not be free till five o'clock, and that on the following day he would come at ten and go at five, and the same every day, except Saturdays and Sundays, all the year round, with a ten days' holiday. The monotony of the prospect appalled him. He was not old enough to know what a narcotic is Habit, and that one can become attached to and interested in the most unpromising jobs.
He looked through the letters he had stamped, and re-read the addresses. Some of them were directed to people living in the country…It made him home-sick, conjuring up visions of shady gardens and country sounds and smells…About now, if he were not in this dismal place, he would be lying in the shade in the garden with a book, or wandering down to the river to boat or bathe…Few workers in the City do regard lunch as a trivial affair. It is the keynote of their day. It is an oasis in a desert of ink and ledgers. Conversation in city office deals, in the morning, with what one is going to have for lunch, and in the afternoon with what one has had for lunch."

Harry Potter - the movie

I finally managed to see “Harry Potter and the sorcerer’s stone”. The movie was not as bad as I had thought. Potter is essentially a potpourri of Tom Brown’s school days, Oliver Twist, Lord of the Rings and the Grimm’s fairy tales. The worst thing about this Potter book is its predictability. However, that would torment you only if are an adult, accustomed to the twist in the tale. Children should enjoy this book immensely. It adds an exciting flavour to their dull school lives (when you are a child, you are sure that school life is dull). As an adult, I prefer to watch the movie version and be through with it in two hours.
Judging on creativity, I would rank Tolkein much higher than Rowling. For most people, even the comparison is sacrilege. Tolkein’s ability to create hundreds of characters and fit them together tightly, like in a jigsaw puzzle, is unsurpassed. Coming back to the comparison, Dumbledore seems to be heavily inspired from the all powerful, yet selfless, Gandalf. Voldemort, the Dark Lord, is something akin to Sauron, desperately attempting to regain his lost power. And Malfoy, like Saruman in LOTR, is helping Voldemort in his ulterior motive. Then, Harry Potter also features an elf who has a vocabulary similar to Gollum. So, Tolkein the king reigns supreme at the top.
Overall, my assessment of Potter is - not as bad as I thought.