After enduring that potent goodbye from Dharamsala, I proceeded for 13 hours of bus, followed by 16 hours of train. I was hoping that while I was in Bombay airport waiting 8 hours for the upcoming 12 hours of plane, that I might come to some conclusions about India. The windowpanes showed me one last view of hardworking India, and there was no doubt - I'd seen enough to be transformed by the place. But the motorways, tramlines, and airways were smogging up my mind, and it was hard not to feel scattered. I eventually joined in casual company with an older Dutchman, and together we whiled away about India, about life and happiness, and why travel was so integral a component to both.

The Bombay Airport P.A. system begins its announcements with belltones precisely like the beginning of Taps. It was the end of Buck in India.

I know some of you might ask what I think of India. I even ask myself, but I'm not sure. It's not often I offer up the skeletons of my journal verbatim to the travelogues here. But I haven't any universal answers to India or happiness or life, and sometimes it seems like a little unfinished black book knows more than I do. So here is what the raw scribbles say:

Bennies to Travel:

• Appreciation of new wrinkles
  
• Learning new language + b. language... the vessel of new mental process
  
• Getting sick, getting well, learning the idea of health and food, fasting and gluttony and how it affects our consciousness
  
• Restriction of comforts leads to streamline of self
  
• Finding happiness in something removed from money
  
• " " in something foreign
  
• " " a foreign form of love (or lust?)
  
• Seeing other people's answers to the meaning of life.
  
• The price? Not so much money as an eternal haunt; everywhere you've been is yours, like a new member of your family... and whenever further you hear of it, you'll relive it deeply. That's the cost: you've left a part of yourself there.
  
• Patience + the positivity of loneliness
  
• A Requestioning of the Aesthetics You've Accepted. (Clothes, Music, Jewelry, Faces, Personalities)
  
• Street Savvy, of the global nature.
  
• The obvious: travelers along the way, more vivid and alive than any character in movie or book, because they are real.
  
• Redefining your connection to happiness via money since your currency converts you to a local prince or pauper.
  

But then the scribbles grow smaller and introspective: "Setback: A seratonin imbalance? Rewire of soul to demand transience more... dissatisfaction with static things, participating in them. Pets, hobbies, wives, a heating up of the molecules that, w/o a constant source of new heat, settle into forms, new selves that might only seem macabre, for all of their potential, but misuse. We come back and see ambition as mere distraction and find our new distractions to be ambitious though they are not acceptable."

And here the little tome of airport wisdom whittles off into thoughts on emotion and logic, draws abstract graphs with things like Standard Domestic Repression and Nexus of Transience, Growth. It's quite dense stuff and I am not sure that I've written this, at least, as I am now. But something is written here and I'm not sure where to take it, let alone whether to take it at all.

For now I have landed upon the shelf of old consciousness - the continent of Europe. For two days, I bumbled about in Paris, adjusted in something of a shock to the idea that so many people could look like me in body, and act and dress and speak so unlike me. I composed a collection of thoughts on the concept: You Know You've Been in Asia For a Long Time When...

• It takes the better part of a minute's search to realize that the showerhead wasn't missing, it was merely hiding in the closet-like thing in the bathroom.
• Toilets feel like an inadvisable height
• You happily say "Namaste" to the Indian shop owners.
• The only thing that seems reasonably priced is alcohol
• People and cars surprise you from behind, or you cut them off - not because you're mean, but because they didn't honk.
• It feels strange that people say "pardon" if they come within 3 feet.
• You wonder how and why queues maintain order.
• Bread. Wow. Was it always like this?
• People selling Rolex's are too passive.
• Paying 2 Euros for linen rental (same price as 1 day's rent in India) is unacceptable.
• You grow parched wondering about the tap water.
• Instantly available hot water is a joy.
• You cut your face up with the brilliantly effective European razor.
• You leave a restaurant to piss in the gutter but there is none. Oh, they have bathrooms in the restaurants here...

Thusly did my reintegration to Western society progress. And, surprisingly enough, I do believe the pendulum is quickly swinging the other way. There is a strange psychologie at work, for those two days in Paris were strangely attracting. I wanted to dress and live like them. I felt the rain and the green grass smell, two things I hadn't experienced in months, and I felt ready... almost... to don the tie and collar.

For only a few days would I remain, so I gave Paris a chance to show me all that Europe had artistically fostered in the last century by visiting the Centre Pompideau. And there did I begin my mind's hasty transition from East to West. Two girls sat on opposite ends of a bench, one sketching, the other text messaging. Among the Pompideau's walls were all of the fits and furies of modernism. Servranckx's geometries, Picasso's mediocrity-raised-by-politicism, Leger's vibrant colors and monochromatic circles, Kandinsky's linear animalism. Pollock. Ozenfant. Repetition. Overlap. Andre Breton's wall. All of these strange icons that make up a canon I had grown with. Collectively, they were grotesque, haunting, a portent to impossibility and catastrophe. Yet... inspiring.

But rupees were still in my mind, and I fled the expensive city on a train north to Holland. There, I witnessed a veritable army of youthful text messengers, and then I witnessed the cinematic sight of French soldiers protecting Gare du Nord. They walked through the train station in perfect posture, height, form, and synchronicity. This was only a week after the Madrid bombings, and they were all seriousness. Their stone gargoyle contrast from my familiarity with Indian troops was incredible.

I approached the high-speed train and met the ticket man.

• "English?"
• "Si... Oui..."
• "Spanish?"
• "English is mejor."
• "Hahaha... what?!"
• (Smiling) "Si, espanol es better."

Such was the status of my brain, bombarded with the world's language. But of course it wasn't that difficult to get by. I slumped into the seat, happy to be free of my packs, and remarked at the scenery screaming by. What was I getting into? Was this really how I lived before? No. This is what I fled?

The train pulled into Rotterdam, my decompression stop in Europe. During the day, I would see the city as though it were an experiment in modernism. For its obsession in uniformity. It was a place where everyone lived like a designer in a designed community. People walking dogs that looked like them. I'd seen many dogs in India, but I hadn't seen leashes in a long time. And their homes: endlessly long, perfectly renovated brick apartments, with universal white trimmed windows. The brick 'n windows then face each other, and you watch in and watch your neighbors pet their cats or watch television. The windows and concrete and white stripes reminded me of zebras and optical interference tests. I wondered how I was faring the test. Where everyone was insanely sane. Where did the screaming saddhus go?

But before long I would settle into the motions. Internet was free again. Designer books lay around the apartment proselytizing font libraries and Swiss design mantras. It was all so ridiculously specific and narrow and at times a bit revolting. But before long I fell back into my former fascinations. I joined Jen for a day at work at a design firm specializing in interface design. I began to rerun the mental pathways of graphic design and typography. And I greatly appreciated the tastes of luxury: of salmon and gouda and olives.

But was this real? The design posters advertised "Don't be a dirty hippi. Buy some new CD's from Nurses With Wounds and Apoplexy" The design books were much like the city of Rotterdam: chaos-phobic, full of fear of the undesigned, the unplanned. And, farther still, the books preached the benefit of the undesigned world for inspiration, scraps that could be made into more. I couldn't help feeling a bit affronted, as if something in me was irked at the idea that scraps needed arranging, editorializing. Colonizers! And yet asitwere and asitis to stay, art is corpse-cold. Design is law. India is overblown with screaming peddlers and car horns. This world is overblown with shiftier Maras: information and options, in dire need of aggressive editing. Swimming around in the existential soup we pick out legumes and point vigorously at them declaring what they are or what they aren't... while the passersby applaud the new aesthetic - it's the concept, not the reality, stupid. That is, they would applaud if anyone were listening and not text messaging. I felt then a familiar dread. And I am to be a part of this.

But that was only one calculation. One moment of truth or deception. As the days move along, I've had more coffee, more cheeses, and more good beers, and I find myself wondering if there isn't something right about believing in a kind of perfection and striving for it, even if it is highly constructed and highly uniform. I tell you now this is a good place. I enjoy it. But something's strange. Does it busy itself in the right ways? And where from here? I may yet find myself behind a white-trim window in the very near-term future, contemplating whether wavelets are the ultimate new compression algorithm, or considering the choice of Garamond or Goudy fonts. But what will I think of it all? Or will I think?