An anecdote

I woke up really early today to catch that extremely early train they call The Taj Express. I was going to Agra to get some work done and I was a little nostalgic and excited to be back after four long years. I kept peering out of the window and wondering if everything was still the same or had it changed.

I arrived at Raja Ki Mandi (RKM for us), a tad inconvenienced and looking for a Prasaadhan(or toilet, for those of us who do not converse in such chaste Hindi). There was a long queue of gentlemen, all patiently waiting for their turn inside the facility. An elderly sweeper, who chanced to come in was so overcome by his love for humanity that he tried to do his best for us.
"Bhaiyya, baahar deewar per kar lo", he warmly confided to that noble group of Indian males who had resisted their primal urge to let go on the walls.

Taking a train to India

After a prolonged absence of four years, I finally fixed my date with Indian Railways again. I work in Bangalore and have my home in Dehradun (they are more than 2500 km apart), so usually I fly to Delhi but this time around I thought it would be an adventure to spend 33 hours on a train to Delhi. (Actually, I didn't, truth is air-tickets were too expensive.)

And an adventure it was, not it terms of exciting, adrenaline rushing moments but feeling the pulse of the vast nation that I call my home. I think if you really want to see India, you have to travel by railroad. Flying just whisks you up above the clouds, suspends your consciousness and then drops you right at the destination. It just abstracts the road you take to the point you want to get. Much like everything else we like to call "convenience".

Travelling on a train, is quite another matter. The engine and its retinue rush along the land, linking the various nondescript villages, barely known stations and huge junctions and big cities. With the airlines, you just get to see the big, important cities; with railways, you see India. And its heartbreakingly beautiful. When you live in a big city long enough, you lose touch from the rest of the nation. Nothing quite brings you in contact with the forgotton hinterlands as a railroad.

I sat all day at the footsteps of my compartment staring out at the settlements that passed; the tiny huts with reddish-orange shingles on top or mud huts with rough fences made out of twisted, dried shrubs. There were large wastelands, too dry to produce anything but there were families still tilling and cultivating and hoping for a decent price for their labour. Almost everyone on the field was burnt deep-brown by the unforgiving tropical Sun. This was their price of labour. Sometimes they would look up and see rest of the world rushing by ahead of them. Did they ever think they were missing out on life?

The land changed when we got to Maharashtra, the soil was darker and thicker, plants were greener. This was a fertile land and you could tell by just looking at it. The people were again something very different from me and you, who still did penance once a year for the local deity and celebrated harvests. There were numerous temples dotting the land, all flying a single, somewhat triangular saffron flag. And as the train crossed the roads, I peered at all those faces waiting across the gates and wondered what their lives were like. I wondered if they were interested in mine.

Somewhere after Nagpur, the light started to fade and then I could see men cycling back to their unlit homes and the faint glow of the kitchen fires that must have welcomed them. The land suddenly started rising and the train was running in between a bed of rock, there were three tunnels that darkened the compartments and caused the lights to be switched on. There were a couple of smokers who came out to the door but I held on to my spot, after all these were the dying minutes of my train journey. Come tomorrow morning and I would be the city-dweller again.

Freedom at Midnight

India is impossible to define or confine in a few sentences. Here the wheels turn, halt, wobble, break-down and then complainingly start rolling again. Its a vast melting pot of people all thrown together to co-exist. India is everything, its a metaphor for life. There is no distant way to say what it is, you can never understand it unless you have felt it.

Its frustrating and limiting and then being free again. Its a land of heterogeneity, of races and cultures so diverse that they could fit a continent. And ironically we have been called a sub-continent :)

I don't intend to write up a primer to understanding India, it's as I said, to be experienced. However, as it is Independence Day today, I could not resist myself from watching a few black and white,grainy videos of our Freedom Struggle. They still give me goose-bumps, watching them is unlike anything I have seen in my life. Scores of people marching 400 km just to take up a handful of salt? Getting caned in most brutal fashion but not retaliate or run away? They were a different breed of people, fearless and self-less, not defying or destroying but calmly and persistently disobeying the Establishment. Yes, we did have our share of revolutionaries and proponents of armed struggle, but people embraced Satyagraha overwhelmingly and the struggle remained famously non-violent. Thats what makes me so proud to be a free child of India.
The images and videos lift me out of the mundane existence that we have become accustomed to and take for granted. They give me belief in the strength of our country and its collective humanity.

And a prayer for peace:


"Om dyo shaanti, Antarikshagwam shaanti
Prithvi shaanti, Aapah shaanti
Roshdyah shaanti, Vanspataya shaanti,
Vishwedeva shaanti, Brahma shaanti
Sarvagyum shaanti, Saa ma shaanti-re dhi.
Om shaanti, shaanti, shaanti."