Inside India

I write today, with no agendas, no ideas, no 'aha' moments. I write today not for you, but for me. It has been quite a while since I have typed into this mundane pastel-colored dialog box. Even my browser no longer stores this page in its cache. I guess 'out of sight is out of mind' is true for our friends at Mozilla too.

A lot many things have happened since I last put pen to paper; or in this case put fingers to keyboard. Barrack became President, Satyam went kaput, 08-became-09, six colleagues got the boot, whispers of a bull-run... the list is endless.
But the last two months of my life have been the most eventful. or the most hectic. depends on how one wishes to see it. So I get this mail one day, asking me if i was interested in this research report that had to be written up. 'It is about middle-India and requires EXTENSIVE travel (on weekends)' was the simple brief.
Now as much as I love my work and am thankful to god and the wonderful people at CLSA ( we all gotta do it man !) for keeping me from being just another statistical addition to Unemployment numbers, I HATE working/travelling for work on weekends. So I thought long and hard about this. And given my diligent adherence to the tenets of motion sickness, I had to think longer and harder.

But I thought, what the hell... lets do it. And two months, 35 cities, 200-odd meetings and 21,500kms later, I fell in love with my country all over again. What this report gave me an opportunity to see was the India most people shun. It was an educating experience for me personally, i realised being a Mumbai boy, i was more Americanised than i thought. i had become the very same bunch who i have vowed to ridicule for their fake accents and love for...er Bryan Adams' Summer of 69.
I lamented at the irony of me carrying bottles of mineral water with me in villages that never had enough since independence; mineral or otherwise. But this is India, and we are Indians.

Geographically diverse, linguistically confusing, culturally educating, religiously sensitizing and mostly tiring, this journey across India simply blew my mind. I would never have been to the magnificent hillocks of Leh in the bosom of the Himalayas(and 120kms from Kargil) or to the dusty hinterlands of Jaunpur or the colourful by lanes of Varanasi or met the devout of Madurai or seen the waves lashing in Kanyakumari or sipped tea in quaint chai-houses in Kolkata or played cards with truck-drivers in Karnal or seen the hopes in the eyes of each parent for the dreams of their kids or seen the wry smiles on people who believe in no more than their own fate.

This journey was in more ways than one, a pilgrimage of a patriot replete with sights and sounds forever etched in my memories. Me and my camera saw an India one would never see on tourists websites or travel catalogues or on wikipedia. This was the real India, with no flyovers, no metro-rails, no load shedding ( no load...even), no home delivery, no atms, no Aquafina... and yet with quaint sense of contentment and a restlessness to offer whatever one can for the guest's comfort.

This is a sojourn inside the very ethos of Bharat was a journey within myself, in many ways.
This is the beauty of going where few men have gone before. This is inside India.