aditya kumar's weblog

I wish and I hope that I am able to watch this at Rangashankara sometime in the next couple of days. More information, here.

Update: [17 November 2005, 1910 Hrs] All tickets sold out :-(

The rain kept on pouring on the bus, in all forms. There were brief periods when the breeze had some private moments with the bus, but overall, the rain intruded most of the time. I could see the windshield and have the driver’s view on some occasions. The wipers kept working overtime.

The view on the Driver’s rear view mirror often revealed the grinning face of our driver. The smile showcasing the bright white set of teeth in the darkness. The smile that also managed to hold a lit bidi that was an important accessory with this man who had already driven us close to 300 kilometers. The same smile that probably had a few hundred stories behind it. Stories that were an important aspect of his life (and probably someone else’s life too), for they fuelled the fire in him to drive 17 hours a day.

I chose to turn my face towards the window. Droplets of water decorated the brown glass pane on my right. The city cars zoomed past, leaving behind a tail of colorful lights, owing to which, the droplets of water, for a moment or two, acquired the effect of hundred mini-rainbows.

And when not mini-rainbows, they were the stars. Small, silvery, glittering and existing within my hand’s reach. I was so much in my own little world. Isn’t that what everyone wants? Isn’t that what you want?

But then the bus stopped, and the imagery acquired a different shape. A beggar child, in the bare minimum of clothes, both hands on the window of a car. His workplace, this muddy, traffic congested road. His plea, in his eyes. His desperations, too many to count. His thoughts, he could not afford.

His hands on the window’s glass were taken to be intrusions into another world. His gestures were met with hatred. On an open window, the glass made way up, securing the world of someone inside. Nothing, but a pure matter of convenience.

If I could make eye contact with the child, all I had to offer was another pair of cold eyes.

The difference between his world and mine? A Glass Pane.

Then I noticed, it was only the breeze now — the rain had gone and so were the droplets. My world looked so bleak without those stars.

My little world now ceased to exist.

PS: Thank you, Mr.Nair, for your suggestions on this.

1200 Hours- Just off Mangalore, from the Mangalore – Mumbai Matsyaganda Express, Konkan Route

It was 7 in the morning when I reached Mangalore. The dawn reminded me, much to my disappointment, of Bangalore, the city I had boarded the bus from. The same grey sky, some drizzle and mist in the air. The plan had been to spend the day at Mangalore before going to Udupi by late evening and catching the train to Goa, my home, the following morning. But a first look at the sky and immediately I knew — my plan had backfired. What I hoped to leave behind, I had not. Gloomy morning was very uninviting and the sea, it was far away.

But hope remained. Something in me wanted to stay as per the original plan. And why not, I had waited for this trip quite a long time and had been looking forward to it. I managed to reach the nearest bus stop and asked for the bus to Ullal beach. Number 44, they said. I waited. Bus 43 came and Bus 45 went by. No luck. By that time the drizzle had transformed itself into pouring rain. Ah, I saw Bus 44 coming. It zoomed by me even though I had gestured for the driver to stop it. He gestured me to go away. Just go away. I think he even said that in Kannada.

The rain did not stop. I went back to the railway station, my base camp. Got myself a platform ticket. I prefer to eat at the railway canteen when I am alone in unknown cities. First, I can eat lavishly without thinking too much about the pocket. The food is never bad. Secondly and more importantly, I make it a point to strike up a conversation with someone from the canteen staff. They are the best people who can tell you about the city and since they talk to all kind of travellers, language is never a problem. As I ordered my tea and bread omelette, the canteen manager gave me, as I realised later, the most important piece of advice at that time– Take the first train from Mangalore to Goa, Matsyaganda Express at 11AM and GO HOME.

Cancelled my ticket from Udupi to Goa and decided to board the Matsyaganda express that was to start at 1100 Hrs and should take me home to Goa by late evening. And here I am, writing this on the train, leaving the edge of Malabar on to a journey to the Konkan Route, a known terrain to me.

1645 Hours — Just off Karwar, the last Karnataka station before the train touches Goa

A little after Udupi, sunshine welcomed me. Rather, I should say, I welcomed the sunshine. It was as if, the bus driver of route 45, the canteen manager and the rain gods conspired against me and made me come here. After being deprieved of sunshine for almost 3 weeks in Bangalore, it was a relief to see the Golden Globe. Droplets of sweat appeared on my forehead and I did not mind it at all.

Now, as the train goes through Konkan, the coconut tree count tends to increase, the tunnels, some as long as 3 Kms, come and go. My age old custom of switching on the lights of the compartment in the daytime, has been invoked.

The rivers are full of water. Greenery is in abundance. The Sun sprays it’s rays and the dust appears almost Golden. The train enters countless and seemingly endless tunnels and when that happens, the smell of dampness overwhelms me, and my new found friend, the future hotel manager who comes from Bengal. We continue to talk about topics ranging from Fish names to Ganguly’s woes.





Goa is an hour away. Coming to Mangalore and bringing along the rain with me was certainly a bad idea or not, I do not know. In fact, who cares, now I do not want to know.

Readers, Happy Deepawali.

Hope this year is great for the people of Blogosphere, for you all — The readers I know, the readers who post comments and the readers who follow this blog but prefer not to comment.

I am travelling right now, will post something on that soon.

I have been travelling. There are quite a few of unreplied emails and comments I know, but please bear with me.

Will update soon.

I dug up this from the rediff.com archives.

In a link that I will soon reveal, Amitava Kumar, in a column written in 1999, asserts that most Indian writers in English, are reporters to the west.

Barring Arundhati Roy, of course.

Now, I hope that you have read Arundhati Roy’s essay “The End of Imagination”.

An excerpt:

The jeering, hooting young men who battered down the Babri Masjid are the same ones whose pictures appeared in the papers in the days that followed the nuclear tests. They were on the streets, celebrating India’s nuclear bomb and simultaneously “condemning Western Culture” by emptying crates of Coke and Pepsi into public drains. I’m a little baffled by their logic: Coke is Western Culture, but the nuclear bomb is an old Indian tradition?

It is not anything else that I wish you read but this. Please take some time out and read it if you still haven’t. See for yourself, what you missed for 7 years.

And here, Amitava Kumar praises Roy’s stance and is also “slightly” critical of her.

If you shall need more matter on this subject, and something less emotional than Roy, please read about this book here.

I arrived here in the evening on a train that runs on meter gauge track. It takes almost 8 hours from Indore to reach here. The official time table indicates a little more than 6 hours, but I do not care since my train to Goa arrives past midnight. Whether this train pulls in at 5 PM or at 6:30 PM, I am hardly bothered since I have a lot of time to kill anyway.

I have travelled enough in this long, wide country to conclude that travelling by train in India is an important part of your syllabus if you think of India as a “full term course”. All the theory learned like “The diversity of the land”, “the different dialects in the speech” come to life when you travel in the train, second class. But meter gauge track is different. It’s like specialising in “small town India” and the villages. The usual trains pass by them with speeds of 110 km per hour as if flipping pages of the book and skipping small, not so important chapters. At the small railway platforms of these very same villages, the meter gauge track trains spend hours.

So we start our journey from Indore and pass on, the two of us, my friend $D and me, passing by stations like Mhow, where we have a stop of 45 minutes. A man sells Kachoris in a cardboard box. It is a long journey and food could be a problem so we eat what we get. By early afternoon we reach Kalakand. Everytime that I have passed through this station, I am reminded of the sweet. I am told the village name is Kalakand because it is famous for the sweet with the same name.

Lucky Ali sings “kitni haseen zindagi” in my ears.

The train stops at the slightest excuse it finds. We do not get annoyed, all this was expected. But we observe. We see villagers carrying huge loads of vegetables in the train. One corner of the coach smells of coriander. On the outside of the windows, hooks are attached, one by one. Some of these hooks carry small logs of wood while the rest carry big cans of milk.

We reach Khandwa at 6:15 PM. According to the timetable we should have been here an hour back.

$D’s train is a good 3 hours late so I have company before I catch the train that will take me to Goa at midnight. Our first stop is the railway canteen run by a bespectacled man who seems well educated and a nice person. Dressed in a simple, clean full sleeve shirt and a little stocky. We order tea and in addition, I order bread and omelette. After a journey like this, where there are no big stations and no food stalls, this is a treat. The man behind the counter continues to read his newspaper while his son, probably 10 years old, tries to engage him in conversations. His trials go in vain.

$D is bored. Unlike me, he does not carry a Walkman. Amidst of all the trains that come and go in front of us, he picks out Bangalore-Delhi Karnataka Express and goes in to roam inside the train while it stands on the platform. “The girls are beautiful inside”, he arrives at the conclusion after he comes back with a wide grin. Evidently, the Bangalore-Delhi culture is in full form inside the coaches. That is the only glimpse we see of the metro culture in one of the busiest rail junctions of Central India. I see $D enjoyed his short lived adventure.

The much sought after train to Bhagalpur arrives. $D finally leaves at around 9 PM. This main part of his journey shall take a good 36 hours more. He has a waiting list ticket. That means no guarantee of a seat. I do not have a confirmed seat for the journey either but Deepavali is around the corner and we are going to our homes to celebrate. Nothing else matters to us. Homecoming could not get better than this. That is the biggest joy.

I stay there, on the platform, sitting on a bench while listening to Six Pence None the Richer’s “Kiss me”. I just heard, my train is on time, a quarter past midnight. This train coming from Delhi and going to Ernakulam in Kerala, will go through the Konkan route and drop me home, Madgaon, in the next 24 hours.

The year was 1999. In the next two years that I went home from Indore via Khandwa, things did not change much. The meter gauge train to Khandwa continued to stop at the slightest excuse and continued carrying logs of woods stuck outside the window. The man behind the counter at Khandwa Station’s canteen continued to indulge himself with late evening newspaper reading while I always ordered my favorite Bread and omelette with tea. I looked at him and wondered if he ever recognised me. Don’t know why, but I hoped for that. But I do not think he ever did. And whenever he noticed me for those 3-5 seconds, each time, it appeared as a mere interruption in his evening newspaper reading project.

$D told me, nothing much has changed there, even now.

Things don’t change much in small town India.