|
|
||
|
Home | Hindi | Kabir | Poetry | Workshop | BoloKids | Writers | Contribute | Search | Contact Shop Online |
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
||
|
Home | Hindi | Kabir | Poetry | Workshop | BoloKids | Writers | Contribute | Search | Contact Shop Online |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Travelogues
I do not know who I
am.
Let me be precise,
clearer: I know what people call me to my face, sometimes I even
know what they think of me. But this is all reflected knowing-ness,
a construction of myself as a mosaic. So lets put it this way –
I am everything that everything else is not. I am not my
mother, not my father, neither my aunt nor my uncle. I am not
this pen on the wooden desk in front of me, nor the tilted lamp
that hangs above. I am not this rotting plastic diskette
slotted into a drawer, nor this pile of paper on the right. I
am not this curtain, and neither am I the wet monsoon shower
that comes down slowly outside this window. I am not the
mosquitoes caught in the netting at night, nor the maid that
sweeps out the room. I am none of these things, nor anything
that has ever been anything that I can name.
If I cannot say what
I am, let me first, at the very least, find a measure of comfort
in knowing what I am not. In the way logic works this is
an important first step, eliminating the poisoned bottles, as it
were, and coming down to a final, fatal choice. And when I think about it, it seems simple to know why I am not any of these things. I can move my hands and feet upon command. I can wriggle my fingers, I can raise my eyebrows, I can stop my breath (for a while, at least), and I can wipe tears from my face, or another’s. So then this ‘myself’ comes down to being those things I have a measure of control over. But what, then, is their name? There are labels for all of these things, but none of them is me.
Lets not digress,
lets come back to definitions, lines and facts. Its simple to
think of the world as divided into nations, but right now I’m
not sure if that is a luxury that I can afford. In the land of
my birth, people ask me if I am a foreigner and deny what is to
me an essential part of myself. I have always thought of myself
as Indian, schooled in these things by education and society.
Yet this concept is difficult to hold on to, is constantly under
attack by the very people with whom I profess similar
citizenship. I asked a man in Jaipur once – he was trying to
sell me kurtas – what it was about me that he took to be
‘foreign’. “Your clothes, your hair, the air that you have…” he
replied. And yet I doubt that the answer is as simple as that.
Perhaps you breathe and live in another land, and you become, in
some ways, part of it, something that goes inside you and is not
easily removed. I am sure I am not alone, but just a very small
part of a global community of people who feel the same –
foreigners in their own land, and foreigners outside. This is
an uncomfortable feeling in the beginning, for I feel the need
to belong; to be part of something, and do not
like my patriotism or loyalty being tested. I did what I did
not because of choice, or free will, or an expectation of
reward, but because this is the way my life turned out and
because there was something that needed to be answered, a need
to see what was beyond the horizon.
To be fair, this
process works in reverse as well. If I am seen as different,
then I too look out with different eyes. This trip across India
is a (re) discovery, of the land, of its people, but also of
myself. I went outside this land to find myself, to answer a
call of what-I-know-not, and I find that the process is not
over. There are new layers to this land, waiting to be
uncovered, and as I uncover each I find a little of myself
revealed – like a reflection in a hall of mirrors that repeats
infinitely; or a fractal pattern in a kaleidoscope that twirls
around to catch its own tail. But if a point of origin has to be
taken, then let it be here, right now, from where I grew up, in
a town that came out of the dust, a creation of modern India, a
‘foreign’ implant that, in a fantastic reversal, is now becoming
‘Indian’, in all the problematic senses of that word.
So then let us start,
and choose a beginning. Let’s zoom into Chandigarh from the
air. The mighty Himalayas border and defend India, and give
rise to five great rivers and a land named after them, the
Punjab. And then in 1947 an Englishman draws a line in the sand
and cuts off one from the other. A few years later a Frenchman
draws still more lines - a grid laid out on a plain at the foot
of the mountains, he calls this a town, a new capital town for a
new country. But this is 60 years ago, and a different story.
We are here today, in the center of this town, where there is a
clunky structure in concrete and stone. Zoom in a little more
and we’ll see people, thousands of them, and buses, hundreds of
them, and now we know this is a bus terminal. An incongruous
beginning, but at least is a point in time and space. Oh wait!
– we know the space, but lets also set a time – and so its
morning, the 24th of June, and lets add a little color and
describe how it feels. Of all the seasons there are in north India needs to be added another one – that of the time spent waiting for the monsoon. While one can write lyrical stories of Indian summer and the beauty and fury of the rains, very little can actually describe being in this time – when to the full heat of summer is added the tension and humidity in the air. Its exactly this time that I chose for a trip, of all places, to Rajasthan – that land of kings and forts. Getting there, however, is not so easy from Chandigarh - a young city though curiously old, that epitomizes the best of new India, and in some ways, its worst.
The bus from Chandigarh to Delhi takes 5 hours and costs between 100 and 300 rupees. This depends on the kind of bus, the ‘deluxe’ stopping rarely, its interiors padded with fake leather, and a television hanging in the front providing movie entertainment. Public road transport remains the almost exclusive preserve of state governments, and in this case Haryana Roadways paints its deluxe buses an inevitable blue and grey reflecting the monsoon sky, scurrying and swarming over the state like ants to a feast. Monsters on the road, these buses are the lifeline of India, accessible to all for a price lesser than, for most things, the cost of a beer. The fleet was new some years back, now the buses are beginning to reflect the toll of years of use and misuse, and heavy service. In the de-luxe version and the anonymity that marks public transport there are, if nothing else, two events of social significance - the first when the ticket assistant hands out bottled water; and the second when the bus stops for its passengers to have a meal. Suffice it to say that ‘deluxe’ and bottled water go together. A potentially potent status symbol, bottled water is right up there with the other icons of new India – the mobile phone and the Hyundai - and goes well with the ‘deluxe’ of the bus, and the price of the ticket.
Bus on route to
Delhi
Its morning at 8 am
on the 25th of June, and the day is already hot, and
getting hotter. The monsoon hangs in the air without quite
being there, an omnipresent mugginess. The bus rumbles its way
out of its Chandigarh bus terminal. In 15 minutes we cross the
city limits. The road link to Delhi crosses Ambala, the largest
military base in north India, where MiGs regularly blast across
the sky and trains can be seen loading and unloading lumbering T
72 tanks. This is also historic country, the heart of north
India, with Kurukshetra of Mahabharata fame, Shahabad
where the river is named after the sage Markandeya, and the
battle plains of Panipat, where the fortunes of Delhi were made
and unmade more than once. There is history spilling out of the
seams, and there is a place for it, but for the moment there is
the present. The road is busy, full of traffic now near the
middle of the day, and this is India of truckers and new
construction projects, of highway towns and content fields
smiling upwards, waiting for the next rains. It’s fascinating
to watch a road link develop. The Delhi – Chandigarh road
corridor is one of the busiest in India, and an offshoot from
one of India’s oldest, the so-called G.T. road. The Grand Trunk
Road was constructed by Sher Shah Suri, the Afghan ruler of
Delhi who temporarily supplanted the fledgling Mughal dynasty in
the 16th century. A prolific builder, he connected
the breadth of his empire, from the Punjab to Bengal to cement
his rule. Ever since, the G.T. road is the main artery of north
India and the vast Gangetic plain. Today the modern road
roughly parallels the original, and kos minars from the
16th century and later still mark off distances.
Crumbling, in disrepair, they’ve survived several empires and
are witnessing the rise of yet another – the new Indian State.
Kos Minar, Grand
Trunk Road The Grand Trunk Road is one of the chief sites of the country’s efforts to build a world-class road network. Widened to two, and then four lanes, construction continues, with international construction firms joining in the act, bidding for contracts that guarantee work for decades. None of this new road infrastructure comes free - a price has to be paid. The Indian janta, long used to free government sops, is getting used to the idea of paying toll for a road. Perhaps this is not so alien as it sounds, in the time of the Mughals caravans and traders had to pay tax for safe passage and the protection of empire, and what was the British empire but a wholesale toll tax on an entire nation?
The Week of August 27, 2006
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Home | Bolography | BoloKids | Columns | Hindi | Kabir | Poetry | Quotes | Workshop | Writers | Contribute | Search | Contact |
|
|
