Journey

We took the train from Madras to New Delhi for a 15 day northwest India trip. The train journey took about 3 days. It was a wonderful way to see and experience India. One observable change was the progressive greening of the envirnonment as we progressed north from south India. Here I was hanging out of the train to take a picture of the lush greenery (some where in Central India) and the train. I was pleasently surprised when I saw the train turning a corner. The turn made for a better picture.

I expected to have a relaxing train journey to Delhi, but then I picked Gandhi as my travel companion. You see I began reading his autobiography, "The Story of My Experiments with Truth" and one doesn't read that book for 'light' reading. The books foreced me to view in a different light, so here I was traveling on the train coming across new people, new cultures, new languages and try to understand how India had changed half century since her independance; thus asking big big questions. I was constantly inquiring, asking "What would Gandhi think of this? What would he think of that?". I was forced to come, again and again, to the conclusion that he wouldn't have been happy with the state of affairs. Once I had poignant, awe-inspiring thought: Gandhi had been physically kicked out of a first-class compartment, for which he had a ticket, on to a station in South Africa because of of racism; and here I was traveling rather comfortably in first-class (and A/C to boot) nearly a century after that incident --had progress been made or does injustice and inequality have a new face? Suffice to say I finished only half the book.

There were times I would just sat at the above spot and watched and pondered as the country went by.