I had set aside 4 days of my 2 week mandatory vacation for a family trip to Goa, but I had to travel solo for the other 10 days as Jyoti didn't have any leave left. For a change, I wanted to travel within India and explore culturally important destinations I had never been to. I had been thinking of visiting the Pushkar camel fair for a while and since my leave coincided with the festival dates, it was the first destination I zeroed upon.
On further research, I found out that there was a Ganga Mahotsav in Varanasi during that time. It's not a name young Indians usually have on their travel wishlist. Moreover, being an atheist, I had no religious motivation to visit. However, during my trip to Morocco earlier in the year, I had come across a couple of Frenchmen who spoke very highly of it – one of them had spent six months in an orphanage there, and another one had dispersed his father’s ashes in the Ganga’s holy waters. I think their high praise of it had lingered on in my mind and I added Varanasi to the list.
Thereafter I added Delhi - I had visited a few times but never got a chance to explore it's historical treasures. It would also serve as a base to the other destinations. Lucknow came next - I was always fascinated by it's heritage, especially after reading William Dalrymple exposition of its erstwhile high culture in "The Age of Kali". Sitting between Lucknow and Varanasi, Allahabad fit in nicely into the plan.
Finally I squeezed in Amritsar as well as I wanted to visit the Golden Temple. It was a fast paced itinerary - out of the 10 nights on the road, I'd be spending 6 of them on different trains criss-crossing the Indo-Gangetic Plain.
I flew in to Mumbai from my family trip to Goa on Sunday, Nov 15 and flew out to Delhi that afternoon to catch an overnight train to Amritsar. What I expected to be a smooth flight-to-train transfer ended up being an eventful ordeal.
I had heard about the new Airport Express Metro and thus expected to zoom through to the city center. But the Metro ran only from the international terminal, and I had to take a rickety shuttle bus to the Aerocity station to connect to it.
It charged a disproportionate 30 bucks, and was packed till there was not even any standing room. The airport express was upto international standards, but there was no artwork either on the train or the stations, and I couldn't find a dustbin on the platform to deposit trash. Apparently it wasn't doing good business and fares had recently been slashed by 50 percent. Fare from the upmarket T3 terminal to New Delhi railway station was INR 60 - at less than a dollar, this was the cheapest airport express train in the world, and yet it seemed to have no takers. That’s a lot of money down a drain!
My train was from old Delhi station, and I had planned to connect to it from the New Delhi station using the regular metro, but it was too crowded. It was a sad state of affairs with a huge posse of policemen herding the crowds towards the platforms. It seemed inhuman to me. I thought about the madness in Mumbai locals, but it involved no police intervention. I got a feeling that this whole trip was a bad idea.
Forgoing the metro, I took a cab. The race for the most rickety cabs in the world are between two Indian cities: Delhi and Kolkata. Between the utilitarian Maruti Omnni and regal but near extinct Ambassador. The ride was brutal – the cabbie kept yelling at other drivers, drove on the wrong side of the road, nearly ran over pedestrians multiple times, ignored signals and jumped over potholes, and made a pit-stop at a liquor store. He made the Mumbai cabbies seem like angels.
Things got worse when I realized upon reaching Old Delhi station that my train was four hours late. If you had to choose a station not to be stuck at for four hours, Old Delhi would take the top spot without a challenger. It was filthy as hell, the electronic displays were non-existent or plain wrong, and the announcements consistently interchanged the source and destination of the trains passing through. Once again, policemen had to manage crowds scrambling to board unreserved coaches. I just felt like taking a flight back home.
After some loitering about I managed to find a seat where I could read for the 4 hours I had to kill. Seated next to me was a middle aged Sardar and his ailing father who could barely walk without support. I chatted with him for a bit and he was surprised as to why I was traveling alone. When the next train arrived, he picked up his two suitcases, braced his father and took off to board the unreserved coach packed to the rafters. It struck me that just that morning, my traveling party to Goa had deemed one Toyota Innova insufficient for 4 adults and 2 infants and had taken two of them instead for our airport transfer.
I chatted for about a half hour to a 17 year old Jat from a village near Amritsar. I could barely understand his Punjabi, but it's the English words he used which were key to the conversation. He walked me through his picture collection on his iPhone 4.
His commentary essentially went like this - this is my friend who owns the 6s, this friend owns Harley Fatbob (till then I knew nothing about Harley models) , this friend moved to Melbourne and is a trucker , the guy with the rifle here also owns a 6s he got from cousin in Canada. His family business was a store selling all kinds of fake Guccis and Pradas and LVs and Jack and Jones. The word "craze " kept popping up in the conversation. Oddly enough, his picture collection featured no girls, except the odd suggestive pic he had downloaded.
When the train finally arrived, it showed the wrong train number, the wrong source and the wrong destination. Nevertheless I was happy to get a berth to lie down on and get some sleep. The train chugged into Amritsar at 11 am. I was slated to take a train back to Delhi the same night, and thus went to the cloak room to deposit my luggage. They wouldn't accept unlocked bags so I had to go and purchase locks. A crow deposited his precious waste on one of my bags in the meanwhile, necessitating a messy cleanup procedure.
I short rickshaw ride from the station took me to the Golden Temple area. I first visited the Jalianwala Bagh memorial. Talking about my feelings about the massacre would be a lengthy digression. All I will say here is it was a sombre moment to see the martyrs' well and the bullet marks made on the walls.
There is little one can add to what is well known about the Golden Temple as well. Though I am an atheist, I hold Sikhism in the highest esteem. Gurudwara doors are open for all faiths, it's the same queue for rich or poor, there is barely any pushing and shoving, and there is food on offer to the hungry, no questions about his faith asked. I walked around for a bit and then had the langar for the first time in my life. It was quite a sight to see hundreds of devotees working to feed tens of thousands, and the din of dishes being washed filled the air.
After the temple visit, I took a rick to see the Wagah border ceremony. The last kilometer to the border had to be covered on foot, and there were a couple of stringent security checks. Cameras were ok but chargers and power banks were not allowed. I was late to the party and couldn't get into the podium, but my height helped me look over the crowd in front of me and catch glimpses of the fanfare. Patriotic songs were played before the ceremony, and women danced to the tune of "Chak de India". Shouts of "Vande Mataram" went up at frequent intervals. I wasn't feeling too well during the day and had to retreat from the crowd ten minutes into the actual ceremony performed by soldiers on both sides of the border. Talking about the India-Pak issue would be a huge digression, suffice to say I had mixed feelings about the whole affair and wasn't really disappointed to be missing the rest of the ceremony.
On the ride back to Amritsar, I was subject to a half-hour lecture by the rick driver about how to take it easy, keep my cool and talk to elders. In a nutshell, this is what transpired :he was driving on the wrong side of the road on the highway, I insisted he switch back to the right side, he claimed I had lost my mind and I asked him to stop and got off till a couple of truck drivers intervened and better sense prevailed. Coincident with his lecture was suicidal driving, flying over speed breakers, almost mowing down children and constant abusing of others' poor driving. His advice about me needing to cool down definitely worked - ten minutes into the lecture, I figured the only way to survive the rest of the ride was to laugh at the irony of the situation.
Back in Amritsar, I visited the Golden Temple once again to behold it's beauty at night. I was running short of time during the earlier visit and hadn’t been able visit the inner sanctum due to the long queues. The lines in the evening had shortened considerably, to about 45 minutes - and I was glad I went in. The gilded ornate decor of the interior was breathtaking.
Before boarding the train back to Delhi, I had chole-kulche at a Vaishno dhaba opposite the railway station, recommended by one of the local shopkeepers. I won’t be exaggerating if I say the kulcha was the biggest and best I've ever had - the right balance between softness and crispiness, and just the right amount of stuffing. I paid a measly 30 bucks for the meal – just the kulcha seemed to have butter worth more than that! A friend I met a week before the trip had told me that Amritsar food had disappointed him, and I had almost decided just to grab a sandwich. Fortunately I asked the shopkeeper for a suggestion and took it. As I started to walk off after paying, the young man who had just taken my seat called out for me, waving my phone in his hand ! While I am due a change from my old 4S, losing my phone while on the road would have been disastrous. A day that started poorly ended on a high note!
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