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July 21 - July 23, 2018
India can have no better symbol for national integration than the railways.
The story here is that the railways are not just a means of transport, but the circulatory system of India.
the pre-dawn hours, no matter where you live, the air is always laden with a smell that I have always found impossible to describe.
This was something unusual in the Hindi heartland, where people look for excuses to get into a conversation.
The chaatwallah is a very important person in north India. He adds spice to your mundane life. He represents a break from routine.
Food is a sacred issue in this country: you rarely refuse it to anyone; in fact, you offer a bite if someone happens to be around while you are eating.
Food, for some unexplainable reason, is simple and delicious in the small hotels that dot the length of the Ganga. Hardly any culinary intricacy is involved in the preparation of puri-alu or alu-matar, yet you want to go back to them again and again, as if you’ve never had them before. The craving they induce is far stronger than the urge to savour a meat dish that has been painstakingly cooked for hours.
Even the simplest of lives must have a routine. Or maybe, it is the routine that makes lives simple.
Fluency in English can work wonders in north Indian towns. It is the ultimate benchmark of sophistication, the logic being that if you can speak fluent English, you must have been to a ‘convent’ school, and if you have been to a ‘convent’ school, you must have had a decent education and must be hailing from a fairly decent family. The logic, which is not entirely irrational, is so deeprooted that even when you converse with people in chaste Hindi, and once they come to know that you belong to the English-speaking lot, they tend to reply with whatever phrases of English they have at their
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But there’s a difference between popcorn and peanuts: you munch on popcorn only when you go to the movies, whereas when you start munching on peanuts, life
itself becomes a movie and you become a passive spectator for that entire duration, addictively cracking open one shell after the other and putting the nuts into your mouth.
‘Lust converts to love, love converts to devotion, devotion converts to spirituality, spirituality converts to super consciousness.’
There are two things that make a walk in a small town highly pleasurable: one, there is hardly any traffic to deal with; two, everything that you see around you is affordable, unless you are buying a car.
Street food, in that sense, is a lot like sex: you are tempted to check it out because you are always told it is taboo; it gives you great pleasure and yet is looked down upon; and once you have discovered the forbidden pleasure, you want to return to it again and again.
A travel writer, in my romantic notion, never makes a public appearance. He is always inaccessible to his readers and is busy collecting material in a faraway, godforsaken land which you might never visit in your lifetime except through his books. He is not the one you would like to be face-to-face with: if you see him in real, you could end up looking for flaws in his personality that might take away from the flawlessness of his prose. Gods are best unseen.
It is one thing to feel the pages of a book and savour the smell of the ink emanating from them, but the moment you realise that your future depends on the book, it becomes a burden.
Competitive exam books
Return journeys are always shorter and more assuring.
Duties can be taught but not the responsibilities.
I can relish meat, that too just mutton, only under the influence of alcohol, when I am anaesthised to the fact that I am eating a living creature that has just been killed. During my sober hours though, I resist eating meat, unless it is done so well that I can’t tell whether it’s mutton or jackfruit.
