journey into INDIA..summary

"Love is sometimes denied, sometimes lost, sometimes unrecognized, but in the end, always found with no regrets, forever valued and kept treasured."




On my visit to Raipur, capital of Chhattisgarh, I had some apprehensions going to a tribal state infested with naxalite problem; but on the contrary, it proved out to be too different from what I had imagined. This state has done a good progress in all these last 8 years since its birth. Good roads (a civil engineer telling you that, take notice of thatJ), all lush green(mainly due to monsoons right now) flat terrain everywhere and water in abundance. Going by the sheer number of ponds everywhere in Raipur-Bilaspur area, it can be called the Land of Ponds without any argument. You can find pond at every 400meter or so in urban area and in rural area, it is narrowed down to 200m. And in these ponds, you can see men and women bathing and washing clothes. Women aged 10 to 100… all bath in the open and that was quite surprising and stark study in contrast. I think, if shiv sena and other custodians of Indian culture want to prevent our much-hyped culture, then they should provide closed bathing and toilet spaces for all these poor people who are forced to bathe and go for toilet in open spaces. And it’s not the tale of some remote village, but this whole specter you can find everywhere even in Raipur and Bilaspur. We even named some ponds as Florida beach, Baywatch zone, etc.

a short summary of last one month

Missed the train to Raipur due to heavy rains (will come back to rains, later)-saw bathing beauties-fell in the reservoir of about 4-5 feet depth-had chicken biryani everyday for consecutive 15days till I got bored and then went for Kim Kay chicken for another 10days-got stuck in rainstorm on two separate occasions for more than 4hrs each-was stuck on other side of the river for 2hrs because Shivnath river was overflowing the only bridge which connects the two parts of the city-played cricket with village kids in a village-hated to have dinner with south Indians and always tried to look for excuse to avoid having meal with them-saw good implementation of National Rural Job Guarantee Scheme and Prime Minister Rural Road Scheme-watched movie in a remote village on DVD player(that was fun…DVD in a village, and most of them had DVD player in villages)-tried unsuccessfully to get an audio cassette but could locate only MP3 CDs ,VCDs and DVDs-read kite runner in 4hrs-always missed breakfast and lunch sometimes intentionally and sometime it was by chance-and I have gained 3kgs-spoke very little other than when speaking to my driver-watched Tamil and Telugu TV programs for a week-everywhere we found gandhiji's statue, surprisingly it was just 2ft high, amazing

Raipur is mainly a bustling city trying to catch up with metros and waking up to the dream of malls, Cineplexes and real estate boom-Raipur is a city of native Chhattisgarhi people-Bilaspur is much bigger and better developed city than Raipur-it inhabitants mainly includes Punjabi, Marwari, Gujarati and Bengalis with native Chhattisgarhi people comprising lower strata of the society-had rajasthani thali for dinner-it comprised of red chilli sauce,mint sauce,curd-green chilly sauce,salad,sweet dal,daal baati,churma,kadhi,allo-subji,chhole,paneer subji,gate ki subji,papad, butter roti, masala poori,dahi bhalla, khichdi with ghee and besan ki tikki, plain rice(yeah..so much in a single serving and you can always ask for more-it was unlimited thali for just Rs 70)..enuff..forgotten some good events for ur good. :)

my trip pics at http:\\picasaweb.google.com\narender.kumar