Bharat Darshan - a Travelogue !

Mukul Kesavan, that brilliant columnist who weaves magic with words, once called the Bharat Darshan of an IAS probationer as "a valuable fiction which helps us believe in the idea of India". Now that I have completed the two month long Bharat Darshan , it is time to look back and introspect on the multitudinous Indias I encountered and decide which India is the real India. For all the efforts we civil service aspirants take to shut us away from the real world and read Indian geography on timeworn pages of outdated exam material, this was a welcome initiation to savour the breadth and depth of Indian geography in real.

It must be said that it was not exactly a complete Bharat Darshan as we did not travel to some vibrant places like Gujarat ,Rajasthan ,Kerala (which incidentally is God's own country and my own cadre) and North East. But we more than made up by travelling to places as extreme as the chilling heights at the Line of Control in Rajouri to the blue waters of the Havelock island in Andaman. The states we covered in the period from 26.12.2015 to 26.2.2016 were : Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh , Maharashtra, Tamilnadu, Goa ,Karnataka, Telengana, Odisha, Chattisgarh, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, West Bengal and finally, Delhi.

Our group of 18 probationers embarked on this tour on one terribly cold Mussoorie evening. Our group was a predominantly South Indian group with 9 Tamils ,two Telugu and one Kannadiga (Coastal Kannadiga, as he would repeatedly emphasise). We had read case studies in academy during our foundation course which had highlighted how putting Tamils and north Indians in a tour group for 50 odd days leads to Babel-like chaos and acrimony. Fortunately, we witnessed nothing bitter in our group and the sparks which flew were the common kind which fly when you put any kind of Indians together.

Our first attachment was with that remarkable institution which loses lives and sleep to secure our borders - the Indian army. The eighteen of us were split into 9 groups of two each and sent to different battalions of the Romeo force of Rashtriya Rifles. Me and Vikranth Raja ( An affable guy who forsook a life in Biotechnology research to join IAS) were assigned the Fatah company of RR49 where we were exposed to the Army way of life for over a week. We were at the Line of Control and from a suitable height, we could see Pakistani hamlets and posts. The RR49 battalion is in charge of manning the Anti infiltration obstacle system at place abutting the LOC which is basically a fence separating the warring brothers.

The very first night ,we were treated to a sumptuous dinner by the Company Commander. We expected a sound sleep to follow but were asked instead to patrol the LOC fence along with jawans. We could not walk wearing the helmet and bullet-proof jackets  for more than few minutes and this was sartorial sine qua non for these jawans ! We got a chance to fire with an AK47 weapon in the firing range and expectedly, all my bullets missed the target comfortably. We also did slithering from a non-lethal height of 12 metres which itself was spooky enough. Other army paraphernalia like area domination patrol, contingency drill were equally memorable .

I remember previous new year celebrations in random streets of Chennai , Bangalore and Madurai but this was a special one as we were patrolling the LOC fence as the clock struck twelve. We met many jawans who were used to lives in which meeting wives and children was a luxury which they can ill afford. A particular poignant moment was when a commander said to us that he had forgotten his child's face as it had been a year and a half since he went home. Our company commander had a wonderful sense of humour and a cool head. When I was playing patriotic songs like "Sarfarosh ki tamanna" on my phone , he admonished me and told me to play "why this kolaveri di" instead.

Two persons I would remember from the army attachment were a Lance Naik and a Lt. Colonel. This particular Lance Naik kept waking us up early morning with a cup of delicious tea and kept talking all the time in pure Hindi . Since we were children of C.Annadurai's political movement, neither of us could understand much of what he was talking. Yet he went on and on with the same enthusiasm for seven days. Only at the end of the seventh day did we realise that he kept talking because once we were gone, he will be back to his lonely and monotonous life of patrols and drills. Life in the army is largely routine and boring and I got the impression that jawans actually prefer the heady days of war to the non-happening times of peace.

I got a chance to question a Lt. Colonel on what motivates them all to serve in the army despite the inclement climes and tough conditions of work. Was it patriotism , which Samuel Johnson once famously dismissed as the last refuge of the scoundrel ? According to this particular officer , jawans were not motivated by such loftier emotions. Rather , it was the spirit of comradeship which they share with other jawans that makes their otherwise taxing lives very much bearable. I was reminded of my favorite Tamil writer Sujatha's column he penned during the Kargil War which echoed similar sentiments.

In Punjab, we had such a breakneck schedule that on one day we had breakfast in Amritsar, lunch in Jalandhar, evening tea in Kapurthala and dinner in Ludhiana. The Golden temple experience was divine, the bullet marks in Jallianwala Bagh memorial were deeply moving but the Wagah Border ceremony was boring. It was indeed strange to see a huge crowd cheering the soldiers on for such a prosaic military ritual.

In Haryana, we had an attachment with the NGO Basix which was doing a great work in livelihood promotion in the rural hinterlands there. The most abiding memory of the visit to Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh was not in the agro-forestry institute or the majestic forts but in the official dinner hosted by the District Collector when a sleepy Thameem Ansariya ( A pious,five-times-praying Chennai girl and a sweet sister) sang "Chinna Chinna Aasai" so cherubically at the request of the collector.

We visited the famed ruins of Khajuraho wherein the erotic sculptures made our girls move away to safer meadows and our guys to giggle and discuss the intricacies. We were apprehensive about the attachment with Jain irrigation systems in Jalgaon because Jain is equivalent to vegetarian food. But we were proved wrong so pleasantly as the food and hospitality there was amazing. The Nagpur attachment at NEERI was a half-heartedly attended one as we were more eager to meet our friends at NADT.

Kolkata (and the larger-than-life hoardings of Didi) was a transit point on the way to Andaman islands. Port Blair felt like a island version of Kerala with its lush greenness, coconut trees , clean blue waters and peace. The first-time experience on the cruises to Ross Island and Havelock Island as the waters of Bay of Bengal surged and swirled around us was memorable. After so many months, I was elated to be back in Chennai wherein the day was spent listening to diet lessons of the Mayor and the evening was spent in meeting friends and family.

I was really excited to be visiting Goa for the first time but expectations were belied because of wrong choice of beaches, uncharacteristically hot weather and the omnipresent stench of fish. The Navy attachment also fell short of our dreams as we could not go aboard a carrier. The days spent in Mumbai were a heady blur as the SEBI and RBI attachments were done and dusted in the first half of the days and the second halves were dedicated to city-trotting as we hopped across bookshops, beaches, bazaars, Gateway of India and Leopold Cafe in a matter of hours. To see the sunset sitting on the sands of Chowpatty beach munching some local spicy delicacy whose name escapes me now is not exactly heaven on earth but comes quite close.

The attachment at the Air Force station in Bidar,Karnataka was enlightening and the late-night dinner with the collector was doubly so as he shared gyan on IAS with drinks and chicken for company. The stopover at Hyderabad lingers in the heart and taste buds because of the biriyani at a friend's place and Paradise restaurant. In Bhubaneswar, we had an attachment with Kalinga institutions run by the visionary Achyuta Samanta wherein the revenues of one world-class university were used to run an educational institution for the tribal children for free. We attended a prayer meeting with 25000 children ,all of them praying in unison for a blissful future. A hamlet visit got particularly emotional with a 22 year old tribal girl crying her heart out lamenting about the pathetic plight of her fellow villagers.

In Puri, we visited the Jagannath and Konark Temples but more exciting was the beach right opposite to the hotel we stayed giving us a chance to behold the deep sea instead of dark dreams as we woke up the next morning. We had more than a week in Chattisgarh as we travelled across the entire breadth of the state from Dantewada to Jagdalpur to Raipur to Bilaspur. We were especially inspired by the vibrant district collectors in the Bastar region who were working double hard to tackle the Naxal canker eating at the heart of the state.

Some thrilling moments to savour ensued when we took the chopper ride across and over the Red corridor areas of Chattisgarh. But even more thrilling were the road trips as the black cat assigned to us kept pointing at various points in the roads wherein previous Naxal violence had consumed many lives. In Bilaspur, we had an attachment with NTPC as we tried to comprehend how the fans we switch on are powered by the coal burnt in the power plant.

In Allahabad, the supposedly divine experience proved to be a disturbing one whereas visiting the house of the man who planted the seeds of secularism on an inhospitable Indian soil proved to be divine. The shore of Yamuna which hosts the Kumbh Mela was home to a legion of poor and rich who had forsaken their earthly worries temporarily to camp in tents and seek divine interference in forlorn lives. Despite my personal reservations about religion, I have to concur that it is organised religion that keeps India going because when hope is not to be found in human lives, it is better to look for it in the heavens above.

Our final stop was Delhi wherein we had attachments with NSG (where a particularly fiery commando explained the nuts and bolts of Operation Black Tornado), NDRF (where we saw brilliant demos on how relief operations get underway in the event of a calamity) and parliament (where we saw some sleepy-eyed MPs struggling to listen to Mallikarjun Kharge's spirited attack on the Modi regime). We also listened to some insightful lectures by veteran MPs like Murli Manohar Joshi, Jairam Ramesh et al.

Our prime minister addressed us in an informal way advising us to see IAS as a service and not as a job. Other parts of his speech flew over my head because of linguistic inadequacies on my part. Our president addressed us in the famed Durbar hall with Gandhi,Nehru,Rajaji and Rajendra Prasad looking on from their humongous portraits. Our vice president shook hands with all the 180 IAS probationers and interacted with us over a cup of coke and a plate of samosas.

Thus the Bharat Dharsan that began with a patrol on the Line of Control ended with a photo-up with the prime minister of the country. In the face of the Lance Naik who woke me up with a cup of tea during the army attachment , in the sprightly flight of the Siberian seagulls we fed in the waters of Yamuna, in the steely determination of the district collector of Jagdalpur to end the Naxal menace, in the crowds rushing to catch the metro at Rajiv Chowk , in the yearning faces of beggars in every shrine and temple across the country, in the election posters in Chennai likening Jayalalitha to a divine incarnation, in the face of the Black cat in Chattisgarh who swore to protect us even if it meant sacrificing his ownself, in the eyes of the tribal student in Bhubaneswar who is determined to clear the civil service exams in the coming years , I saw multitudinous Indias fighting to seek attention to shape my idea of India. But prudence suggests that they are all varied, they are all extremely different and unique but they are all India. My India.