India: Caste – The Beginning of the End?

I am not religious. I was born a Hindu, and there are many aspects of Hinduism that I consider praiseworthy. Hindu philosophy (what little I have read of it) is profound and rational. At its best, Hinduism is a gentle way of life that preaches compassion and tolerance. There is room for speculation, discussion and debate. However, there are things about the way Hinduism is practiced that is truly detestable. The worst of these is caste. Caste (and the way casteism is practiced in certain parts of India) represents all those things about Hinduism I would rather forget.

Nowhere is casteism practiced more aggressively than in the Hindi-speaking heartland of North India, in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Together, these two states are the most backward in India, on virtually any parameter you select – whether it is economic development, literacy, gender equality, infanticide, healthcare, crime or primary education. Together, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar form about 30% of India’s population, and unless there is significant positive change in these two states, India’s dream of becoming an economic superpower can be forgotten.

So-called “lower” castes were persecuted for millennia under the garb of religious sanction. After independence, every Indian government irrespective of political persuasion has found ways to develop and maintain caste-based “vote-banks”, playing off castes against each other to obtain votes and power. This political tactic of divide-and-rule is still very widely practiced all over India. In more progressive parts of India, education, literacy and economic development have made a significant dent in caste-based politics, and though caste is still important, it is no longer all-important. It is not easy to eliminate thousands of years of institutionalized prejudice and it will take time for things to change.

Many right thinking people had given up hope regarding any significant change in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Which is why the re-election of Nitish Kumar as the Chief Minister of Bihar is such a refreshing development. As Chief Minister of Bihar, Nitish Kumar has brought about much needed change in India’s most backward, benighted state. Instead of focusing on caste-based politics in a quest for power, Kumar has focused on economic development and security. The changes he has brought about in Bihar in the five years he has been Chief Minister would be considered modest in most other places. He has built roads and schools and put criminals in prison. He has provided modest livelihoods to the desperately poor. In Bihar, a state where there was no security, no roads, very little education and absolutely no economic development, these changes are truly revolutionary. There is still a long way for Bihar to go. It remains extremely poor and backward. But still, a beginning has been made.

Kumar’s shrewd tactic of focusing on security and economic development must have been a huge gamble, especially in a state where everybody assumed that the only way of obtaining power was propagating destructive caste and religion based politics. But against all odds, it has worked.

Does this mean the beginning of the end of destructive caste-based politics in India? I certainly hope so. It took thousands of years to build the destructive institution of caste. It may be too optimistic to think that it can be dismantled in twenty years. Can we dare hope that a start has been made?

Politics: Obama’s India Visit: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

I am a big fan of the United States of America. I lived there for six years, and since then, have been back a few times. No other country in the world is freer, more diverse or tolerant. No other country in the world is more honest – Americans make no bones about the fact that you do need money to be happy, and a firm belief in capitalism is a cornerstone of the American way of life. It is a country that respects and encourages individualism, and believes that personal choices and not governmental intervention are the key to individual and societal happiness. I happen to agree with all these principles.

India and the US have had an indifferent, sometimes tense relationship over the last sixty years. During the Cold War, India was a Soviet ally and was in the ludicrous position of opposing the US ideologically, while being heavily dependent on US food aid to prevent mass starvation.

Over the last twenty years, however, the Indo-US relationship has thawed considerably. On the economic front, India’s economy has liberalized and the country has prospered. India views the US as the biggest market for its services and manufacturing exports. From the US perspective, the impressive purchasing power of India’s rapidly expanding middle class has resulted in US corporations making a beeline for India. On the political front, both the US and India view the rise of authoritarian China with increasing nervousness. India has an aggressive, authoritarian China as its immediate neighbour on its eastern border and crumbling, increasingly fundamentalist Pakistan on its western border. India and the US are both liberal, progressive, secular democracies and a strategic relationship between the two countries should be in the natural order of things. India needs the US to remain a superpower to guarantee its own future prosperity.

Under George W. Bush’s presidency, the Indo-US friendship improved considerably. Bush pushed aggressively for free trade as well as the Indo-US nuclear partnership. The Bush Administration agreed with India’s aspirations of becoming a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. So, Indian hopes were running high when Barack Obama became US president.

However, Obama’s early pronouncements were not encouraging. He railed against jobs being outsourced to India (and probably invented the term“Bangalored”) to win cheap political brownie points, when any economist worth his salt would have told him that free trade is mutually beneficial. His administration’s message seemed to be – You must open your markets to our good and services, but our markets will remain closed to your goods and services.

Obama now wants India to buy billions of dollars worth military equipment. This will create jobs for American workers in a tough recession. I have no problem with that. But I do have a problem when he says that he also plans to give similar military equipment to Pakistan - FOR FREE. I find this mystifying.

Pakistan is indeed under attack from within, but I fail to see how providing it with the latest jet fighters and tanks will help it fight fundamentalists who live in caves in the mountains. The Obama Administration is also conspicuously quiet about China’s plans to supply Pakistan with nuclear technology, but at the same time, is pressing India to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). India has been a responsible nuclear power for nearly forty years, and has never exported nuclear technology to pariah states such as North Korea or dubious Middle Eastern tyrants.

India’s foreign policy has never been aggressive or expansionist. India has contributed billions of dollars of developmental aid to the redevelopment of Afghanistan. India has contributed troops and money to many of the UN’s interventions around the world – from Kosovo to Rwanda.

Despite India being a model international citizen, the Obama Administration seems to be indifferent to India, at least when it comes to concrete benefits on the ground. Which just goes to prove the old adage – no good deed goes unpunished. And Obama’s constant refrain about how much he admires Mahatma Gandhi doesn’t count. We would prefer free trade and equal access to US markets, thank you very much.

India: Superpower Status and the Ever-Present Banana Skin

This week has been a newsworthy one for India, since the Ayodhya verdict has been announced. While the Indian newspapers will devote large amounts of newsprint to the analysis of this verdict, the British newspapers have been full of the Labour leadership elections, the impending “savage” cuts to public finance and of course, India’s lack of preparedness for the Commonwealth Games in Delhi.

The British press seems to have two very different views about India. The first is respectful – one that holds that India (along with China) is becoming an economic superpower in the 21st century. The second is dismissive – an older, established view of India as an uneducated, impoverished, backward nation. A recent newspaper article (I think it was in the London Evening Standard), claimed that 800 million Indians (80% of India’s population) lived on less than £ 1 a day. This is rubbish. The number of Indians living below the poverty line is about 350 million, or 35% of the population. In this day and age of course, it is a tragedy that so many Indians are still so poor. Between the two opposite views mentioned above, there is no middle ground.

Regarding the adverse coverage in British newspapers regarding the Commonwealth Games, the editorial in the London Times last week got it spot-on when it said that there were two Indias – one led by a vibrant, competitive, efficient private sector which is rapidly becoming a world-beater, and the other led (if that is the right word) by a slow, corrupt, incompetent public sector that isn’t accountable to its citizens or anyone else.

Unfortunately the Commonwealth Games is being organized by India’s public sector, which consists of discredited politicians, and their corrupt minions – the bureaucrats. If this organizational exercise had been handed over to a private sector group such as Reliance or Tatas to manage (with government funding), these Games would have been the best in the world, and would have cost far less.

Why? Because I am extremely optimistic about most companies in India’s private sector. Many of them are better run than their Western counterparts, and I am confident that in ten years, India’s private sector companies will be major global players in automobiles, banking, medical research, pharmaceuticals, life sciences and engineering goods, just like their counterparts already are in information technology and computing.

India’s private sector will boom and bring prosperity to India’s teeming millions only if it is allowed to do so by an obstructionist, corrupt government.

So while India’s private sector grows from strength to strength, the country’s public sector languishes. If anything, the public sector is getting worse. Apart from being corrupt, it is also unaccountable to the people it is supposed to serve – the citizens of India. While foreign media commentators have been concerned by the shoddy preparations for the Commonwealth Games, they have been dismayed at the callous, uncaring attitude of the Indian government officials who created the mess in the first place. Indians on the other hand, have not been surprised by either the incompetence or the attitude of their government representatives. That is because the Indian government does not view itself as being there to work for its citizens, and we as Indians, know this. It is as simple as that, and it is a situation that has actually gotten worse over the last few decades.

Therefore, when people talk of China and India emerging as the new superpowers of the 21st century, I agree as far as China is concerned since this is a stated objective of the Chinese government and they are concertedly working towards it. I am not so sure about India. While Indians have the intelligence, industriousness and gumption to eradicate poverty and become a superpower (as our private sector so aptly demonstrates), the Indian government and its’ corrupt, incompetent and apathetic administration is like a banana skin, on which our national aspirations could slip up on at any time.

Observations: An Alien in El Dorado

If you look up “El Dorado” on Google, you will find many different definitions for it. The simplest one says that it means "the Gilded One" or "the Golden Man," which refers to a legendary South American king who covered himself in gold – a sort of South American King Midas. European adventurers (mostly Spanish) became obsessed with finding the legendary treasures of El Dorado, and searched for a city filled with gold in the 16th and 17th centuries. These Spanish conquistadors were initially led by the notorious Cortez. They were filled with missionary zeal and insatiable greed. For two centuries, they raped, pillaged and brutalized the original inhabitants of the South American continent in their search for the fabled “City of Gold”. In many ways, the phrase itself came to symbolize the obsession with material greed that consumes us as human beings.

The Middle East in general and Qatar in particular, appear to symbolize the new “El Dorado”. The region’s economy is booming, thanks to the world’s insatiable demand for petroleum products. Tiny Qatar is the world’s third largest producer of natural gas, and is well-positioned to cash in on this demand. There are new, futuristically designed office buildings coming up everywhere. Local inflation rates and real estate prices have skyrocketed over the past few years. The number of foreign expatriates has also skyrocketed. Like the rest of us, they come to Qatar only for the money. The total population of this country is approximately 1.5 million people, of which 80% are expatriate workers – a polyglot of nationalities, of which South Asians form the majority.

So what is life like in this new El Dorado? On the surface, everything is new, larger than life and shiny. The locals drive around in super-sized SUVs since petrol is ridiculously cheap. The men are immaculately turned out in their Arab traditional white dress. The women are covered from head to toe in their black “abayaas”, yet wear large amounts of make-up and expensive designer clothes under their traditional garb.

The aim is to impress peers and countrymen with large houses, oversized cars, branded luxury goods and a lavish lifestyle. The amount of food one sees wasted at local restaurants is staggering. Recycling of plastic bottles, newspapers and cans is unheard of. Someone told me that all plastic cans and bottles are sent to India as trash – they are then recycled there. Qatar is a desert with no large bodies of fresh water or rivers, yet very few people think of conserving water. Desalinated sea-water is used to satisfy the country’s water needs. It is an expensive proposition but money is not a constraint for such a small, rich country.

Obesity amongst the local population has reached alarming levels. Conspicuous consumption (and the need to let everyone else know that you have “arrived”) is the order of the day. This need for an ostentatious display of wealth is contagious, and one sees it amongst locals and expatriates alike. If the United States is (or at least was) the land of plenty, the oil-rich states of the Gulf are the land of excess.

Part of this phenomenon can be traced back to the fact that the entire Gulf region was unproductive desert only two generations ago. It is only in the last forty years or so, and particularly since the OPEC oil crisis of 1973, that these tiny autonomous states became prosperous overnight. Therefore, the wealth is all new, and one can understand (though not necessarily sympathize with) the desire to flaunt this new-found status. On the surface, all material needs of the population (resident and expatriate) are met, with more than enough to spare - which is why all the expatriates are here in the first place.

There are strict social hierarchies here, as rigid and inflexible as any caste system. The locals are at the top of the social totem pole, followed by those with passports from developed Western countries (it doesn’t matter where you come from, as long as you are blessed with such a passport). Next on the totem pole are Arabs from other rich countries, followed by Arabs from less fortunate countries (Sudan, Somalia and parts of Africa). Then come the Filipinos who do a lot of the semi-skilled work in the country. Bringing up the rear are the South Asians (Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis, Nepalese and Sri Lankan Tamils – in that order). The Indian community is a mixed bag – a majority are laborers, clerks and peons, but there are quite a few highly qualified Indians as well. The way you are treated depends in large part on the nationality stamped on your passport.

I often wonder whether the Indians here are a happy lot. One of the people I know here is a man who irons clothes for a living. I will call him Dilip. He is typical of the large South Asian labor community. He is from eastern Uttar Pradesh, India’s Gangetic heartland, an area that is culturally and historically rich, yet economically impoverished. He has been here for many years. I used to walk by his little shop every evening, with a bunch of clothes that needed ironing. There was a beat-up old cassette player in the corner of his shop, which played old Hindi movie songs by Kishore Kumar, Mohammed Rafi and Lata Mangeshkar. I often watched Dilip through the glass window of his shop while walking by late at night, with the music playing inside. You could see the grief, homesickness and sense of loss in his eyes. He was in Qatar because his own country was been unable to provide him with a decent livelihood.

Looking at people like Dilip, I feel ashamed; ashamed that one of my countrymen is forced to live in such deprived circumstances so far away from home; ashamed that sixty-three years after independence, we still haven’t found a way to provide basic essentials such as elementary education, safe drinking water, healthcare and literacy to a third of our population. Spin it as you will, that is the grim truth.

As Indians, we are proud of our lively parliamentary democracy. I am all for parliamentary democracy and the ability of an individual to participate in guiding the destiny of his or her nation. However, how much of a difference does this make to people like Dilip and three hundred million other Indians who do not have access to the basic necessities that most of us take for granted? For people like Dilip, what is more important? Are they happy with a democratic political system that provides them the fundamental right to vote and (at least theoretically) participate in shaping their destinies? Or would they prefer to live under a totalitarian (but efficient) system of government in India if it provided them with a roof over their heads, moderately paying jobs, an education for their children and uninterrupted access to safe drinking water, healthcare and electricity?

I do not know the answer to this question, and neither, I suspect, does Dilip. He probably hasn’t thought about it, and I do not blame him. He is too busy struggling to survive in this alien land and save up some money for his retirement and his children’s future. Unlike Indian expatriates in Western countries, he cannot assimilate into this culture, since that is not an option in this part of the world. So he remains an eternal alien in El Dorado.

My time in Qatar has been financially rewarding, and provided me with significant financial security. Still, looking at Dilip, I realize that all that glitters is not gold. And even gold exacts a very heavy price on those who come to El Dorado in search of it.

Football: Bring on the World Cup!

Football is a game that I have always loved. As a child, in the days before cable TV and overly-competitive primary schooling, I grew up in what was then the idyllic suburb of Bandra in Mumbai (Bombay). As kids, there were two ways of proving your worth to your peers (and kids can be an extremely critical and occasionally cruel peer group). The first was to excel academically. However, academic excellence was not considered cool. Playing football and hockey and dribbling your way past a maze of defenders who were bent on doing you physical harm was considered cool.

So, I grew up idolizing older kids who excelled at either hockey or football (though we played cricket as well, it was considered an elitist game that cost a lot of money, at least when played with a cricket "season" ball).

Luckily for me, I turned out to be a good field hockey player, who some said could have tried out for the Bombay team. One coach said that if I was really devoted to the game, I could (maybe) have tried out for the India team. But then hockey was a profession that paid badly, and there was no point pursuing that particular dream.

Unluckily for me, I was never a good football player. This was largely due to the fact that I could not head the ball, since I wore glasses. So I sat on the sidelines and watched some truly gifted players during school and university games. The more I watched the game, the more it fascinated me. Many years later, as a student in the U.S, I became friends with a guy who had played for the Sikkim state football team (Sikkim is one of India’s North-eastern Himalayan states). He took me under his wing and trained me.

I never became a very good player and my enthusiasm clearly exceeded my ability. My sole claim to fame was that during a university game where I came on pretty early in the first half as a substitute, I restricted the opposition’s centre-forward to only two goals , which I thought was an excellent performance. This guy had tried out for Zambia’s national team, was about six feet four inches tall, two hundred pounds and would have given a fleet-footed cheetah pretty stiff competition in a race.

Since I was a child, I have followed football closely. I watched old videos of Pele, Garrincha, Beckenbauer and the other greats. I was heartbroken when France (led by the great Michel Platini) lost to Germany in penalty shoot-outs in the 1986 World Cup. I watched with amazement as Diego Maradona scored what was possibly the goal of the century against England, when he dribbled past five or six England defenders and put the ball past Peter Shilton, that great England goalkeeper. I also watched the infamous “Hand of God” goal that Maradona scored in that match. I was overjoyed when France under the great Zinedine Zidane won the World Cup and the European Cup. What a great player he was, and what a treat to watch!

This year, we will have the privilege of watching a man who is probably the best player the world has seen since Diego Maradona – another Argentinean, the 22 year old Lionel Messi. Like Maradona, he is short in stature and has a low center of gravity, which means he rarely falls when tackled. Like Maradona, he has extremely quick reflexes and great peripheral vision. And like Maradona, he can accelerate and change direction so quickly that he leaves defenders struggling and gasping in his wake. I watched Lionel Messi single-handedly demolish my favorite football club Arsenal in the Champions League quarter-finals this year. He scored all the four goals for his club Barcelona in that match, and was simply unstoppable. Whether Messi can live up to his (justified) billing remains to be seen.

There will be many other great players to watch as well. Didier Drogba for the Ivory Coast (though he has broken his arm), Wayne Rooney, Steven Gerrard, Cesc Fabregas (probably the best midfielder in the world) and so many others.

Who will win? There will be upsets, and new stars will be born. Some established stars will disappoint and fall by the wayside. All of us have our favorite teams, but it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that we will get a chance to watch some of the most gifted and graceful sportspersons in the world, in what is undoubtedly the most popular, unifying and democratic sport in the world. If there is one activity that can unite all of humanity for a little while, irrespective of religion, political leanings, nationality, gender or anything else, it is this – soccer, the “beautiful game” as Pele once called it.

Travel: Why Do You Do It?

I was born with wanderlust. As much as I love my home in Pune, India, I love to travel, and would spend the rest of my life travelling if I could afford it. Unfortunately, I cannot. Luckily for me, however, I am not alone in my love of travel, and am married to someone who loves to travel as much as I do.

Many people ask my wife and I about how we manage our marriage, considering the fact that we have spent most of it living on different continents. I agree that this is not an ideal state of affairs and we will, in the near future, have an opportunity to spend more time together.

Part of the reason we have spent so much time apart has been due to our love of travel, or rather, our love of seeing and living in new places. The actual “travelling” bit can be pretty dreadful. I absolutely hate airports and the whole process of getting from one place to another by air. If I had the time and money, I would travel the world by train, since I enjoy train travel. When I lived in the US many years ago, I saw a lot of the country from the passenger seat of a car, which was also enjoyable.

My definition of travelling and seeing new places is a little different from some other people. I like to see new places, but only at my own pace. Actually, I like to live in new places as opposed to seeing them. I like to try and understand the local culture and politics, find a favourite bar and/or restaurant and learn more about the local food. I like to meet and chat with locals, and hopefully make a few friends. This means that I need to spend a considerable amount of time in a place, until it starts to feel like a surrogate home.

For many people, travelling means continuous frantic movement from one place to another, as their camera-shutters keep clicking incessantly, showing them standing in front of famous monuments or historical buildings. People who love seeing six new places in seven days are tourists, not travellers. Tourists usually know nothing about the places they visit, and are more interested in immediate photo-opportunities and quickly moving on to the next destination recommended by their tour guide. More often than not, they aren’t interested in really getting to know the places they visit. As a result, they usually leave a place with as little knowledge of it as when they first arrived there. Tourists usually have everything organized and accounted for in advance. Travellers, by contrast, often make spontaneous decisions and prefer to go off the beaten track, in search of a unique or different experience. I have nothing against tourists, but I cannot be one. I prefer to be a traveller instead.

While the world is a large place and I doubt I will be able to see much of it, I consider myself lucky to have seen as much of it as I have. I have travelled the high cold plains of the American West, driven through Yellowstone National Park on the first day of the season, eaten “recession-special” pizzas in the Bronx in New York and lived off Coal Harbour in beautiful Vancouver, Canada. I have visited the Taj Mahal on a moon-lit night, trekked at 11,000 feet in the incomparably beautiful Indian Himalayas and watched the sunrise on the 25,600 foot high Nanda Devi. I have seen the beautiful temple carvings at Khajuraho and crossed the Ganges River in a decrepit steamboat.

Along the way, I have made several great friends who have enriched my life. Thanks to the Internet, I have rediscovered some of them after many years. There is still so much more to see and do, and if life is kind, I will continue to travel. This probably means I will sacrifice career opportunities and financial stability to satisfy my wanderlust. So be it. I may not die rich, but whenever my time comes, I can at least say I was well-travelled.

Nostalgia: The Sunday Morning Matinee

I do not know if Sunday morning matinee movies still exist. I hope they do, because some of my fondest childhood memories are from watching such movies. As usual, I will elaborate (possibly at too much length).

I grew up in a place called Bandra, in the city of Bombay (now called Mumbai). At one time, Bandra used to be called the “Queen of the Suburbs”. It isn’t anymore. It is crowded, expensive and in my opinion, not worth living in anymore. But thirty years ago, it was all different.

Bandra was a quiet, clean, tree-shaded place by the sea, full of beautiful cottages and an old world charm. Back in the old “socialist” days, very few people had cars, so traffic wasn’t a problem. In the 1970s, Bandra was still not populated with high-rise residential buildings, shopping malls, cable television and beauty parlors. Instead, we had huge playgrounds where we played cricket, football and hockey every day of the year and for entertainment, we had the New Talkies cinema hall.

The New Talkies cinema hall was a beat-up, old movie theatre on Hill Road. On weekdays, they usually showed the latest Bollywood blockbusters. But on weekends (Sunday mornings), they showed old black and white Hollywood movies from the 1940s and 1950s. And these are the movies my dad took me to see when I was seven, eight, nine years old. Going to these movies with my dad every Sunday morning was a treasured ritual; moments in time that I will remember as long as I live.

In particular, a few movies stand out. The first one was the “The Corsican Brothers”, the 1941 black and white version, starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as a swashbuckling swordsman in a double role. For an eight year old, it didn’t get any better than this. An epic tale of sword-fighting, revenge and romance, with not one, but two Douglas Fairbanks sliding down banisters with sword in one hand and the damsel in distress in the other. The two Corsican brothers (both played by Douglas Fairbanks Jr. of course) are separated at birth, and destined to meet at some point. To add to the drama and pathos, both of them become expert swordsmen and fall in love with the same woman (actress Ruth Warrick). There is a dastardly villain, and of course, one of the brothers then has to sacrifice himself for the other. I wonder if our Hindi movies got the idea of siblings separated at birth from “The Corsican Brothers”!

Another movie was “Godzilla” – the original black and white Japanese version dubbed in English. The opening scene showed Godzilla emerging from the Pacific Ocean at the stroke of midnight, poised to terrorize whole villages of Japanese peasants. For some reason, Godzilla’s preferred time of surfacing from the Pacific Ocean was always midnight; and in the movie, church bells ominously chime twelve times every time Godzilla is about to emerge. This was my first “horror” movie, and watching Godzilla terrorize the Japanese countryside was plenty scary for a seven year old.

I remember many other such matinee movies I watched with my father; “The Prisoner of Zenda” (1937 version with Ronald Colman and yes, the ubiquitous Douglas Fairbanks Jr.), “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “The Three Musketeers”. Watching these movies with my father made for some enduring and happy childhood memories. They were great opportunities for me to bond with my dad. For him, it was a chance to re-live his childhood, since most of these Sunday morning matinee films were from the 1940s and 1950s.

Today, the New Talkies cinema hall is long gone; replaced by a huge, glittering mall. I feel no sense of attachment to the mall, but every time I walk past it, I still mourn for the New Talkies theatre, that air-conditioned palace of dreams from my childhood.

Nostalgia: The Little Train That Could

Distinguished author Paul Theroux has written a great many books on travel; especially train travel. In one of his travel books he says that he never saw a train go by without wishing he was on it. I know that feeling.

Unlike air travel which is soulless and impersonal, train travel offers the traveler a chance to escape - from a dead-end job, a stressful life, an unhappy personal event. It offers a chance to assume a new identity, reinvent oneself.

And of all types of train travel, steam train travel was undoubtedly the most enjoyable. Steam engines have gone the way of the dodo, and I doubt there are any railways in the world that use steam engines anymore.
But I still have memories from thirty years ago, when as a child, my parents and I would make the annual pilgrimage to visit my grandparents up in the Indian Himalayas. Nowadays, there is a reasonably good highway from Delhi, as well as a couple of high-speed trains (high-speed by Indian standards, anyway).

But thirty years ago, there was just one meter-gauge train from the Indian city of Agra in the congested plains of North India. That train was the Kumaon Express, so named because it transported travelers from the city to Agra to the Kumaon Himalayas. And best of all, that train was pulled by what looked like a toy steam train engine. The engine had a distinctive whistle that sounded like a boy on the cusp of puberty. It was shrill and broke when it hit the high notes. In Bengali, we used to call it “bhangaa-gola”, or “broken voice”.

How mightily the little steam train huffed and puffed to cover the three hundred and fifty kilometers to our destination! Its maximum speed was about thirty kilometers an hour. At that speed, the whole train compartment would shudder and shake, and it felt like it would come apart at the seams.
The train journey was an overnight one. All through the cold foggy winter night, the train would travel through the fertile plains of North India, with its distinctive whistle blowing.

In the morning, you woke up to winter mist and fog, and little stations in the verdant green fields of the Indian terai. The train stations would suddenly loom through the fog, and you felt you had suddenly gone back in time. The stations looked and felt like they were lost in time; shades of Stewart Granger and Ava Gardner in that old Hollywood classic “Bhowani Junction”.

Tea-sellers rushed through the morning fog, selling tea in small matkas (earthenware pots). Porters (known in India as coolies) rushed hither and yon pursued by harried passengers looking for their train compartments. The cries of hawkers shattered the early morning silence, as the train leisurely ambled its way through places with names like as Lalkuan, Kicchha and Baheri.

The journey would finally end at the last railhead – the Kathgodam train station, where the pine and oak trees of my beloved Himalayan foothills would suddenly come into view. Although I would be covered in soot and coal ash, my spirits would rise as the Himalayan foothills appeared on the horizon. They were the land of Jim Corbett and tigers. They promised everything I craved for – deep, dark forests, cool, crisp mountain air and best of all, the sight of those snow-covered titans in the distance.

The train would finally stop, its labors complete for the day. With a huge whooshing sound, the engine would finally shudder to a halt, sounding like a marathon runner with respiratory problems breasting the tape at the end of a race.

Today, there are broad-gauge, comparatively high-speed trains that cover the same distance within a much shorter time. But I will always remember the Kumaon Express fondly. It was the little train that could. It was the train that took me home.