After the trip has been done
What an amazing two weeks it was.
45 degrees C, 3850 kms, heatwaves, sleepless nights.. and all done, It was the best two weeks I have ever had. That´s because the trip was not just an adventure through India in a shitty rickshaw, it was a cultural and historical excursion, a culinary extravaganza, an opportunity to speak to & touch the real India - its people, and a rendezvous with mother herself in all her glory of peaks, rivers and oceans.Â
I didn´t know what to expect, before this trip got underway. What would it be like? Didn´t know where to start. I wanted to share my experiences though, share our adventure with those following us but as we got on the road it got a bit harder. Twitter wouldn´t work with our particular phone network and after our long days of driving, by the time we unpacked our rickshaw and found a place to rest our heads, we were often seeing our hour hands strike 9, when most of the internet cafes (which there were plenty of) would shut down. Mobile internet was too pricey for us and so over the days we adjusted to resort to the sms update service as you had seen on this site.
Already many have asked us that all encompassing question: ¨How was the trip? Tell me all about it¨. Unfortunately, it has been the toughest question to answer as so much as happened and most of it, I feel there are no words for it. In a word, it was "awesome". Instead of struggling to describe that feeling in words, I thought it would make most sense to share a couple of stories on the road. I´m sure my Thamizh Siblings will have things to add to this! The siblings are me (Dilip), my older brother (Karthik) and my cousin (Mowly).
1. Breaks
We had 30 min to 1 hour breaks whenever we stopped. We´d stop often. Karthik anna got 3 simple tips from an uncle of ours´ who has a rick. He said: (a) don´t hog the throttle (b) take a break every few hours (3) really enjoy the rick. This lead to almost no major breakdowns (tripstoppers) on our whole trip but also longer days as we´d have to ride more to catch up on distance. This also meant, we found ourselves resting under treeshade quite a bit. Karthik anna came up with this great idea to buy some paint and write all the cities that we stayed in/were memorable. He also painted all the states we passed through. We used these breaks for that, and also for refuelling.Â
2. Refuelling
We finally figured out the capacity of our rickshaw but now I have forgotten it (great). It was something like 7 litres capacity of which 3 litres were reserve. We averaged some 30kms/ltr and as we had many 300km+ days, we´d have to fuel on the go. We´d use our jerry can to fill up rick fuel (a combination of petrol and 2T oil @50ml per litr) and this using this plastic bottle contraption we´d refuel the tank when we fell into reserve. We always wanted to refuel because our jerry can was so crappy that the fuel ate into the weak mouth and started leaking at that weak point. Everytime we´d fall into a pothole, which was very often, the jery can would jump, fuel would leak and we´d breathe it. Made us a little insane hahah, but hey at least we didn´t have to hitchike to find more fuel when we ran out! We have to thank the kind man who got us a jerry can for us on our very unprepared launch day.
p.s. Our first [album.](index.php?mode=teamwebsites&name=thamizh&page=gallery&albumid=348) I´ll post more photos when I get to the US.
3. Launch day
So before we got to Shillong for the launch, I decided to coax my brothers into a detour in Delhi. I´ve really wanted to checkout a big North Indian city and Delhi being our transit point, it was a great pic. It´s a really well managed and developed city but it still reminds me a lot of Chennai, which is very comforting. There was a lot of development we were seeing. We got to meet up with Karthik anna´s friend Gautham who runs a great book rental service in Noida and he took us out for drinks and dinner in Connaught place, which is a very geometrically planned portion (New Delhi). We stayed in Old Delhi so we got to see the Red Fort, the popular Jain temple, a big Sikh temple, Jama Masjid, Chandni Chowk and then India gate where we met Gautham. I also got to call and chat with my uni friends who live in Delhi but unfortunately were unable to meet up with them as they were out of town. I digress! So the all day touring in the Delhi heat the jetlag and the long journey to Shillong plus a couple of hours test driving and fixing the mistakes in the paintjob gave us reason to take an hour nap before the launch party. We snoozed at 5pm and when I woke up it was about 2am the next morning. Shucks, we totally slept through he launch party. We even booked at the expensive hotel where the launch party was taking place so we wouldn´t miss it. Very disappointing. Any the dominoes started falling and as tired as we were we checked out and got to the start line with very little planning. We barely had a toolkit and our papers, somehow rigged our luggage into the rick, didn´t have a jerry can or any paricular idea of where we were going to go next. We just hoped for some good karma.
4. Good Karma
The amount of good karma that we gained from others would put us in a point where we could spend years trying to pay it back. Sri Lanka used to be like that many years ago. Now the kindness and the heart of its people has been tattered by economic and political ruin. There is still hope though. We a neighbour like India and the support of its people and politicans, I think Sri Lanka can rise up to the kind, safe and completely giving nation it once was. Back to the people. All they needed was a lead in, which was often a rick break. We´d always stop somewhere off the highway with nothing but flat farmland in sight and suddenly one person would appear. Mitosis, 5 minutes later there would be 10. They´d all look at us, give us the Indian stare, touch the rickshaw. Peek and see inside, almost as if we were not in it. They wait, for some verbal cue. I´d say namaskar or aks for directions and then we´d be faced with the famous 3 questions. #1: kahang jaa rahe hai? (where are you going). #2: kahaang se? (from where). #3 aapka auto? (is this your rickshaw?). After answering the questions and if we stayed and chatted for longer, we´d be asked where we live and why we´re doing this. Some would ask why we had a Kerala license plate and if we were from that state. We´d answer that we´re originally from the great state of Tamilnadu, around Madurai but born in Sri Lanka and now living around the world, doing a race for the charities Frankwater and SOS children vllages. We´d talk a bit about the slogan on the back "Stop Genocide in Sri Lanka" for those who asked more about Sri Lanka. They were always very happy to talk to us. So were we. If only it wasn´t a race we´d stay and have a cup of chai with them. Village and town folk were always kind and exciting. City folk on other hand were often a pile and a half of crook.
5. City Folk
Whether the big city of Patna (formerly Pataliputra, home of India´s first kingdom) which is a big dump now, or Varanasi which shares the same fate, or a tourist town like Khajuraho or Jaldhapara we saw plenty of crooks. In Patna we found this guy who swore this hotel he new was excellent. After kindly saying no, we´d see him again 1/2km away (did he teleport?). Finder´s fees are big in this city and everyone probably does it as a side business on the way to the grocery store. In Varanasi where we booked a hotel on the way and when trying to get directions, one guy tried to take us there and in return ask a finder´s fee from us and from the hotel making a big commotion. After figuring it all out, the hotel guy hooked us up with a boat ride who linked us up with a priest to get into the golden temple who in turn linked us up with other store owners and priests in and around the temple. In this scenario (being linked up wasn´t a good thing). It was just a way to vasool us (squeeze out as much money as possible) all in the name of god, promising good long life for our parents. Disgusting. It´s hard to find someone to trust in these big cities. Even mother´s holy Ganges was polluted with soap scum, faeces, urine, sewage and cremation ash. Waaay beyond capacity. There is this place called Hotel Relax in Jaldhapara and the son of the owner (I forget his name) is a total fraud. Rips everyone off because he knows he´ll never see them again. We found another guy though at this place called the Tourist Nest. That was a great place. We expected a lot from Jaldhapara. Being in West Bengal, we wanted to see Rhinos and Tigers, hence the stop here. We took a Safari and all we saw was a hog deer and the but of a Rhino. We saw more animals on the road.
6. Animals on the Road
On the road we saw the basic chickens, donkeys, horses, buffaloes, cows, dogs & goats. Dogs by the way are stupid when it comes to crossing the road which is why we saw so many roadkill dogs. We saw some other animals though which we didn´t expect to see. Monkeys, Elephants, Camels, Peacocks, Deer were what I can remember...
7. Best Memories from the Road
Staying in a trucker´s stop was fun. Our rick parked right next to lorries, eating at the dhaba, and then sleeping in a cot staring right into the night sky and waking up to some very meaningful conversation with the dhaba owner... priceless, really. This one time we were tired from pulling an all-nighter the night before and sleeping in the rick that we decided to sleep right on the roadside. It was afternoon, hot and dusty and with many lorries on the road too noisy and dusty to sleep. I walked across the road to a farmer´s hut and asked for some water to wash up. He didn´t make much conversation at first as with central Indians (they take a bit of time to bond, unlike the northeasterners who are very quick to befriend). After a while though he crossed over the street and started making conversation with us. Asking the famous questions. Within a few minutes he insisted that we looked way too tired and had to therefore take a shower in his well tank, have some rotis and aloo with him, have some chai, sleep in his house, leave early next morning. He wouldn´t leave without us accepting. We told him about the race and the miles we had to cover and negotiated to let him allow us to leave the same night! He took some time but agreed. We felt like kids showering in the well. Reminded me of my childhood when we were in our village Kovil Patty, showering in patta´s (father´s father) well water. He made us tea with milk straight from the cow. After some good conversation and pictures he was very very sad to see us leave. So were we. He invited us to a bullock cart ride into town but we couldn´t do it. It had already become dark and we wanted to get at least 100k in. He said he´s pay me a money order for the photos but I insisted that I´d mail copies to him for fre. After he left and we packed up it was hard for us to leave, he was so kind we thought we´d have to give something back. I remembered that we had a watermelon we bought a few hours ago, so we presented it to the farmer´s wife. She was so happy. Even in the darkness we could see the genuninety of her thanks and wave as she stood until we left. She moved us.
8. Moved
We moved 3850 kms from Shillong to Goa but we were more emotionally moved by the people. We thought we´d be "giving" a lot on this trip. Starting with the charity and later with our company, our food and whatever oher methods of kindness we can bestoy upon fellow Indians. Putting aside the crooks who gladly accepted our "giving", i think we ended up taking a lot more. Once you move into Bihar you come across abject poverty. We drove for 500kms from Siiguri in West Bengal to Patna in Bihar. It was such a tiring day. We couldn´t find any water or food. It was pure dry desert. The more we moved into central India it was harder to find dhabas (eateries). We realised that because of the lower income standards people wouldn´really eat meals. Instead they would go to a snack store and eat more snacks as they were cheaper to produce and hence cheaper to consume - which is why there were many snack stores and no dhabas. Plenty of kachodies and pakodies. I´m sure the cities are different, but taking the local and state roads we got first hard view of this. We´d also see no buses. Instead jam packed share taxijeeps and share autos. We came across so many hitchhikers whi´d pay for shared transport. If we had more time we´d have given more lifts is what we´d say. We did give some lifts. In Assam we gave a 30km lift to this guy Saroj who at the end gave more than he took. He introduced us to a local north indian pasttime called kwai/pan (beetel leaf and beetel nut with limestone -- popular in older communities in the south). Somewhere in central India (I think Madhya Pradesh) we gave a lift to two election guards with kalikshanovs (sp?). In Maharashtra we gave a lift to a man who was surprised when we wouldn´t take money from him, he was so grateful. When stopping for a refuel in Madhya Pradesh we gave pack of kulchi (dry mixture food) to a boy as his younger brother was too afraid to accept. He was so happy and his father blessed us.Â
9. Blessed
Mowly anna got a bottle of water filled from a hand pump well with the help of a very attractive marvadi girl. I talked to a man and his daughter and many sons returning from the temple, Karhik anna talking to the little boys who wished they went to school but didn´t but still lied that they did with a tear drop from their eyes, the kindness of the children and people of India was always coupled with the blessing of their elders. Every wave, stop, direction request and conversation was returned with smiles thanks and a blessing. It is very very likely that those blessings to finish well and safe was why when we got stuck in Bihar with a broken clutch cable late at night did we got safe help and continued down the road. It is that blessing that every police officer who was rude to us when they stopped us was very kind and proud when they learned about us and bid us farewell. It is those blessings that helped us cross the finish line with very little problems. All in the good name of kindness, charity, good karma and hoping for an end to the genocide in Sri Lanka and a beginning of many good livelihoods in our dear island home, the pearl of the Indian ocean, hoping for it to shine once again, providing light to the Bay of Bengal.Â
Well... this has been quite a massive post and I hope you actually got through it and enjoyed it. There are more stories and more tales from the road but heck I can´t put all of it online. I can do the photos though, I´ll let you know when I get that sorted.
Until we meet, take the best care of yourselves and be very happy. Pass the good karma!
Cheers!
Dilip Ramachandran
The Thamizh Siblings
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