25th December – Lifeline of the train

I woke up on the 25th of December as a yatri to the music of Swades and Rang De Basanti. No no, the songs were not my alarm tones but TJY’s wake up call from the Public Announcement (PA) System. Yawn… I got down from my berth to head to the ‘bathroom set up’ in the last bogie. I was very curious to know how TJY team had set the whole bathroom thing up. And this is what I saw. A queue of a dozen yatris geared up with clothes and soaps waiting to fill half a bucket of cold water. The bathing ‘room’ was just a 2 x 4 feet aluminum box! In the moving train with patriotic songs as ambient sound, the cold water bath was so enjoyable. It was an experience of a lifetime which I was to experience everyday!

After all of us were energized with heavy breakfast by the enthusiastic catering team, the first session of the yatra started in the AC chair car. The AC chair cars did the dual job of being the meeting point of all the yatris and also the presentation room during the yatra. It had huge glass windows on both sides that gave a panoramic view of the Indian heartland passing by. I saw the green fields of Maharashtra’s Konkan region while the Tata Jagriti Yatra Team started with the introduction and details of the exciting and thrilling journey that we were about to have.

Shashank Mani Tripathi, the chairman of Tata Jagriti Yatra and Rewati Prabhu, board member of Tata Jagriti Yatra, put the objective of yatra which is enterprise led development into words. According to them, the middle India which earns about Rs. 40 to Rs. 120 per day should be converted from job seekers to job creators. According to them, this conversion leads to more wealth creation and development. It kind of made sense to me. Bottom up approach is better than top down approach as till now the trickle down approach hasn’t worked wonders for the rural India for sure.

With that thought in mind, I along with my group mates, headed for our compartments. As each group was made up of 15 strangers, who came from different parts of the country with different academic and social backgrounds, we were given the task of sharing our life experiences with the help of a lifeline chart. The next two hours revealed a whole lot of interesting facts about my team mates. I was kind of intimidated. The funniest part was that they all said they didn’t believe in the current education system but most of them stressed on their percentages! My group had an architect, an HR professional, a management student, a few engineers, a social worker, an IT professional, an environmentalist, an IPS aspirant from states like Haryana, Delhi, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Bihar, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh!! That’s why I called my train ‘the microscopic view of India.’