I & I became friends smoking at the door of the railway compartment. Going by the kind of people both I and I are, we would always smoke in full public view. In trains, buses, roads, chai shops, smoke & travel. Non-stop. The railway compartment where we started this journey from dropped us to the city of Surat. Mad, RR, I & I walked from the station to a huge dairy establishment. We had chai in between. But we didn’t smoke. Because not everybody smokes. Inside the dairy complex we were given two rooms. I and I shared one. Smoked again, this time with chai and Parle-G. All 3 play important roles in any journey as anyone travelling on this subcontinent will agree.
The dairy had no direct connection to our visit. We were in Surat to meet some very worried environmentalists & farmer rights activists. The modern state of Gujarat has given them a lot to worry about in the last few decades and their concerns are only rising as the State is only concerned about making money out of money. Surat, as one of the environmentalists would term is the ‘Silent Bhopal’, where toxicity is slowly wrapping all the air, all the water, slowly, noiselessly, and all that bothers the State and the Society of Surat are textiles and diamonds. Money, out of money.
In general, people with a sane mindsense, in general, down to earth people, are openly repulsed at the sight of war, riots, suppression – at the greedy overuse of natural treasures (are not national treasures). In general, all the unnoticed piling up of trash, the thickening of air, the hunger and the poverty that is slowly plaguing the society. I have seen with my own two eyes, slums not even a kilometer from Surat City’s boundary, flooded with dark black waters from some drain, people with buckets in hand, emptying their neighbourhood, not even flinching, once. Surat City was called one of the cleanest cities in some award show. But this slum is outside its boundary. A kilometer away.
The only way to strength for us bloody commoners is numbers.
Farmers, political leaders, thought leaders are coming together, building a steady number of ‘people organizations’, ‘live’, ‘contemporary’ and ‘flexible’ platforms that serve not any purpose of larger material gain but exist simply to hold hands together until this shadow of dark times pass over.
By evening, notes were exchanged between representatives (self-appointed) from various Indian states and hasty actions planned, to do at least ‘something’ against this maddening march of big capital urban bulldozers and excavating machines. Whoever can save his or her patch of lemongrass must act fast.
I & I snapped out of the meeting in one quick exchange of whispers. The man we were to trail was pointed out by Suhas Tai. The man hitched a ride in another’s car, we sneaked in. Many questions were thrown about in the car, about whereabouts & what nexts, with no definite answers. We abruptly deboarded the car bang in the middle of a 6-lane national highway and crossed the road with fingers crossed at the dinosaurian industrial lorries, turned right into another smaller road which led us into the Narmada District of Gujarat.
We waited for countless minutes trying to hitch a ride until finally an oversized public bus came to our rescue.
I & I were both lulled into slumber by the cradle of a bus swaying like an elephant over roads that were once forests. I was woken up only much later by a stranger, no less than 25, no more than 30, who said he was an income tax officer, who recently stopped his boss from taking bribes because he was quite a big fan of Arvind Kejriwal and Narendra Modi. He looked mildly psychotic. In the train earlier, I & I had exchanged seats. Next to her seat, where I sat later, another psycho had approached me. He limped over, took my book of Chittaprosad’s paintings and spoke of a million rehab visits, stories of compulsive drug use and of terror and violence that had broken his ribs and bones. His manners made everybody laugh adorably at him. He bummed cigarettes off everyone almost and got out in Vadodara, for another rehab visit. The income tax psycho was less likeable and we soon reached where we had to alight.
I & I finished two glasses of sugarcane juice in the millionth of a second and jumped on to an overstuffed blingy autorickshaw which our trail pointed out to us. 3-4 hours in the bus, 35-40 minutes in the rickshaw, dusk slowly turned into night and we slipped into familiar single lanes of rural India, bushes leaning on both sides, brushing, air turning raw’er and sounds of crickets turning deeper. Abruptly, we were called off. Our trail left us with another contact on a motorbike and moved on to his home beyond hills inviting us over the next day. We embraced the new found friend and rode into the night.
Bhure Kaka’s humble dwelling welcomed us that night he cooked dinner over his own fire, spoke less, listened more, to visitors who came over that night just to share one kind word with us. We noted everything down furiously in an attempt to record all the injustice that prevailed in the ancient settlement of Indravarna.
Tales of flooding after the dams were built, tales of half the village moving up on the mountain, tales of 20 kilo watermelons that grow no more in the stilted farms, tales of new dams built on their face, tales of fresh acquisition notices, tales of rebellion and honour.
We slept off that night, wary of adventures, but in that silent sleepy night, from my charpai, I could hear the rumble of the river I hadn’t seen since a year. Next morning, unable to contain my curiosity, I had walked up to the river.
Later, we were introduced to a new biker but the bike remained the same.
At the Kevadiya Colony Ticket Counter, a display on the wall told us that were the 10******th tourist to have come to see the miracle of modern India. We had come to loathe it. The ticket is the irony here.
We were constantly stared at by the cop/gatekeepers. And amply warned not to show off the video cam too much.
There were at least 3 check posts in a stretch of 3 kilometers.
Similar arrangements can be seen in Central Indian forestlands.
At the Sardar Sarovar we intentionally drove into a compound which housed a huge, unreal (a lot like the villain headquarters in James Bond movies) kind of tunnel. Unable to contain our curiousity…
The cautious cop asked us to park the bike and get down. We did. He acted really strange after that.
“Don’t ask about places you have no business in”. (On being asked what’s this tunnel for).
It’s probably the route to the main power station of Sardar Sarovar somewhere underground as I figured from the notice boards around that place, which also said no trespassing.
We spent some time watching in horror the absolute recklessness with which an artificial wall has been erected right in the middle of a river almost like a stab through the heart of Narmada.
Downstream, uphill you can see small cranes slowly eating away all the skin of the valley. Downhill the empty hollow patches slowly multiply like infection.
The cop kept showing us a rifle resting under the tree and kept asking us, “do you know what this is”?
Then suddenly he turned to my bag, and kept telling me with a chuckle, “anyone can just go in and lop a bomb, hee hee”.
Thank goodness we got out from the clutches of that sinister man. A similar situation had encountered us (G, M, N & I) one fine dawn after we had squatted in a river resort one full moon night on the banks of River Kundalika. The owner found us in the morning on hammocks inside his very swank over-the-river cabin built on bamboo stilts. He had kept a pistol on the table all the while asking us to pay some exorbitant charges of the resort. Thank God we had gotten out the clutches of that psycho.
https://www.change.org/p/shri-narendra-modi-prime-minister-of-india-stop-raising-the-dam-height-of-sardar-sarovar-project-and-rehabilitate-the-affected-people-urgently
