Monday 15 November 2010

And Beyond

After a breakfast of a couple of digestives and a milk powdered coffee I made my way to the entry lobby with my 56kg of baggage, stepping over the guys who had checked me in the previous day and were now asleep on the floor – I guess that’s just where they sleep – and handing my bags to the Koenig cab driver to load in the back. I insisted on hanging onto and loading myself the smaller rucksack containing my laptop, DSLR & various photo & video lenses . Two other guys who had flown in the previous day from Goa where also on their way to Deharadun and the three of us climbed into the mini-minibus.


This is now 5:30am and already the streets are packed with an even more insane traffic & lots of people. Although I can see that not everyone is active as we pass countless people asleep on the side of the road.

With all my gear packed up taking the least possible space I could only use my small camcorder but as I forgot to bring the charger I’m limited to what the two charged batteries I have got will allow me. So I have some video, but I have to ration my use of that camera and using MiniDV tapes, you can’t easily just take off what you’ve got so far – for that I can at least use my XL2 as I have plenty of batteries and I do have a charger for them. The most amazing bit of the early morning squeeze came when 9 lanes of traffic that were actually moving along within the 3 lanes of road had to squeeze down to 3 lanes on 1 narrow road. You’ve seen a heard of sheep squeeze en-masse through a small gate between fields? Same thing.

So we get dropped off outside the station, already a mass of heaving humanity and I suspect it has been this way all night and only gets busier still in the day. Fending off the occasional offers to carry our bags we wait for our chaperone to “park” and we then walk off through New Delhi train station to find our platform and wait for our train to Dehradun. One of the Koenig guys offers to carry my video pack – he won’t want paying, at least not by me and it’s not like I don’t appreciate paying someone for their effort of carrying my gear but although Koenig have given me an advance of 1000 rupees (approx. £14) it’s in big 100 or 50 notes and little as that is I don’t know the going rate and anyway have been advised not to.

So I watch this guy really struggling with my 21kg video pack as I follow behind him with my 23kg clothes, stuff & video tripod rucksack nicely sitting on my back and my 12kg lens/laptop bag swapping hands thinking “OK, maybe I’m a little bit fitter than I thought”. A though that soon faded after several up & down flights of stairs and a long walk along the platform to where my carriage is expected to pull in.

As we wait, I watch as other trains get packed full – animals off to market & beyond seem to have more room than they do, at least in the UK they do. A family who have probably been living rough for generations limp past, the elderly dad (who might only be in his 40’s but looks in his 70’s) has his lower legs bent out of shape from obviously carrying massive loads on his head or back for decades. They cross the tracks and throw a few bags onto a train and climb up into the puree of people. The bendy legged one takes an age to cross the tracks and I begin to wonder if I’ll actually see someone cut into little bits in front of me today. If I do, it also goes through my mind “what will happen then, will the bits just be collected into a binbag, left there, what?” I haven’t worked out attitudes in this country but it seems there is so much wretchedness. Through the course of another tragedy I will get a smaller insight, but later. Now I’m standing on the platform thinking about existence and the need to just keep doing it regardless of what it means. And wondering of course what my carriage will be like – “I have a seat no. I have a seat no” I keep reminding myself, that must mean I won’t be standing for 6 hours!

Indeed the Executive coach with my seat no 24 arrives and it is kind of normal. Grubby, yes, but I recognise it as a train carriage with seats. I’m on my own now. The two other guys are in carriages nearly 1/2km away. I heave my three packs up onto the overhead luggage racks – “If this train turns over I know which to duck from” – and take my aisle seat next to, it turns out, a retired Indian banker. Executive coach like I said!

After repeated Hindi/English “Welcome aboard the New Delhi to Dehardun Express Train” announcements – which soon start to grate in the same way as amusement park queue funny voice tannoys do – we pull out of the station. Passing people, dogs, cows and crap from all three variants of those creatures on the platform we seem to take a very long time before the dereliction of Delhi passes into fields of what I think are sago but my seat buddy insists are wheat – Googling reminds me that sago of course comes from a palm, it wasn’t sago (but there were sago palms as well) but I can’t work out what is was, I just know it wasn’t wheat! We start to chat a little and he obviously asks where I’m from.

“I flew in from London but I live in Hereford”

“I visited London many times and many many other cities in Europe and around the world. I lived in St. Johns Wood [a district of NW London that my parents also lived in for a short time long before I was invented].”

He asks “Whereabouts is Hereford? Is it near St John’s Wood?”

“No, it’s out of London, closer to Wales”

“Oh, on the Bakerloo line. Which one is the nearest tube station?”

I change the subject – that’s when we talked crops!

The train attendants bring newspapers. I get “The Times of India” and get an insight into what I had been seeing some of briefly on the news channels as I channel hopped through the available staticky channels the previous afternoon. A government minister has been forced to resign over mobile phone spectrum allocation corruption scandal and it seems Vodafone amongst many others got their allocation cheap in return for what I’m not quite sure but it seems to have cost India about a billion rupees!

Next follows some breakfast. Cornflakes – I’ve been warned about milk products in India, but the milk is hot, really very hot and smells, and tastes like UHT so I figure it’s OK. Then tea and biscuits, then some curried veges and three soggy French fries. I’m glad when nothing more appears.

The retired banker and I have now swapped seats and we continue to chat off and on and sitting next to the window I feel more able to take out my camcorder and try to capture some of the world that we pass. Small conical “huts” made from straw, some with vines growing around them, they look like they might be straw stores but as some of them have entrances I fear they were probably the homes of the people who were making the cow dung fuel Frisbees that were stacked and arranged along the tracks. I see lots of things, butterflies (nice to see some in November), egrets, cows, people, rubbish, trees, some temples and soon I need to try and catch up my sleep and snooze a little.

I wake with a jolt at a stop and resume conversation about the multitude of Indian languages and how Sanskrit is to India as Latin is to Europe, a little history and then it’s his stop and he disembarks, off on holiday for a few days to Haridwar with his wife and 90-yr old mother in law – one of the holiest places in Hinduism (Haridwar not the mother in law). I sleep most of the rest of the way and after the nearly 7-hour journey get off the train, once again declining offers of assistance with baggage.

The next chaperone meets us as we regroup on the platform and suggests it is OK to hand over my video pack to one of the head balancers. I still have my other two packs and watch as my video pack lifts into the air and onto the guy’s turban-like headgear. It is followed by a box of what looks like books and then another couple of bags, all held firmly in place by gravity, a couple of well positioned fingers and lots of good fortune – which holds all the way until the Koening cab!

It’s hot (I’d guess about 36C) but less dusty than Delhi and the traffic, still enthusiastic for the horn, is a mere trickle in comparison. We head off and after a while we start to wind through smaller and smaller streets past worse and worse houses/shacks/building sites. I genuinely start to get a sick feeling in my stomach as it dawns on me we might be getting closer to our new home for, in my case three and a half weeks. “Are we just taking a shortcut?” I ask optimistically. “Not short cut no” (Sicker still) “the main road is always jammed. We take a long cut”. We pass through a manned barrier point into the Dehradun Technology Park and drive towards actually modern looking buildings with techy sounding firms. OK so we pass one being built (just a few buildings down in turns out from Koenig’s training centre) with the forest of wooden scaffolding poles holding up the concrete floor, but they look good when they’re finished!

We have Pizza for lunch, complete some formalities of registration and payment (at last with relief I can unload a little more than £4k’s worth of travellers cheques) and logins etc and then off to accommodation. Rick, the South African guy of the two that had come up from Goa, is temporarily with me in “The Country House” until a room becomes vacant in the student apartments. I have elected to ease myself into both training and staying in India by spending my whole time in Dehradun in “The Country House”, at an upgraded price compared to the apartments.

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