Explorers Fellowship is a ineffable experience to any person who goes through it. ‘Around the country in 42 days’ is no silly business. Travelling through the sleeper trains, general compartments, local buses, autorikshas, ferries rikshawalas and once in a while getting stuck at the middle of the road and asking random lifts. The kutcha roads, narrow lanes, national highways and railway tracks we covered. The Idly, Dosa, Goan thali, Aurangabad Chicken, Hyderabadi Biriyani, Kolkata Rasagola, Tezpur Momos, Delhi Panipuri and Amritsar Kulfi we tasted. Never leaving out the tasty delicacies our friends’ moms’ offered us at their homes filled with love and warmth. The languages we spoke, a perfect blend of actions and multiple languages. The people we met, such awesome crowd our country has got helping us out in situations you never expect.How they even matched up with us in our language disabilities and ignorance. The green fields, foggy hillsides, buzzing streets, charming beaches, historious forts and museums, shopping streets ,holy temples ,churches and mosques. No wonder we call India the most diverse country. We feel blessed because we could imbibe all these from the various parts of the country.
Our theme which we travelled with, soon we were to realize it was a bad selection of theme. Dams, the temples of Modern India did not let all devotees in. The security checking and restrictions on meeting officials and clicking photographs put us in trouble. There were instances we travelled around six hours to just visit a dam but were not even let in or permit a glance through its structure. The permission granting offices were far away in some corner not walk able for a person who came by local transport. The locations of dams are also remarkable, at some corner away from the township, in most of the places it was even hard to find a rickshaw in the premises. Though everything went handy due to the team work. But above everything we got hold of some really cool people amidst all who gave us a lot of information.
Travelling is a great experience on its own. We were also a team who witnessed the Assam floods, President’s swearing in ceremony at Rashtrapati Bhavan and the great Sawan crowd at Varanasi right under our nose. Even we had random plan shifters, sickness, rushing for trains and unexpected breakdowns, part and parcel of all long trips. We can’t really believe the fact that we have become those travellers who does not stay in any place for more than three days, and finally landing up on campus, we were thinking of when to pack our bags and leave next to.
Daily routine for the last one and a half month included bargaining to any cost told at our face and looking at the price list rather than the item on the food menu, fearing GST and waiters who ask for tips, calculating time of our baths and food and sleep and dividing time on spots which always went out of hand.
We were really into ‘Deshadanam’, the journey to wisdom. The days gone on journey will always be an evergreen page in our lives, letting us live the rest with something more than what we possessed so far.
