The Explorer’s Fellowship 2017 has indeed been a great experience for all three of us. We realized sometimes how difficult it might get to survive when we cannot access facilities that we feel are basic necessities, and parallel to that we also realized how beautiful it can be to live without them. Starting from Mumbai, we covered the entire circumference of India, including Alleppey, Kanyakumari, Kolkata, Cherrapunjee, Agra, Manali and Bikaner
One thing that we realized is that each and every state, is a different world. That made us believe that there can be no general statements about India. Several issues such as respect for women, government facilities, standard of living, friendliness etc have different views in different regions. If people say women are not safe in India, we’d suggest them to visit the North East and if someone says the government doesn’t work efficiently, we’d suggest them to visit cities of the south.
We did face problems about finding accommodation, because often we found it a bit lazy to go out distances finding for cheaper stays. But in certain cities it proved beneficial, as most basic facilities such as lunch/dinner or points of interests were nearby costly rooms, and this helped us save on transport as we could simply walk around.
We were able to justify our theme, Local Cuisines at various places, like Kolkata, Manali and Gangtok, where we found cuisines apart from those found on Google. However we could not justify our themes at places where it could be, such as Punjab and Rajasthan. We realized this was because of our poor planning, such as giving more than necessary time to certain places, and giving less time to these states. However, we tried our level best, and have researched on certain cities fairly well.
Few of our team mates did feel sick during our journey, like Fever and Cold. But we did not decide to relax or take a day off siting in our rooms because of that. Mostly the sickness cured off in a day or to, and hence did not waste much of our fellowship.
One thing that we tried and failed is the Diary Entry. We did maintain a diary, but it was not so efficient.
This was because most of the time we were too tired to write things that were so fresh in our minds, and we thought we’ll note it down when we compose a report.
Overall we think the experience was worth it. We interacted with a lot of locals, and most of the interactions started with finding a common language to communicate. Apart from our theme and point of interests, we asked them about the history and happenings of the city. Every one of them had their own perception, and that gave us various views on things. Rickshaw walas were quite helpful here, and even though they demanded a bit higher wage, we used to take a rickshaw once in a while and talk to him about the city. This taught us to make analytical decisions, realizing what’s good behind the bad.
