Islands to Visit Before They Disappear

Islands usually give people a picture of isolated pieces of paradise separated from the hustle bustle of the outside world. These are lovely escapades, to draw a curtain of deep blue sea resolutely around us and disengage from everything else. And if you are an island lover and places like Venice and Fiji is way down on the travel list; then it's time to move them up. Increasing sea levels and extreme climatic conditions are slowly engulfing these low-lying islands.

The following islands are sprinkled around the world and all of them are famous vacation destinations and are disappearing into the sea, albeit at different speed. And should the predictions of scientists come true, these beautiful pieces of land may not be around for long.

Venice:

Encompassing 118 islands linked by 400 bridges and partitioned into six large districts or "sestieri", three on each side of the Grand Canal - Venice! Floods, known as acque alte have been part of Venice's winter for centuries and their frequency has increased spectacularly since the 20th century. The city faced only eight severe floods between 1931 and 1945, in the last decade of the 20th century there were 44 and by 2009 the number of annual floods had risen to 200.

A tourist city par excellence, Venice holds some of the most famous attractions including Piazza San Marco, the Rialto Bridge and the Palazzo Ducale. After a long day of seeing the sights, enjoy a conventional Venetian dinner at the historic Bacaro trattoria Ca D'Oro, Detta alla Vedova (on Calle Del Pistor), followed by an opera at La Fenice.

Fiji:

Named as one of the most heavenly destinations in the world, the Fiji archipelago consisting of 332 islands faces a severe flood every year caused by nonstop day and night rains that goes on for atleast a week. Activities like surfing; surf rafting and kayaking is one of the favourite pass times of visitors on the islands. 

Maldives:

An archipelago of 1190 coral islands, Maldives and its palm tree laced white silvery beaches and pristine clear blue lagoons swarmed with marine life attracts thousands of tourists. These islands could be the first islands in the world to disappear as eighty percent of the total land is less than three meters above sea level and it is believed that by the end of this century the islands could be completely gone. Visitors are allowed only on 11 of the 26 atolls to preserve the local culture Diving into the coral reef, lazing around in a hammock on the beaches under the sea, surfing, and going snorkeling or relaxing in a spa is the best things n can do while in Maldives.

The Isles of Scilly:

Located in the southwest corner of the United Kingdom off the Cornish Peninsula is the Isles of Scilly that consists of five low-lying wind-swept granite islands and more than hundred uninhabited islets. These islands have rugged cliffs, cultivated flowers that colour the island with vivid hues from spring to fall, immaculate clear blue bay and silver sand beaches. They are progressively more exposed to the inclemency of storms combined with rising sea levels could engulf the islands' low-lying areas. 

Tuvalu:

A chain of nine Polynesian islands, Tuvalu, located in the Pacific Ocean halfway between Australia and Hawaii is the fourth smallest country in the world and has an average above sea level altitude of just over three feet. These Polynesian islands are the second lowest lying islands of the world after the Maldives. The predicted sea level rise could make these islands uninhabitable. Diving, snorkeling, swimming and sailing in the twenty square miles of coral reefs, lagoons and isolated islets that make up the Funafuti Conservation Area is the main highlight of visiting Tuvalu.


  
  

Do girls make you uncomfortable? It’s a boring old chore, but when one is a family with little children, every simple outing has the potential to become a little adventure in no time

We are a family of five. Two adults called Mamma and Papa and three little children.
A few days ago, I met a woman in an empty flat. A regular person, quite like you and me. Posh school, Delhi University, an MBA and her own small business now. She was house-hunting with her husband and they were there to see a flat our friend owns in south Delhi. Our friend lives abroad, so we had gone to unlock the door for the potential new tenants.

Judgemental: People often have preconceived ideas about the girl child.(Thinkstock)

It’s a boring old chore, but when one is a family with little children, every simple outing has the potential to become a little adventure in no time. “Hi, I am Natasha,” I said. She looked at my children. She looked at me.
“You wanted a boy,” she said to me.
I stared at her face. A question mark appeared on mine.
“You wanted a boy,” she repeated.
“No,” I said, tentatively.
I began to get the drift of what she was saying. By now she was looking directly at our youngest child, Naseem. Naseem was embracing the empty, dusty spaces in the house, humming her own song. Now encircling a pillar with her hands and trying to climb it like a coconut tree, now treating her father like a pillar and climbing up on him. Afzal swayed for a moment like a coconut tree in a storm, then regained his balance, Naseem still hanging on to him.
“She’s a girl,” said the woman. “They are all girls.”
“Just step outside the house with me for a moment,” I said to her. I opened the main door and led the way. She didn’t seem to understand.
“Come out here,” I said to her. She stepped out. “Sahar,” I called out to our oldest daughter, “I am just out here consoling this lady.”
“What, Mamma?” she called back from the empty cupboard she and Aliza were sitting inside.
I gestured to her. I am here, just letting you know. Play carefully. Sahar is 9 and she and I read each other’s faces quite well.
Now I turned to the woman who had come to see a flat but was distracted by little girls. To be accurate, distressed by little girls.
“What are you saying,” I asked her directly.
“I’m just saying that you must have wanted to have a son, that’s why you tried three times,” she said.
“It may not have crossed your mind yet,” I said to her, “but some people have children because they WANT to have children. Some people are in love with each other and become pregnant and get moony-eyed ideas about wanting to create a family together. It may be a foolish idea that doesn’t always work well, but it’s something that happens to a lot of us.”
“But you have three daughters,” she said. She showed me three fingers.
“Before I start feeling sorry for you,” I said to her, “let me just cut through the crap. Do you realize how WRONG it is to talk like this IN FRONT of children? You are saying to them that their parents don’t want them? That they don’t have a right to exist? That random strangers can be rude to them just because they are girls?
What is it about them that you hate so much?”
She didn’t have answers, of course. Only preconceived, borrowed ideas and conditioned responses. She’s not alone. We all isolate each other, callously spitting smug, self-righteous judgements without a second thought. We have quick-stick labels for everyone, irrespective of the personal choices we may have made.
I’ve just figured out that one way to shut out ignorant voices is to speak louder than them. It doesn’t always come naturally to me. I feel furious but my anger creeps into dark corners and hides inside me. I stumble upon it unexpectedly.
I am learning to hold on to my anger when I meet it. It is slippery and likely to get me into trouble. But really, sometimes it is better to be in trouble with others than to be troubled alone. It is critical to shake people up than be left shaking with rage oneself.
“Mamma, Papa is calling you inside.” Sahar and Aliza came out of the flat. “What are you talking about?” Sahar asked, looking at my face for clues.
“Important things,” I said. “Things I learnt from you.”
Natasha Badhwar is a film-maker, media trainer and mother of three.

For sporting travellers, stadiums are shrines Travelling out of India in the mid-1980s played hell on the wrist. Stand at a bank and sign traveller’s cheques and by the 40th, the Calcutta bank clerk will set down his tea, do the old headshake and say, “Saar, eet ees not matching.”

Wimbledon, 1987, and the tremulous apprentice is shown his place. It arrives in the form of a pass whose label is simply rude. “ROVER”, it says. Oracles with lost hair, who could tell you Big Bill Tilden’s string tension or the specific brandy Suzanne Lenglen chugged before occasional matches, wear “CENTRE COURT” badges. The “ROVER” is dismissed to the outer courts, wandering like an awed, eager canine with a notebook.

The ultimate destination: Madison Square Garden in New York City has hosted many epic encounters. (DT/Wikimedia Commons)

This was my first “foreign travel” as a writer and an introduction to sporting caste systems. Calm down, it happens everywhere. In India, officials at a cricket stadium once told us the first row in the press box was for the visiting English press. It was all eventually settled over a cigarette, tea in glasses and much mangling of the history of the freedom movement. Later, perhaps on this tour itself, an English writer, upset by hiccuping telexes and phone lines full of static, threw his computer on the floor in disgust and left. An Indian, with commendable inventiveness, fixed it, presumably deleted the tired lines about Delhi Belly, and kept it. Travelling out of India in the mid-1980s played hell on the wrist. Stand at a bank and sign traveller’s cheques and by the 40th, the Calcutta bank clerk will set down his tea, do the old headshake and say, “Saar, eet ees not matching.” No credit card. No mobile phone. Off you go with just a typewriter with a slipping ribbon, one dead key and a degree in telexing and overwrought prose.
You gratefully meet Western journalists whose bylines you already know and discover over time that your name they can never remember. You voyage with a colleague who promises a beer at an English train station and confidently strides towards a Heel Bar. You take pictures, grinning like an incoherent tourist before a scoreboard, and then in time wear the conceit of “my third Wimbledon”, till an old-timer nearby nearly suffers cardiac arrest while trying to blow out a cake commemorating his 40th French Open and shows you your place. Again. Lucky bastard, you think, and take a piece.
You live, on tour, in lovely smelling distance of fellows who make sambhar, others who lecture on catches they never saw, some who can find alcohol in nunneries if they have to, and once walk in front of a great player, whose son you’ve gently sledged in print, and hear him say “Who is this sunuvabitch Rohit Brijnath?”, and turn and introduce yourself and become friends. You spend nights with a photographer colleague in a Hiroshima hotel and learn about patient appetites. The blue-movie channel is too expensive, but it has an 8-second preview, takes a minute to reload if you press a button, so all night he sits there, waiting, comforted by repeats of the preview.
And you’re learning, laughing, watching, drinking, arguing and falling in love, mostly with stadiums. To stand in Adelaide’s cricket ground, where a cathedral looks on, its bells seeming to ring in praise, is to be moved. Players come, dazzle, go, but these are custodians of sport who, when mute, hold anticipation; who, when full, are beasts of promise.
What stories the original boxing ring at Madison Square Garden (MSG) could tell us, and when it was retired in 2007, after 82 years, it was as if someone was snuffing out history. Sugar Robinson danced there, Jake LaMotta bled, Jack Dempsey hit, Joe Frazier-Muhammad Ali pounded, and some nights there were so many greats in attendance that the boxing historian Bert Sugar, who died recently, reportedly kidded, “In this room if you yelled the word ‘Champ’, you’d be trampled!”
For sporting travellers—like the grown bankers I saw reduced to babbling boys as they prepared for a maiden visit to the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) last winter—the geographies that matter in sport are not cities, but the arenas within them. The Nou Camp, Fenway Park, St Andrew. Nope, never been to any. Nor to Rio’s Maracana, which is why it would be sinful not to pack a bag for the 2014 World Cup and at least stand in an arena which, during the 1950 World Cup, held 199,854 people.
Stadiums offer sport a frame of reference, they are at once theatres and museums. Of course, in India, they are bare in every way, not just absent of facility but blind to the value of the past; their corridors and walls mostly chronicle no history except of sloppy construction. Still, the bamboo-pole stands of Davis Cup ties; the old-timer who swears “Son, there was no one like Krishnan”, and his friend, a wheezing archive on Anglo-Indian hockey; the small-town tented pavilions and tired scoreboards; the East Bengal supporters and their hilsa bought after famous victories—all this was a blessing, too, amphitheatres and people of another kind.
No journey to a stadium is the same for they are wrapped in various colours, sounds and distinct personalities, reflecting not just a tribe but a sport. Golf fans and boxing spectators, one might say, have diverse vocabularies. No journey to a stadium is the same, for sport never is and neither are we. Boy looking at his father shouting “waah, waah” with hand outstretched towards that ustad called Gundappa Viswanath. Teenager with vodka hidden in flasks—once you could sneak them past indolent policemen—bound to the next man by a community sweat and a love for Bib (how Bengalis said Viv, no surname required). Rookie writer, downing a 10am whisky in Paris because warm clothes hadn’t been packed, waiting for history and unsure how to narrate it.
No journey is the same for those within a stadium. For the home team, the stadium’s aura is their cloak, the turf knows their feet, the wind is a visiting friend, familiarity is their reassurance. They stake their ownership just through their walk. For the visiting player, to enter the Theatre of Dreams, and walk its trophy-rich corridors, and look up and see Bobby Charlton smiling in his suit, is just hell. The stadium looks bigger, lurching, threatening, and for minutes, it is as if body and mind have been dislocated.
Journeys at stadiums don’t end with final whistles for, as a magazine writer, unimprisoned by deadline, there was licence to linger and lurk.
Wait and you might catch Dhanraj Pillay walking and weeping at Sydney 2000 after India’s exit from the hockey, bump into a furious official ready to go on-the-record, slink into the Davis Cup team bus with a wink from the captain, or just get plain lucky and find V.V.S. Laxman, Ajit Agarkar and Rahul Dravid, who forged victory in Adelaide 2003, still sitting hours later in the dressing room even as the team had left. To leave the room was to finish a journey and they were not ready yet.
Politicians can command mass audiences, but nowhere on the planet do people willingly congregate, both joined and separate, as in stadiums. Tribalism can be ugly, abuse is often rife, parochialism distresses, yet strangers also unite, people find silent, reflective spaces within mobs, a public and yet private communion with a sport is found. It is a beautiful madness compressed into a few hours: sweat, sound, spilled beer, the groan at a roar in the midst of a pee, the charm of proximity, the exquisiteness of tension, the flight of imagination: What will happen now? So many of us in one place, yet each one an individual traveller.

Transformation for the better The right to education will change future generations, will make them better than us

Rudyard Kipling opens his superb novel with the street urchin Kim teasing the son of a wealthy man. Kim kicks Chota Lal, whose father, Lala Dinanath, is worth half-a-million sterling, off the trunnion of the mighty cannon Zam-Zammah. Kipling loved India and wrote that it was the only democratic place in the world. It warms us to read this, but of course this was quite untrue in Kipling’s time and remains untrue today. Whether it will be so tomorrow, I am not as certain.

The right to education law will change the lives of millions of poor families, whose children will now attend schools they have had no access to. Mint

Few laws are transformational, but the right to education is.It will change the lives of millions of poor families, whose children will now attend the schools they have had no access to.
But it will also change the lives of the millions of children from families that are not poor. This is where the unexpected thunderclap will come.
From this summer, one in four children in class I will be poor. It will be a new experience for the children of middle-class families, because they have always been insulated from contact with poverty.
This is a strange thing to say for a nation in which half the population doesn’t have enough to eat. For those who live in the city, however, poverty is what happens around us. We aren’t ever directly touched by it. Indians are trained to ignore it on the street and none of the people one studies with or works with or knows well is poor, because in India social segregation is absolute. The one person under middle class you know conversationally is your servant.
The rich girl marries the boy from the slums only in Bollywood, and not even there these days.
This torrent of the poor being mingled forcibly with us through the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, has no precedent. Currently, India only adds enough private schools to service middle-class expansion. That is why we so stubbornly resist reservations in education, because there isn’t enough supply to accommodate the weak. This was the basis for a case filed by unaided private schools, which they lost a couple of weeks ago. Now, with the student body for this year going up by 25%, new private schools will have to come up immediately and old ones expanded. Till that happens, both rich and poor must suffer together.
Some of the law is addressed at government schools. The government guarantees it will build additional schools so that there is one within specified distances in all villages and city neighbourhoods.
This will not happen soon, and to the extent it does, will be meaningless. First, state governments already say, rightly, that they have no money to build new schools even though the Centre is paying most of the bill. India is setting aside $40 billion (Rs. 2.1 trillion now) over five years for this law and the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, $8 billion a year. About two-thirds will come from Manmohan Singh’s government and a third will have to be paid by the state governments.
Then the old problems—lack of quality teachers, lack of motivation, lack of supervision—will remain.
The teacher is a figure of reverence for Indians and as a representative of the state, he is also feared. He is under no pressure to change his functioning. This law promises to punish the teacher who does not perform, but other laws have promised that before. Government teachers see their jobs as a sinecure, with work being voluntary. V.S. Naipaul reported this in the 1972 book The Overcrowded Barracoon and noted that India’s schools were really just shells. Things are the same 40 years later and it’s currently not possible for the Indian village school to begin producing properly literate people.

The teacher is a figure of reverence for Indians and as a representative of the state, he is also feared. Divya Babu/Mint

About 79 million Indian children drop out of school before reaching class VIII. The majority of those who do get there have no meaningful education.The right to education law acknowledges the problems and lists the things all government schools must provide. These include a particular level of staffing (a teacher for every 40 students), dedicated teachers for math and science, languages and social studies for classes VI, VII and VIII, a separate toilet for girls and a kitchen which will give free lunch to the children. Some of this has already been enforced and one reason why the number of dropouts has decreased is because of the success of the mid-day meal scheme in schools.
The government seems to have thought through the law. Private schools have been prohibited from screening students, so they cannot deny them admission and fines for not complying are steep: up to Rs. 10,000 per day.
The state will only reimburse private schools the sum it would have spent on the child in a government school. The rest of it, which is most of it, will have to come from the private schools, which are likely to raise fees for other children. In essence, the middle class will be directly subsidizing the education of the poor. This is excellent because it is more efficient than doing it indirectly through taxes.
A school near where I lived in Mumbai’s Bandra, St Andrew’s High School, has already experienced similar integration. Bandra is a Catholic suburb, but has become Muslim-majority over the last few years as migrants from north India have settled in slums there. They send their children to English schools because they know English is their passport to the middle class. The school responded by marking quotas for admission. They would take one-third of their students from Muslim families, a third from Christian and a third from Hindu. This actually discriminated against Muslims, because their strength in the neighbourhood was more than a third. But the parents of the well-off children did not want their children to be swamped out. This system of quotas was supported also by wealthy Muslim parents, who didn’t want their children sitting with children from the slums.
Though people were initially upset on both sides, the school has settled down with this system and it’s likely the same thing will happen with the right to education.

We can be sure that the school will not look on the poor children kindly for the first few years. Priyanka Parashar/Mint

As the law is applied, painful stories will emerge. The poor children, who will not have extra tuition classes, or parents who can help them with homework, will not do as well as the other children.Schools, especially the ones for the super rich, will try and segregate the children of the poor into separate classrooms. The media will find out and—the Indian media being liberal—resist it. It will be forced change and forced integration. Like the change in the US that came after the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s under president Lyndon Johnson.
A few weeks from now, millions of students will begin arriving without a uniform and without money to pay for extra-curricular activities like swimming or tennis or French and piano lessons. Without money to buy shoes to play cricket, or to pay for school picnics.
The law says the school cannot stop the child from studying so they must either drop the uniform rule for the subsidized child, which would be terrible because it would make the boys and girls of the poor stand out, or pay for uniforms from the school fund. Perhaps that will happen, but we can be sure that the school will not look on the poor children kindly for the first few years and the children will need to be brave to stick it out through the monstrous prejudice that comes so easily to us Indians.
Without question, change will come to the children they sit next to in class. My friends today are still the ones I made in school: Mubin, Nazmi, Priti, Waheeda. I never studied or played with anyone who didn’t have enough to eat and couldn’t afford shoes. How would we have reacted at the age of 6 if our bench mate were to reveal he didn’t watch cricket because he didn’t have a TV, or didn’t have a toilet in his house? That he didn’t go on vacations, and his parents worked seven days, and they couldn’t read? Would we sit apart and not share our lunch box with him? I do not think we could have remained unaffected.
The children that this great law will produce will be different from us and they will be better.

Final frontiers | The paths least travelled The audacious find crossing boundaries of speed, depth, or endurance more exciting than another visa stamp. We present the most extreme journeys it’s possible to take

Travel is the fastest way to get a crash course in the amazing, exotic world that lies around us, but for some people, even that’s not enough. They have taken destinations and journeys to near-ridiculous extremes—from space visits to the deepest trench in the ocean. While the pioneers often face extremely difficult journeys, they make it easier for those who follow.
Beyond the skies
Star Trek was the ultimate fantasy in a travel show. See new worlds every day, meet exotic alien creatures and have tough adventures, beyond the “final frontier”. Space tourism is still some distance from the world projected in Star Trek’s episodes, but near-Earth, inner-space tourism has become a reality. In March, Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic signed on actor Ashton Kutcher as the 500th passenger for its first customer sub-orbital flight expected between 2013 and 2014.

Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShip Two

“They will be the pioneers and in time, the price will come down... so that in your lifetime, space travel could be nearly as commonplace as travelling to another continent,” Branson said in a statement on the company’s website.While Branson’s enterprise might bring space travel to the larger public (Kutcher reportedly paid $200,000, or around Rs. 1 crore, for the opportunity), some people who could afford it have already made the trip. Video-game developer Richard Garriott—creator of the famous Ultima series of games— helped found a company, Space Adventures, that organizes space tourism trips. For over $30 million, it put Garriott, after months of intensive training, on the crew of the 2008 Soyuz TMA 13 mission to the International Space Station (ISS) for 10 days.
Garriott was the sixth civilian to visit the ISS—he was originally supposed to be the first, but sold his seat to Texan Dennis Tito in 2001, for financial reasons. Tito spent eight days on the ISS, and since then there have been eight trips and seven travellers. Charles Simonyi, a Hungarian-American software entrepreneur, made two trips—the first for 15 days in 2007 and then for 14 days in 2009.
Under the sea

While the surface of our planet has been thoroughly explored, our knowledge of the landscape and ecosystems at the bottom of the ocean is still comparatively scant. While there have been several scientific experiments with unmanned vessels, human beings have almost never reached the deepest parts of the ocean—until now anyway.Film-maker James Cameron, the director of Titanic (recently released in 3D) in which he explored in some detail the use of submersibles in deep-sea operations, travelled 11km undersea in submarine Deepsea Challenger to the deepest point, the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, in the last week of March. Cameron spent 3 hours at that depth.

Machine journeys: The Triton submarine will go to the bottom of the ocean

The journey to the bottom took 2 hours, 36 minutes, and the submarine was fitted with an array of cameras so that it could film the sights at the bottom in 3D for later study. At the televised press conference later, Cameron told reporters, “It was absolutely the most remote, isolated place on the planet. I really feel like in one day I’ve been to another planet and come back.”Other submersible trips to the deep are also being planned, including the Branson-backed DeepFlight Challenger and another by the Marine Science and Technology Foundation, an organization backed by Google’s Eric Schmidt, called the DOER Marine (DOER stands for Deep Ocean Exploration and Research). Like the Deepsea Challenger, the emphasis on these machines will also be on scientific exploration.
A US-based submersible company, Triton Submarines, is also planning on building a submarine to take tourists down to the depths for $250,000 a ticket—it could begin operations as early as next year.
Keeping on track
Back in the 1980s, noted American travel writer Paul Theroux “lost” his Chinese tour guide and then spent a year travelling around China by rail. This eventually became the basis of his book, Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China (1988), in which he described his journeys around the massive rail network which connected most parts of China.

Bullet trains make travelling across China a breeze.(Wikimedia Commons)

In his book, Theroux describes travelling on 40 trains, from the tropics and metropolises to the desert wasteland, to create a picture of China as a modern nation and an ancient culture.Things have changed since and visitors to China can jet across the countryside on the bullet train. Shanghai houses Asia’s largest train terminus, including a special visitors’ viewing hall in the former airline terminus that is home to the Shanghai-Beijing bullet train. Despite an accident caused by lightning that killed 40 people in July, the bullet train remains operational and hurtles through the countryside at 300 kmph. The journey cuts between the busy cityscapes of Shanghai and Beijing, filled with high-rises and flyovers, and the paddy fields that lie in between. With a number of additional trains being built, China already houses the largest bullet train network in the world.
The best way to go about planning a rail journey through China is to visit Seat61.com, a comprehensive travel website that has enough information to plan routes, costs and pick up on local information.
Past human endurance
The Tour d’Afrique is one of the most gruelling and rewarding cycling tours—according to the company’s website (www.tourdafrique.com), past travellers have described it as a journey of the mind and body.
Tour d’Afrique can be an endless holiday, a four-month journey of cycling across the back roads of Africa, where cyclists can cover almost 12,000km, going from the pyramids in Egypt all the way past the horn of Africa.

Tour d’Afrique connects people (Catharina Robbertze/Tour d’Afrique)

While the tour attracts professionals (in 2003, the first tour set a Guinness World Record for the fastest human-powered crossing of Africa), the organizers say anyone can make the journey— and point to former tour members who included the elderly and an amputee.The tour begins in January from the Pyramids of Giza and works its way through Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Botswana and Namibia, ending in South Africa. While the riders cover over 100km each day, they cycle through the scenic route and get to experience each country, its culture and landscape, as they travel through. There’s a registration fee of $150 and the entry fee for the full tour is $13,900. Tourists can also opt to do certain sections of the route; section trips start at $1,400.
The group, which first started these tours in 2003, has been so successful that it now organizes tours on every inhabited continent other than Australia. These include some of the most famous routes in the world, such as the Silk Route (Shanghai to Istanbul), along the route of the Orient Express (from Paris to Istanbul) and a Trans-Europa Amber+ tour (from St Petersburg to Lisbon). An Indian Adventure tour, their latest, starts from Agra, moves through Rajasthan and the western coast, to Kanyakumari.
Work meets travel

Sean Aiken started the One Week Job project

American student Sean Aiken didn’t know what to do after graduating. Getting a job didn’t appeal to him as much as the idea of travel, which he couldn’t afford. Then he came up with the One Week Job project (oneweekjob.com). Between February 2007 and March 2008, Aiken would travel around the US, taking up any job he could get, for one week. For that year, he would work in 52 different jobs, trek 55,000 miles (around 88,514km) and blog about it. The full list is still available online (one weekjob.com/about-the-project/previous-jobs/)—Aiken would end up working jobs as diverse as a bungee instructor, an advertising executive, a baker, stock trader, astronomer and cowboy.
Since then, the project has expanded from being a quirky idea to a genuine cause to help people around the world. Whatever money he earned for the work was donated towards the ONE/Make Poverty History campaign, a charitable organization dedicated to poverty eradication. In one year, he raised a little over $20,000. The project continued, with different volunteers each year, and this year’s One Week Job project is slated to start from June, with 59-year-old Linda Chase.
To sign up for the project, visit one weekjob.com and leave your name as a volunteer.
The project has also been running in Australia since November. In week 18, volunteer Paul Seymour (24) is in Brisbane and the group has already raised a little over $3,140.10. All of his earnings will go to the Big Brothers Big Sisters organization, which helps mentor “vulnerable young people”.

Other realms | Fata morgana Buccaneers of the imagination go where no man on earth does. Here are some mirages rich with fantastical travel

It’s a cliché of the genre that most works of fantasy begin with a map—from J.R.R. Tolkien’s beautiful depiction of the route to the Lonely Mountain in The Hobbit to the steampunk- inspired beginning of HBO’s Game of Thrones. A big part of the joy of fantasy set in other worlds is in exploring the universes so created. Critics of the genre often complain that too much of fantasy focuses more on this “world-building” than on strong plots or good prose, but it’s nice to be reminded that imaginary worlds can also be joyful things in and of themselves.
Many works of fantasy are built around a quest of some sort. The quest is one of the most basic forms of narrative there is, but it also provides an excuse to further explore these worlds. There are people, for example, who complain that the bulk of The Lord of the Rings is nothing but a long walk through Middle-earth. This is absolutely true and it’s wonderful if you like that sort of thing. But fantasy writing’s journeys can contain scenes of genuine wonder even for the non-believer and the examples below achieve just that.
Ged’s Pursuit of the Shadow

In Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, a young wizard unleashes a terrifying shadow that haunts him for long after. Eventually, he comes to the realization that he must face the thing that he has released into the world, and he follows it into the uncharted realms of the ocean. Many fantastic journeys are made memorable by an undercurrent of fear. Characters are pursued by enemies, or face the knowledge that there is danger all around them. Ged’s pursuit of his shadow is completely different. The hunted becomes the hunter and a sense of triumph colours the whole venture.“With hand and spell, Ged turned his boat and it leaped like a dolphin from the water, rolling, in that quick turn. Faster than before, he followed, but the shadow grew ever fainter to his eyes. Rain, mixed with sleet and snow, came stinging across his back and his left cheek. He could not see more than a hundred yards ahead. Before long, as the storm grew heavier, the shadow was lost to sight.

“Yet, Ged was sure of its track as if he followed a beast’s track over snow, instead of a wraith fleeing over water. Though the wind blew his way now, he held the singing magewind in the sail, and flake-foam shot from the boat’s blunt prow, and she slapped the water as she went.”Arthur Gordon Pym goes South
The voyage documented in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is not one that a sensible reader would wish to replicate, replete as it is with shipwrecks, cannibalism and ghost ships. Eventually, most of the ship’s crew is slaughtered by a tribe of “savages”.
This is all unpleasant, but the book’s most memorable journey is the small section after this litany of horrors has come to an end. Pym, Peters, and the “native” they have taken captive drift further towards the Antarctic in a canoe. As they travel south, the narrative takes on a numb, detached quality. Yet “we were entering upon a region of novelty and wonder”; the water turns white and warm, and white ash occasionally rains down upon the travellers. Then, in a sudden burst of activity, the boat rushes towards a cataract, a chasm opens, and Pym sees “a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow”. And on this weird, ambiguous note, the book abruptly ends. Pym’s journey is no one’s idea of a dream vacation, but it’s impossible to forget.
…and Caspian goes East

C.S. Lewis’ Prince Caspian embarks upon a quest to find the seven lords who remained faithful to his father. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is most people’s favourite Narnia book. There are echoes here of The Odyssey, with its perilous seas and series of strange, magical islands, and also of Samuel Coleridge, in a nightmarish episode where an albatross figures strongly. Yet the best part of the voyage comes after all the islands have been left behind. In a way, this is the reverse of Pym’s journey above. In both cases, the sea becomes warmer and calmer, but where Poe’s book speaks of drowsiness, Lewis gives the impression of extreme clarity. The sun becomes bigger and brighter; where Poe’s ocean turns milky, here the water is so clear that entire civilizations of mer-people can be observed fathoms below. When the water does turn white, it is because it is covered in flowers.
We never find out what is at the utter East; we are left with the image of Reepicheep, the mouse, paddling his coracle over the wave at the end of the world, “very black against the lilies”. It is enough.
Dhrun in the forest of Tantravalles
About half of the plots in Jack Vance’s Lyonesse books involve people travelling on one quest or another. Yet Dhrun’s journey in the first book, Suldrun’s Garden, stands out.

The eldest child of princess Suldrun, Dhrun is fated to rule the Elder Isles. But he is kidnapped by the fairies, and a changeling left in his place. After a childhood spent among the fairies of Thripsey Shee, Dhrun is cast out to make his own way in the world. To help him, he has a magic purse and a sword that comes when called. But he is also cursed to carry seven years of bad luck.There’s something of the fairy tale to Dhrun’s story (as he insouciantly defrauds trolls and defeats ogres before joining a medicine show), and Vance makes use of a droll, courtly style that is reminiscent of Charles Perrault’s fairy tales. But the real wonder here is in Vance’s ability to tell a genuinely dark story full of things like slavery and sexual abuse, and still infuse the whole with the luminosity of something remembered from early childhood.
Rincewind in Space
An elderly hero is on his way to the city of the gods, which he plans to blow up. What he doesn’t realize is that if he succeeds, it will mean the end of the world. Someone has to stop him, but he already has a massive head start.

This is the problem that confronts the characters in Terry Pratchett and Paul Kidby’s graphic novel The Last Hero. The solution, naturally, is to build a spaceship powered by specially fed dragons, fly off the edge of the world, and count on gravity (or whatever the equivalent of gravity is for a flat world on the back of four elephants on the back of a turtle) to make sure that “down” eventually turns into “up”. Needless to say, things go horribly wrong. This is expected when you have a mad genius, a cowardly wizard and a simian (“Ankh-Morpork, we have an orang-utan…”) on board. There’s a moon landing, all sorts of shenanigans involving flatulent lunar dragons, and somehow it all ends happily enough.

Private peaks | In a corner that counts Past motorable roads, horseback up 7,100ft above sea level, to find the cottage overlooking the Chenab

Let me take you to my village, Breswana, as typical a hamlet in the invisible pahari belt of Jammu and Kashmir as you can hope for. I say “invisible” because few people outside the state have an idea of the terrain, culture and lifestyle we have here.
The pahari region in Jammu and Kashmir is different from the Kashmir Valley, which forms most people’s idea of Kashmir. We have no shikaras, open green meadows, or running background santoor music. We’re all about mountains, rocks, subsistence farming, livestock and hardiness. Our way of life in the mountains is different from that in the valley. We speak Kashmiri too, but our accent and local slang differ. Cast aside also notions of fair, rosy-cheeked Kashmiris with full red lips. The mountain sun has turned us into a wrinkled, hardy people with tanned leather for skin and crow’s feet around smiling eyes.

Nature trail: The Chenab valley.

My life today is different to what I imagined when I was a child growing up in Dubai in the 1980s. Back then, it was all about “study well, get a good job, make money, kick back and enjoy”. I stuck to the formula for many years, with college and then a well-paying, fun job in Bangalore. In late 2008, everything changed. I decided I wanted to help at home and left the city suddenly. What I do now is run the Haji Public School with my family—it’s a school we set up in our ancestral village in the mountains of Doda, at an altitude of approximately 7,100ft overlooking the Chenab river, with no motorable roads going all the way up even today. It’s really the most wonderful corner of the world.
My great grandfather established the village in the early 1900s; today, almost every resident of Breswana is family—by blood or marriage. In every sense of the word, it is home.
My work has me shuttling between Jammu (“the big city”) and the school in Breswana throughout the year. It’s a whole day’s travel, with mixed measures of driving, walking and horse riding. Jammu is where my town house is, and I head there every time I need to catch up on paperwork, have official meetings, purchase supplies or access proper Internet. This is at least once a month, if not more often.
It is a beautiful, if exhausting, journey. I haven’t tired of it yet and it’s been five years of scampering uphill and down, and driving on the national highway in all seasons. There are three legs of the journey from city to village: Jammu to Doda—183km by road; Doda to Premnagar, the last motorable stop—16km again by road; and horseback/trek to Breswana up the mountain horse trails, rocks, ravines and forest (oh, and a water mill)—8km on mountain trails, upwards.

On horseback up the mountain.

The drive from Jammu to Doda takes about 5 hours—as long as there are no traffic hassles. Doda to Premnagar, a small roadside hill town, is another hour or so. It is a most scenic mountainous drive along the NH-1B, and with a dramatic U-turn at Batote (an important transit town en route), we are in Doda district. Somewhere after Batote, you’ll spot the river Chenab for the first time, going the other way; it will accompany you on the left of the highway for the remaining portion of the journey.
On the highway, you will see Gujjars and Bakarwals moving north in the summer, taking their animals to higher reaches for a season of grazing. Before the winter, you can see them heading down with their livestock in the thousands. Traffic moves slowly during these seasonal migrations in the state.
On the Jammu-Doda stretch, our family has gravitated towards certain establishments for their good food and quick service: Manhas Dhaba at Samroli, Prem Sweets at Kud, a chai (tea) stall at a pine-covered corner of Patnitop (a popular hill station about 3 hours out of Jammu), and, most importantly, Sharma Vaishno Dhaba at Bagar (pronounced like the rude word) for its flawless victory with rajma dal-chawal and desi ghee.
My favourite stretch of the journey to the village is the last, horse-borne bit. Nothing compares to riding a good mountain horse on tough mountain trails. Our family has always had horses, both local stock as well as the matchless Zanskaris. Everything about horses brings out the romantic in me. They’re gorgeous animals, and it’s quite incredible the way they manage our mountain slopes. With horses and me, it’s a case of true love, and I have my father to thank for showing us the ropes well as children and making us comfortable with them. I know of people screwing up their noses when confronted with horse smells, but I am immediately taken back to Breswana, to my trips home.

The bridge across the Chenab. Photographs by Beata Labikova

The final leg of the journey kicks off when we wave goodbye to the car or jeep at Premnagar (the town is so named only after a gentleman called Premchand and not, as one hoped, a tragic local love story). There’s a wooden footbridge over the Chenab at Premnagar which we cross to where the horses wait. If you look up at this point, you can spot Breswana on the neck of the mountain towering above the town. Here onwards, all luggage goes up on pack animals or on the backs of men/women. It’s a 7km, steep and uphill route on rocky trails that takes 3-4 hours to cover. We stop a few times along the way to rest the horses. Again, we have our preferred spots for resting—shade, wind and water being the deciding factors.
This final ride is where one gets to see pahari Jammu and Kashmir, still untouched by the outside world. We pass through villages, where we see people go about their daily lives and work through different seasons. Things carry on as they used to, farmers still follow traditional farming methods, and the villages look more or less as they always have as far back as I can remember. Everyone knows everything about everyone else in the mountains and much current information is traded between travellers going up and down.

I usually ride into Breswana with the sunset; a hot cup of noon chai (Kashmiri salt tea) and home-made bread welcome me along with a fireplace (optional) and all the familiar sights and smells of home.It’s always a physically demanding trip, this one between Jammu and Breswana, leading to an aching back, a sore backside and tired legs. But a day later, sitting in the favourite spot in front of my cottage, waiting for a Web page to load on the mobile phone, with schoolchildren chattering in the distance and the sun warming my back, I find I really cannot complain.
At all. Just get me some Internet up here.

Valley trails | Up the hill and down the mountain Through sunshine and clouds, fields and beaches, walking helps uncover hidden layers

Walking in England brings with it an unavoidable —and long—discussion about the weather. Despite this drawback, walking or hiking remains one of the most popular outdoor activities in the country. With the availability of detailed ordnance maps, experienced walk leaders and marked footpaths, it’s hard to see why not.
Practicalities aside, the activity helps discover an important layer of the place—one that lies hidden from the superficial tours we subject ourselves to. London, Oxford and Cambridge are great destinations in their own right, but only a small part of a country that also has outstanding natural beauty.

On the trail: Paragliders ride the air currents over Sussex.

The walk my group is on today is only 24km of the 160km-long South Downs Way, which covers the entire length of the South Downs National Park, one of south-east England’s newest national parks spanning the chalk ridges of the South Downs and acres of woodland.Our walk starts in a village called Hassocks. To get there, I take a train from London. The journey is a nice appetizer before the walk, with the train chugging away in a reassuring manner. All its passengers conduct conversations in hushed tones—a curious behaviour trait that I haven’t seen anywhere else. Even the children are quiet. My thoughts flow in a happy and silent hum, following the mysterious lives of people who seem to thrive in the middle of nowhere. I have no concern for the adventure, or lack of it, that the day might have in store for me.
In Hassocks, I meet the rest of the group and, for a few minutes, while the walk leader tells us about the path and the weather forecast for the day (clouds with some sun), we eye each other’s gear, an exercise that divides the experienced from new walkers.

Legend has it that the devil dug this valley. Photographs by Sneha Nagesh

Everyone has the essentials— sturdy walking boots, waterproof windcheater and waterproof trousers—for without them, battling England’s moody weather would be a weary and damp affair. Some seasoned walkers are equipped with handier extras—well-fitted knapsacks that double as water bottles with tubes hanging out so you don’t have to break your pace even for a drink, trousers with extra back pockets that are full of nutritional energy titbits and small GPS devices that fit into a pocket on your shoulder. Following this necessary ritual, we set off, and a few minutes from the main road, we are surrounded by trees. The sun offers us patches of light from time to time but the trees catch them with more ease than us. Some of us are with this particular group for the first time (the group is specifically for people in their 20s and 30s) and the air is thick with introductory conversations. After some stories of different professions, lifestyles and varying fitness levels, initial conversations establish one thing in common—everyone in the group has an insatiable love for the outdoors.
We arrive at the foot of the first hill on our route and conversation stops, giving way to silent, brisk, long steps as we try to climb up in a dignified fashion. At the end of our climb, we stop, again without discussion, for a reward—a snack and a drink from our respective knapsacks, while we savour the view around us. There are some cows grazing nearby and they don’t make any movement or show any signs of being disturbed by our arrival.

The next section of the hike is through a V-shaped valley called Devil’s Dyke. One of the walkers tells me about the legend associated with the place. The valley was formed when the devil dug a trench to flood all the churches in Sussex.The story seems too gloomy to fit the place somehow, as we pass some other walkers, and an amusing little dog. He makes a big ceremony about walking— going a few metres, sitting down and refusing to go any further till his owners reward him with a pat, and carry him for a few moments; he then jumps out of their arms to repeat the process all over again.
When we reach the end of Devil’s Dyke, we find a pub named after the place. The wind is howling and people are sitting outside, gazing at the sky as it turns blue for the first time today. In addition to this, the blueness is marked with pastel shades. We realize then that we have walked into the territory of paragliders; nameless and faceless to us, they seem to be catching air currents like they own them.
The sun is now out in all its splendour and we find a place to stop for lunch, arranging ourselves in different degrees of comfort. As we munch on our sandwiches, one of the gliders moves around. As he carries out a series of manoeuvres forming infinity shapes in the sky, I am convinced of his ownership of the wind.
We find it difficult to free ourselves from the enchanting scenes, but we do in the end. Our path goes along a large farm and for the next leg of the journey, we are accompanied by gigantic tractors that throw mounds of dust up into the air. The dust clouds stay contained around the tractors and don’t reach us, as though respecting our transience.
It happens in a slow, calculated manner, but the path eventually begins to curve and then we see it in the distance—a view of the English Channel.
As we descend the hill, we are in a lighter mood and the tone of our conversation changes—becoming more easy-going and leaning towards favourite beach holidays. After passing some more farms and a large motorway, we arrive in Shoreham-by-Sea, a small port town.
The walk leader tells us that the town’s beach, our destination, is around 5km away. We quicken our pace, till we come to a group of houseboats on the Adur river, each looking more unusual than the one next to it. One of them even has a microwave turned into a postbox. It’s a surprising scene and people stop to take photographs as wind chimes on the houseboat produce a musical sound.
When we arrive at the beach, it has become considerably colder. A few people brave the water for a moment. A few minutes later, everyone heads to a pub. After a quick drink, I decide to go back to the beach. The tide is low and I walk closer to the sea as the setting sun makes strange reflections on the silted sand.
After the sun disappears, I sit cross-legged on the pebbles, feeling a kind of peace in the solitude and anonymity that I have come to associate with travelling on foot through the glorious British countryside.

Slow Tracks | Where speed is not of the essence On board the Akola Ratlam Fast Passenger, traversing India’s longest remaining stretch of metre-gauge railway line

Akola Junction’s platforms 1 and 5 could well be different worlds.
Platform 1 is blanketed by the intense white glare of tube lights. It’s 5am, but four tea stalls are open. Each flaunts bright, shiny, coloured packs of chips and glimmering bottles of cool drinks. Vendors wheel their carts across the clean, polished platform in front of closed office doors.
On platform 5, lights are few and far between in the semi-dark chill of early morning. There is no concrete, no paint, no polish and no activity. There are no stalls, no milling tea vendors. The platform’s dusty unpaved surface is almost at ground level, indistinct from the earth. A dull brown 11-bogie train stands still, its fading signboards murmuring “Akola-Ratlam”.
Akola is an undistinguished town in north-eastern Maharashtra, 250km from Nagpur. I’m in Akola to travel on the Akola Ratlam Fast Passenger, India’s longest-remaining metre-gauge train route, a world apart from platform 1’s broad gauge trains.
Gauge change

Squeezed: Tiny bogies force passengers on to the roof. Photo by Karan Desai/Flickr.com/photos/theblueindian

Since a carriage of gauge-width 1m could seat four people side by side, viceroy Lord Mayo instituted the metre gauge in 1872. When it wasn’t uniformly adopted, Lord Salisbury in 1878 introduced the broad gauge (1.676m) as an alternative standard. During this period, railways were also being built by princely states, which used either broad or metre gauges, depending on their fancy. Over the years, neither gauge saw universal adoption—and both continued to be used.In 1951, metre gauge comprised 45% of the length of Indian Railways. It was possible to travel over 2,500km from Rameswaram, Tamil Nadu, to Sarai Rohilla (Delhi) by metre gauge alone. Extensive networks of both metre and broad gauges remained well into the 1990s.
But transloading passengers and freight from one gauge to another wasn’t efficient. Indian Railways, therefore, aggressively pursued Project Unigauge to convert metre-gauge routes everywhere to broad gauge. The Rameswaram-Delhi metre-gauge route has diminished progressively to Jaipur-Secunderabad, and then to Jaipur-Purna (Maharashtra) over the last 20 years. Today, all that remains of this north-south corridor is the 435km stretch from Akola in Maharashtra to Ratlam in Madhya Pradesh, still the longest remaining line of its kind in India.
Before long, this might be gone too, taking with it a slower, older way of travel and life.
Slow trot

The Akola Ratlam Fast Passenger ambles out at 6am. There isn’t quite the smooth slinking of a broad-gauge train’s departure, nor is there the gasping acceleration of one. Even outside town limits, it keeps up its steady, slow trot—refusing to speed up from its 25km per hour (kmph) dodder.The Ratlam Akola Fast Passenger’s gentle rocking feels like the deliberate sway of a cradle as it dawdles slowly past brown fields. There are no houses, roads or vehicles in the empty landscape. A golden ball of sunlight emerges in the distance. A solitary bus purrs by a railway crossing. The first few stations have abandoned station buildings, with dried leaves strewn across platforms. In the first 30km, I see no people along the track.
The tender swaying and the unhurried pace are comforting. Slow travel, bereft of sensory overload and human presence, allows me to stop, wait, peer out, think and see clearly, unfettered by external stimulation.
Yet, there are moments when I’m impatient for the rush of a fast train’s pace, when I crave distractions. At Patsul village in Akola district, the music of an old Hindi song from a portable radio outside is a welcome burst of sensory stimulation.
One question perplexes me. The person who put the word “fast” into Akola Ratlam Fast Passenger—what was he smoking?
‘Useless line’

A food vendor at the Khandwa station in Madhya Pradesh. Photo by Karan Desai/Flickr.com/photos/theblueindian

At 7.30am, Akot is the first big station on the journey, with clumps of huts and pudgy houses. Over breakfast of oil-smudged samosas, I ask the train’s guard, J.V. Gautam, if I can travel in his cabin. To my delight, he agrees without a second thought.In his cabin, an iron trunk doubles as a writing table, on which are neatly arranged a notebook, a toolkit, a walkie-talkie, and a row of blue, green and red pens.
“Bahut bekaar line hai yeh (What a useless line this is),” he laments, adding that trains can’t go faster than 30 kmph because of the quality of the track.
“The 174km from Akola to Khandwa takes 7 hours!” he says. “This section is under South Central Railways. The section from Khandwa to Ratlam comes under Western Railways—and because the track is better there, trains often touch 60-70 kmph. But these will never touch the 100 kmph speed of broad-gauge trains,” he adds.
He tells me there’s no labour or material available to keep the route in order; that’s why trains go slow. He adds: “If the railways sell tickets at such subsidized rates, how will they get money to repair anything? A 20-30km journey costs Rs. 3-4. That’s less than the cost of a cup of tea.”
I ask him if he will miss the metre gauge when it’s converted. Of course not, he says emphatically. Broad gauge will cut the 7-hour trip to Khandwa down to 3 hours—that will mean faster travel, shorter working hours, fewer stops for repairs and crossings. I ask if it isn’t worthwhile to preserve the metre gauge’s heritage. Gautam snorts, “Well, if they want to preserve it, they should just use a museum.”
“Ek minute,” he excuses himself. He picks up one of four baskets with tiffin boxes from a shelf and leans out of the door. At a railway crossing, he deftly delivers the day’s lunch into the gatekeeper’s waiting arms. Over the morning, he delivers all four tiffin boxes to railway staffers on the route.
Hill thrill
The train ascends the Gawilgarh hills. I peer down into a yawning viaduct marked “Ampitheater (sic) viaduct”. Suddenly the train plunges into darkness, but not before I glimpse “Wan tunnel, 1960, 558m”.
All along are dry forests full of spindly, emaciated trees. Barks have gnarled, freckled surfaces. Viaducts and bridges have waterless bottoms. Occasional smudges of smouldering black offer a clue to the reason for the leaflessness.
Gautam interrupts my meditation. “Saab! Isko zaroor dekhiye (Sir, you must see this).” Ahead, the track goes into the shape of a number 4. It traverses some distance, curves on itself, and ends up running under, and perpendicular to, the bridge we are crossing. A board helpfully announces “Spiral”.
Civilization at last
As it pulls to a halt, the slow rocking rhythm of the train subsides. “Tukaithad,” say the boards. It’s 10.30am. There are vegetable sellers, bhelpuri vendors and a tea-and-snacks stall—a relief after the largely civilization-free stations so far.
In the stationmaster’s room, the driver, Naseem Sheikh, has made himself comfortable. He is waiting for another train to arrive before we can leave. Sheikh also laments the trains’ slow speed. He lowers his voice and says: “This is an Adivasi area. That’s why there’s no development and the condition of tracks is bad.”
He adds, “See? Now we’ve stopped here for 30 minutes. Sometimes, we have to stop for 4 hours. Do they care to protest? Until that happens, the condition of the track won’t change.”
By now, we have descended the Gawilgarh hills. A “Welcome to MP” board passes by. Dry woods slowly give way to occasional rivulets. Groves, roads and electric poles, largely absent so far, suddenly become ubiquitous. The Tapti is a wide sash of glimmering water.
The languid rocking of the train remains unchanged. Its slowness transmits itself to me as I take deep breaths and deliberately, clearly arrange my thoughts.
Nothing changes

Slow shuffle: The train halts at a small wayside station somewhere between Khandwa and Omkareshwar.Photo by Karan Desai.

At Khandwa at 1.30pm, guards change, drivers change, most passengers alight and give way to others, for the train is moving from South Central Railways to Western Railways. The train is much faster now. Even at a top speed of 60 kmph, though, it maintains a shuffling gait, not quite managing the urgency of broad-gauge trains.
B.S. Goswami is the new guard, a man with a twirling moustache and booming voice. Goswami tells me that the route has not changed for decades. Semaphore signals line the route. Frayed bamboo hoops called tokens are used to mark the arrival of trains. Mechanical line-clearing systems regulate traffic. Bogies have wooden foot boards. Train lights often refuse to work. But these are unchanged not to preserve history, but simply because it isn’t economical to refurbish these before the broad gauge takes over.
At Nimar Kheri in Madhya Pradesh, a railway staffer enters, opens up a part of the top of a big red safe in the guard’s cabin and places a jingling pouch in it. He then pulls a lever down so that the pouch goes into the safe. Every station on the route puts its daily cash collection in a leather pouch and deposits it in the safe, which is opened at the end of the line at Ratlam.
Goswami mentions that the 1925 train robbery at Kakori, a flashpoint in India’s independence movement, entailed the robbery of cash bags from just such a safe.
Change is necessary

I ask Goswami whether he thinks it’s a good idea to retain the metre gauge for its heritage value. He says: “Some years ago, I was a guard for the Mumbai Firozpur Janata Express. I saw the general compartments there. Shashi Tharoor (former minister of state for external affairs) talked about cattle class, but these people—their compartments were so crowded that it was worse than seeing cattle packed into trucks.” “This, our train—you should see how packed it is when people go to Mhow and Nagpur for Ambedkar Jayanti, or during festivals at Indore or Omkareshwar. People ride on the top of the train, and you have no space even there.”
Goswami then comes to the point. “When people travel like that, when we’re so short of capacity, how can people say they want a 11-bogie, 48-seater metre-gauge train instead of a 24-bogie, 72-seater, broad-gauge train? Besides, how can we use this old unreliable signal and traffic technology instead of functional, modern equipment?”
At Mhow
The train rumbles across the Narmada river in the late afternoon sunlight. At Kalakund, a banker—a special engine for mountainous terrain—joins the rear of the train so as to push it up the 1:40 incline (that is, for every 40m horizontal distance covered, the altitude rises 1m). Far below, the rocky Choral river winds its way along a canyon, until we reach.
At the curiously named Mhow (actually an acronym for Military Headquarters of War), a massive photograph of Babasaheb Ambedkar presides over the station lobby, for it is Ambedkar’s birthplace.
End of the journey
I stop in Indore for the night. As I resume the journey to Ratlam the next afternoon, farms and fields continue to be plentiful. Ajnod station is but a signboard plonked in the middle of sprawling farmland. At Fatehabad Chandrawatiganj, people load large milk cans made of iron on to the train, while others suspend these cans with hefty chains from train windows.
Past Fatehabad Chandrawatiganj, wheat chaff rises in the evening sunlight in fields, suffusing the air with a magical halo. The dust of crushed maize hits my nostrils with its musty odour, pervading the compartment. The train has slowed to 30 kmph again.
As the yellow sky pales to black, bleak lights from houses make tiny breaches on the dark horizon. Weak zero-watt bulbs in ancient bogies look like they’ll die out at any moment. The starlit darkness is slowly diluted by the faraway lights of Ratlam.
After a day through lands largely untouched by urbanity, on a route that harks back to an ancient connection that will soon be no more, the train drifts into Ratlam station, refusing to change its pace.
At Ratlam, two station buildings face each other. Ratlam’s broad-gauge section faces the metre-gauge one that I exit. After a day full of leisure and deliberation, I step across into Ratlam’s broad-gauge building to take the midnight Rajdhani Express to Mumbai that immediately races to its destination at a breathless 120 kmph.

Close connections | Ships, trains and automobiles A breathless journey from Switzerland to England that brought adventure and lasting friendship

In the summer of 1985, I was in Geneva, interning at a United Nations (UN) agency. Geneva was pretty, but it was also discreet and quiet, like a Swiss banker. Most people understood English, but they preferred speaking in French. My French at that time was non-existent, so once I left the area near Palais des Nations, I hardly got to speak to anyone. That is, until I met Javed.
One evening, in my hostel’s kitchen, I met a young man humming a tune which sounded vaguely like a song from a Hindi film. I had picked up some food from the fridge all students shared and heated some soup when he turned around and saw me.

On board and starboard: Geneva’s Palais des Nations.(Yann Forget/Wikimedia Commons)

Are you an Indian, I asked him. He smiled and said he was a Canadian. Looking at my perplexed look, he made it easy: His parents were from Pakistan, he explained, and he was interning at the World Health Organization. Javed enjoyed some Hindi film songs, could talk about cricket, and most importantly, he liked spicing up his food the way I did. Over the next few weeks, we had many long conversations, about what we studied (he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and medical student), about our countries and the Western world, about our cricketers and their inability to win matches. We moaned about the strong Swiss franc, how hard it was to shop and how boring it was to eat the same curries and rice that we cooked for each other night after night because it was too expensive to eat out, and the food in the café was unappetizing.
Towards the end of that summer, Javed asked me if I wanted to come to England with him. We were students, dependent on scanty fellowships and scholarships. Flying from Geneva to London, tempting though it seemed, was not part of my plans.
He sensed my reluctance. “We will go by road,” he said. Then he carefully explained his plan. He had to return to his college by mid-August, with all the books he had acquired in Geneva. If I agreed to go with him and carry his stuff with him, we could travel by trains, cabs and a boat all the way to Oxford, in 24 hours or a bit more. Once there, he said, I could stay with him, and he’d show me around.

Christ Church college, Oxford.(Manoj Madhavan/Mint)

I had never been to Oxford. I had not travelled by train in Europe either. I had already finished the project the UN agency wanted me to work on, and if I disappeared for a few days, nobody would notice. And I loved hanging out with Javed. In that Francophone city, surrounded by earnest UN bureaucrats by day and a hostel where few spoke English in the evenings, Javed had been my constant companion. The phrase wasn’t invented then—or at least I hadn’t heard it—but going with him to Oxford was a no-brainer. He had worked out the costs, distances involved, schedules and routes. When do we leave, I asked. And our adventure began.
It wasn’t going to be easy. We had, simply, too many bags, and only four hands. A few small bags which you could sling along your shoulders, a large, proper backpack weighed down by many books, a couple of suitcases, and another sleeping bag. Did I mention my own suitcase, since I wanted my proverbial change of socks for the week—at least—that I wanted to spend in Oxford?
We boarded the train at Geneva’s central station, Genève-Cornavin (also known as Gare de Cornavin) for Gare de Lyon in Paris. We wouldn’t have time to see any sights in Paris. The train, typically Swiss, left on time, and as we left Geneva, I could sense that however much Javed complained about the insipid nature of the city, he was going to miss the place.
The train moved briskly and soon we were in the French countryside. It was still early in the morning, and we drank some coffee. French officials walked through our compartment, checking passports. Javed’s Canadian passport was returned promptly; they lingered longer over my Indian passport, but had no questions for me, and let us resume our sleep.
The fun began once we reached Paris. Javed hadn’t told me that we had to change trains and go across the city to another major station. The distance between Gare de Lyon and Gare du Nord is only about 5km, but the taxi queue was long and the Paris traffic unreliable. So we carried our worldly possessions and raced past others, snaking through Parisians, to get on the subway for Gare du Nord. We had to change lines at Les Halles to get to Gare du Nord—what we hadn’t bargained for was how large Les Halles was.

Paddington station, London (Mike Peel/www.mikepeel.net/Wikimedia Commons)

Les Halles seems almost as large as the Louvre when you are running late and while it lacks the aesthetic beauty of the museum, its walls do carry images of women wearing almost nothing. But unlike the canvases at the Louvre, where the nearly naked women usually lounged around in their beds, silken sashes draped strategically on their bodies, the women in the posters at Les Halles served a more prosaic purpose: of selling toasters, air conditioners, cars, cigarettes, intimate lingerie, perfumes, chocolates, holidays in distant islands, and even sports equipment. We had no time to look, of course, and we were well brought up Asian kids. I now remember little of that mad race except for Javed grumbling how unfriendly the Paris Metro was to the disabled, who’d find its many stairs—and the lack of escalators—a major drawback for easy movement. We made it to the train to Calais just as it was leaving the station. We drifted into sleep; suddenly Javed got up and told me we had overslept, and Calais had passed us by. Desperately, we took our many bags and got off at a tiny station where nobody else got off, wondering what to do next. Help came from the stationmaster, who wasn’t sure he understood what we were asking, but told us to take a cab to the Calais ferry point.

The White Cliffs of Dover (Les Powell)

It was already mid-afternoon and most drivers had topped their nice long lunches with a few glasses of the finest red from the vineyard nearby. We managed to rouse one bushy- moustached gent, who agreed to drive. It is only when he started the cab that we realized that he had had too many drinks and was considerably above legal limit under almost any jurisdiction, even a libertarian one. But we had a deadline and a destination and we begged him to keep his eyes on the road, hands on the steering wheel and his leg only gently on the accelerator, to be pressed only if necessary.
Javed sat with him in the front, keeping him awake and engaged in a conversation, with the driver asking us if we had eaten and whether we’d like to drink. Javed kept reminding him how far Calais was and that we had to make the last ferry. I looked at the farmhouses and Javed observed how the landscape would have been devastated only 40 years ago, during World War II. At the ferry point, we saw a middle-aged Englishman, pleading for the fare to take him home. He could barely walk. Most of us ignored him.
On the ferry, most passengers were English, bringing crates of wine home to make up for the higher-taxed and highly limited selection of wines in their villages’ off-licences. It was nice to hear the plummy English accent again, as well as the cheerful English numbers on the ferry’s music system. And the café served drinkable tea.
The tide was mischievously high and the water was buoyant, slowing our journey to England. I was busy looking at the white cliffs of Dover, looking hauntingly beautiful at the twilight hour. With the sun about to disappear, the cliffs looked distinctly golden. They would be silver, bathed in moonlight, when our ferry would reach Dover.
That’s when we faced another problem. Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government had privatized the railways and the new operators had detached their timetable from other modes of transport, such as ferries. The last train for London left at its appointed hour, as though it was Mussolini’s Italy where trains supposedly ran on time. Meanwhile, the ferry disgorged hundreds of us, looking for a way out of Dover.
The immigration officers took their time, looking suspiciously at dodgy passports. Indians didn’t need visas to enter Britain at that time, but it meant some questioning at the border. The officer asked me the purpose of my visit and—for the first time in my life—I said I was visiting a friend. Travel, until then, had always been “official”—Scotland on a student exchange programme, the US to study, and Switzerland on an internship. This time, I was in England, visiting a friend. It gave me a sense of freedom I hadn’t experienced before.
That joy was short-lived; we found that the next train to London was at 4am, the so-called “milk train”. We were hungry and tired, but the ever- reliable, rights-conscious, desk-thumping Americans came to the rescue, protesting loudly, and as often happens, they got their way. Thanks to their assertiveness, all of us benefited. The ferry company, after much grumbling, hired a bus to take us to London.
We slept on that stretch. At Paddington in London, we spread our stuff on the ground and were about to sleep when two of London’s finest turned up. With exceptional politeness, they asked us who we were and why we were at the station. Javed explained matters, and said we were going to board the first train to Oxford.
The police officers told us we had to go to a hotel. But that costs money, and neither of us wanted to spend any. So we collected our belongings and pretended to leave, and after stepping out of the station on one side, entered from another side, spread our stuff again, and settled down.
About 2 hours later, we were woken up by the same police officers, looking irritated.
“I thought we said you had to stay in a hotel,” one of them said.
Javed explained how we were poor students (from India and Pakistan, I helpfully added) and how in another half an hour, the first train would leave for Oxford. Would they mind terribly if we waited for the train?
They relented. About 40 minutes later, we were on the train to Oxford. Another hour later, we were in that ancient town of dreaming spires. We dumped all the bags and squeezed ourselves in a taxi, asking the driver to take us to Christ Church college.
To cheer the driver, Javed asked the cricket score (Allan Border’s Aussies were visiting England, and the Birmingham Test was going on). But this driver was a football fan, and turned on the radio so that we could find out for ourselves what had happened. England were winning; but we didn’t care, failing the Tebbit Test.
The cheerful porter at Christ Church took us in. We went to sleep—in proper beds, at last—waking up many hours later. It was probably the oddest 24 hours of my life, but it confirmed the warm, strong, life-changing and affirming friendship we shared.
In the week that followed, Javed and I travelled a couple of times to London and saw the city as it should be seen—in bright summer sunshine, in resplendent colours. We ate fish and chips at night from vans, served by men from the Caribbean and explored pubs where I discovered warm beer. He took me to Cambridge and showed me the square in Trinity College where Harold Abrahams supposedly ran the 350m perimeter in less than 43 seconds—the time it takes for the clock to strike 12; the tree from which an apple supposedly fell on Newton; and the shimmering river where students punted. We went to an army surplus store where I bought a sweater and khakis. We later drove to Wales, visited Hay-on-Wye before it became the global literary capital, bought more books—including the first editions of Dom Moraes and Philip Larkin—and walked in the Dartmoor hills.
At the end of the week, Javed and I hugged, unsure when we’d meet next. We met once later, near Washington, where his family then lived. I stayed up the night with his sisters, Zareena and Shaheena, as we watched Dev Anand’s films after a dinner of a magnificent biryani Javed’s mother had made.
As I was thinking about writing on those wonderful days, where the journey mattered and the destination was irrelevant, I asked him in an email if he had any specific memory I was missing.
“Yes,” he said. “Don’t forget to mention that we lost one backpack.”
Whose fault was it? It hardly mattered—what’s the cost of a backpack compared to friendship?

Open seas | One thousand shades of blue Off the Dalmatian coast, where calm azure alternates with thundering grey and islands speckle the map, you meet Adriatic’s many moods

The first time I saw the Adriatic Sea, I realized blue can be many different colours. Now I’m about to spend a whole week on the water, watching it shimmer and shine, up close.
Croatia has over 1,000 islands, and with my brother visiting us for a few weeks, we figured the best way to show him the country would be to sail along the coastline. We are starting from the islet of Trogir, a Unesco World Heritage Site, on Croatia’s Dalmatian coast. We are meeting the boat and our skipper at the Trogir marina, and we set sail a few hours after lunch.
Day 1
Wine on the ‘Supernova’
Her name is Supernova. She is pretty, and surprisingly big.
Our skipper, Marko, is a 24-year-old student, and this is his father’s boat. When school is out, Marko works on the boat. He knows these waters and their moods like the back of his hand. He also knows all the important folk along the coast: marina workers, restaurant managers and water-taxi operators.
Marko gives us a quick tour: three bedrooms, two bathrooms, the common area with a kitchenette, the open deck and patio. He shows us where the life jackets are; we ask him where we can store the wine.

Cobalt coast:Trogir

He shows us various boating knots; we ponder over the boat’s complicated flushing mechanism.He tells us he is allergic to seafood; we promise to cook him some chicken curry.
Before I know it, we’ve pulled away from Trogir. The orange rooftops of the islet are quickly replaced by green mountain tops and fluffy white clouds. Fifteen minutes into the week and we are all by ourselves in the middle of the sea. We open a celebratory bottle of wine—this is the Croatian way, after all. It’s the first in what will soon become a series. A soft breeze is blowing and the wine is doing its thing—it’s exhilarating.
Our first day on the boat is a short 3-hour ride to the island of Brac, right in time for sunset. The sky is a riot of colours—pink, orange and grey; the water makes soft gurgling sounds and church bells ring in the distance. I wonder if the bells will ring through the night, and early into the morning. As I find out later, they do.
Once the sun dips, it gets dark quickly, and the crackle of burning coal can be heard all along the waterfront. We step into a crowded local inn (konoba) for dinner. The chef, a robust man in his late 50s, stands by an open grill, preparing the night’s meal—monkfish and lamb. He spends most of his time chain-smoking, drinking rakija shots, and chatting with everyone in the establishment. From time to time, he flips the fish and meat. The konoba is busy, and the food takes time to come. But when it does, it is perfect, flavoured with the sea, the coal and a wedge of lemon.
Day 2
Treasure island
Cooking on the boat is an experience. There’s barely any room and the boat keeps bobbing. We work elbow to elbow, and eat the same way. There’s hot coffee, fried eggs, sausages, tomatoes, cheese, and fresh white bread. It sounds like a meal from an Enid Blyton story; it tastes as good.
“We have good wind today. Time to put up the sails,” Marko declares. We try and help, but it’s not as easy as it looks, and I keep getting in the way. Eventually, the sails balloon up and as the wind hits the white, it makes a loud whoosh, propelling us towards Palmižana on Sveti Klement island.

The bay is made of clichés: beautiful, blue, calm, and clear—I can see schools of fish darting about, and the seabed down below. We are one of three boats anchored at the marina. Come summer, boats and skippers will fight for a spot here. For now, we have the entire place all to ourselves. Palmižana is a botanical estate, full of exotic plants and smells. I catch a hint of eucalyptus and rosemary, and a tinge of lavender.“What do you recommend?” I ask Hrvoj, the waiter at Toto’s Beach Restaurant, one of the two restaurants on this side of the island. We are seated in the open courtyard, under the cover of ancient pine trees. The bay is spread out in front of us. “I’ll show you,” he says, pointing towards the water; a diver in a blue and yellow wetsuit is making his way across the pebbled beach with an aquarium draped across his arms. There’s a lobster, sea shark, a heap of shells, and an amberjack there. “What would you like, and how would you like it?” Soon the table is full of shells, ravioli, spaghetti and grilled fish; lunch takes us a while.
After you’re stuffed on seafood, it isn’t the best time to take a water taxi and yet, that’s exactly what we do. The motor is loud and the ride is rough, but it’s the best way to reach the busy island of Hvar. Besides, it’s a 10-minute ride; it ends before any bout of seasickness can set in.
Hvar is one of Croatia’s more high-profile islands. In the summer months (May-August), the promenade is lined with private luxury yachts. The likes of Roman Abramovich, Bernie Ecclestone, Beyoncé, Britain’s Prince Harry and the Hiltons can be seen living it up along the waterfront. Hvar is always up for a party. We take in some of this glamour before heading back to the boat for a quiet dinner and a rowdy game of Scrabble.
Day 3
The sea is throwing up

The marina at Hvar island (Atlantide Phototravel/Corbis)

The sea asks for some respect today. The sky is overcast and the waves have an agenda; they’ve turned just as grey as the clouds. We hold on as the boat lurches up and comes crashing down, over and over again, like a drunken whale. The boat tilts to a precarious angle and holds that line. My stomach feels as choppy as the sea; everything tastes of salt.An hour later, we are still clutching the railings. The rain is coming down now and the water is rising higher. Despite the rainproof jacket, I am soaked to the bone. My mind goes back to our first day on Supernova—where did he say those orange life vests were stored?
I feel the impact of each wave that crashes into us. The thud throws me off the bench for a microsecond before I am flung back down. It reminds me of a rickshaw ride in post-monsoon Mumbai, but this is slightly scarier. The lashing goes on till we pull into the Kut marina, on the island of Vis. I feel battered, the rest look equally shaken.
We know this island. It’s Croatia’s cricket island, where we’ve spent many hot summers chasing cricket balls and tallying scores. We abandon the boat, practically flying across the yellow walkway, for dry, firm land, and savour that first moment of realization: Nothing is swaying, nothing is lurching, and no one needs to throw up.
Day 4
Flip-flops from Albania
Things have calmed down again. Yesterday’s mood swings have been brushed away—the sky is as blue as the water, and all the other elements are behaving as well. We let the sails out and continue with Day 4 in the direction of Korcula.
We see more boats around today than we have over the last three days. Yesterday’s weather must have derailed a few routes and hijacked a few itineraries. “Lots of traffic this morning; we might have trouble parking at the marina,” Marko warns us.

Cerulean: The Zlatni Rat be (Thinkstock)

We are lucky to find one of the last open slots, squeezing in just before a set of Scandinavian vessels arrive. The marina is busy, but it’s not just the traffic. There is garbage floating about the water, an anomaly in Croatian waters. One of the marina workers, also named Marko, is not happy. “This garbage is coming from Albania. They throw everything in. What can we do? We have to clean it all before the tourists come.” A white and blue flip-flop floats by, taunting Marko from the marina.Unlike the state of the water, Korcula is in perfect order. This walled town, also known as Little Dubrovnik, is all tiny cobbled alleyways and stone structures, colliding and crossing like an unwound spool of yarn. There are restaurants, cafés, boutiques, galleries, hotels and museums embedded into the walls.
Sitting by the waterfront for dinner, we watch fishing boats come in and out. We watch the cruise lines anchor for the night. We watch little children dangle strings into the water, hoping to catch fish. We watch the maintenance crew complete the clean-up just as the sun sinks in.
Everything is beautiful again.
Day 5
Look, dolphins!
We are making an early start to get away from yesterday’s crowds. It’s not yet 8am when the walls of Korcula fall behind us, growing smaller and smaller until once again, it’s just us and the sea. The day is spent under the sun, with books, music and sunscreen. Hours pass in this calm—the day is serene, perfect.
Lost in our own worlds, we jolt back only when a loud splash demands our attention. There are no other boats around us. There is no movement. We stare at the water, slightly puzzled. Then we hear it again, but this time behind us.
“Dolphins!” everyone shouts at once.
There are four of them—young, pale grey and full of energy. They are playing what looks like a game of dolphin tag. They leap in and out of the water around the boat, not bothered by our presence—they make as much noise as we do, and our voices ring out in the open sea. This stretch back to Brac is known for dolphin-spotting, but they don’t always hang around for so long.
“Do you want to follow them or keep to the course?”
“Follow them, of course.” And we do, for the next 20 minutes, till they pull away and disappear into the blue horizon.
Day 6
On a dinghy to Bol
Supernova is anchored off the town of Bol on Brac island. Right now, it’s the only boat around. That means only one thing: The beach is all ours. We hop on to the dinghy and make for the shore.
Zlatni Rat is one of Croatia’s most popular beaches. It has one interesting feature: The beach line keeps shifting depending on the winds and the tides. In a few months, it will be a challenge to get from the beach bar to the water without stepping on sunbathing bodies. But for now, it’s just us, a bunch of French pensioners, and the guy running the beach bar.
We spend the whole day on the beach. The water is clear and the temperature perfect. I can see the seabed all the way through, pebbled with white limestone. We follow a simple routine today: swim, lounge, repeat.
Day 7
Back to reality, sort of
Before we know it, the week is over and we are heading back to Trogir. We pack our bags—making sure to collect all the chargers, books and board games. We tidy up the boat, sorting out the recycling from the other waste. We pack our bags and head out to the deck to soak up some sun before this journey comes to an end.
Slowly the open sea gives way to the orange rooftops and the crowded marina. We tether the boat for one last time, and walk across the yellow plank to dry land. We say our goodbyes to Marko and head back into the Unesco-protected walls of Trogir.
The sound of splashing water lingers on.