Rocking in the Free World

As I’ve said before, one of the limited advantages of being a Gorgonite is easy access to the hills, though God knows I don’t nearly take as much advantage of it as I should.

The past weekend had thursday off at the office in lieu of Janmashtami and that provided ample scope to take time off on Friday to make it a four day weekend. Dharamshala was decided upon as the destination of choice and the fact that the rainy season was on meant that the place wouldn’t yet be inundated with peak Amit capacity.

Now, the preferred mode of travel is flight, but only Kingfisher flies to the airport near Dharamshala and round trip tickets are frigging expensive. Consequently, train travel was the obvious preferred choice.

I’d booked A/c 3-tier tickets about a month in advance and even though I was waitlisted, it seemed as though enough people would drop out for me to get confirmed tickets by the time the date of journey arrived.

I was travelling with Mohit the Just and he suggested, quite sensibly, that we need a backup plan. He therefore booked confirmed second class sleeper tickets, as an insurance policy.

We decided to rendezvous at the Old Delhi railway station at around 8 on the evening of September 1st, to be in time for the departure of the train with the confirmed ticket, henceforth colloquially referred to as the Jammu Mail. Due to horrendous traffic jams in the Old Delhi area near the Red Fort leading up to Chandni Chowk, I was delayed and reached the station fifteen minutes after the scheduled departure of the train, only to find that the train hadn’t yet left.

Mohit and I checked out the assigned compartment and found out to our dismay that a gigantic LG television box lay on the precise location of our seats.

Standing outside the compartment and seeing it overflowing with people, with the sweltering air adding to my discomfort, the elitist bastard in me chose to pass up on this train with the fervent hope that the air conditioned one on which we were waitlisted would provide us passage.

However, it was not to be since the waitlist hadn’t moved up and we were left stranded at the railway station platform, knowing fully well the age old saying about the bird in hand, but choosing to be stubborn and perhaps, a bit asinine in ignoring it all the same.

What happened next was that we ended up heading to the Kashmere Gate Inter-State Bus Terminus and boarding a shady private bus that took us to Jalandhar via Ludhiana. The travel on this bus makes for an interesting tale in itself, although I’d rather you experience it for yourself should you get a chance.

Needless to say, the stupid bus driver took his own sweet time transporting us along the plains on what is possibly one of India’s best laid out roads, NH1, making us believe that we’d have done the distance much faster on a TVS 50CC.

When we woke up, we’d reached Ludhiana from where we had to change over and take another bus to Jalandhar from where we had to change over and take another bus to Dharamshala.

Discounting my visit to Chandigarh as a kid with family, this was my first proper visit into Punjab and looking all around the countryside, the place seemed radically different from any other place I have been to in the country.

Lush green fields on either side of the roads for long stretches, marred by the occasional Skoda, Jaguar, Merdeces Benz showroom bang in the middle of nowhere, combined with huge sprawling mansions in the center of massive fields gave one the impression that these guys liked to live it big and that the Pubjabi penchant for opulence as seen on TV is not the urban legend one would have naively made it out to be.

You didn’t really see too many poor (rather poor-looking) people since everyone seemed to be dressed up in trendy clothes and seemed quite jolly. The music being played loudly on the bus also added to this impression and comprised of the typical Punjabi night club music which, funnily enough, didn’t sound out of place as our bus sped along on the road to Jalandhar.

I must confess that this place piqued my interest enough to warrant a visit sometime in the future during the onset of winter. A trip to Amritsar and to the Wagah border is definitely on the cards in the days ahead.

We managed to catch a glimpse of the much-advertised and spoken about Lovely Professional University and witnessed first hand a few hundred of the twenty three thousand students make their way into the vast campus, on the outskirts of Jalandhar.

After a brief stopover when we were lying in wait for the next bus to take us to Dharamshala, we finally clambered onto a bus that took its own sweet time along the winding roads up the hills, passing through places such as Hoshiarpur and Dehra and making no less than four stops before finally dropping us off at Dharamshala.

The air in the mountains lets you relax and chill out to a point where you are not bothered by how the driver seemed to be taking his own sweet time to transport you to your final destination. Cliched as it sounds, the journey by itself was a fun experience as the landscape changed from the hot plains to the cooler mountains until such time that when we finally arrived, the entire place had grown misty and obscured the magnificent conifers and the hilly landscape from our view.

I can always say in retrospect that the longer, significantly more uncomfortable journey was fun because I had no choice but to endure it. However, that sudden feeling of wanting to say goodbye to the train as it left the platform to take alternate transport into the hills instead gave me a chance to see parts of the country that I would’ve otherwise had limited incentive to visit, and for that I am grateful.

More about the actual Dharamshala trip in the next post.