Most travel websites called Badami (in Karnataka) a sleepy town. They’re ‘quiet’ wrong. It snores. With a small bus stand, a railway station where only slow passenger trains halt, an arterial main road (the station road, in this case) where all the businesses are concentrated, it’s just like any town in India. It’s hard to believe that this town village was once one of the largest cities in South India.

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I tried to make a list of all items available at Joona Bazaar, but I must admit I had failed miserably. It’s Pune’s first mall; it’s bigger than the big bazaars and it’s location is more central than any central-right on the road. Every Wednesday and Sunday, a part of the road leading from PMC to railway station is blocked for this bazaar. Joona is Marathi for old, and the place remains largely faithful to its name. Though quite a few new items are sold here, it’s the old and used items that the bazaar is more famous for.

I wasn’t sure if the vendors were comfortable being photographed, so I took my time to befriend a vendor and shot him. He didn’t object, and there was no stopping me. But as with any crowded place, composing better images was difficult.

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The bombs went off yet again. The security agencies played a quick Inky-Pinky-Ponky and even before any incriminating evidence was found, their fingers were already pointing towards the east. Never mind if their predictions ever go wrong, they can always say that the rest of their fingers were pointing the other way.

While the role of our western neighbor in various terrorist activities could be understood in light of decade-old tensions between us, it is highly surprising to see an increasing role of Bangladeshis in various terrorist acts of violence. After all, we were the ones who fought hard for their freedom. Why did religion get the better of their gratitude towards the Indians?

Let us face it, our neighbours never saw India as a friend in modern times. Not even Bangladesh, save a few years following 1971. The lesser said about Pakistan and China, the better. The experience with Sri Lanka is something every person associated with South Block would want to forget. We first trained the LTTE rebels, and then fought them; the nation suffered a major cardiac arrest when the Frankenstein monster that eventually emerged claimed an Indian Prime Minister.

Having had to choose between a communist China and a democratic India, Nepal and Bhutan naturally tilted towards the latter. Nepal is now slowly inching towards China after the Maoists won the recent elections rather emphatically. Bhutan simply does not have any choice, being dependent on India for virtually everything. Remember how reluctantly they had co-operated with us during Operation All Clear? We started mending our relations with the junta in Myanmar only after realizing how vast a petroleum deposit is waiting to be explored there. Moreover, that too after China started making inroads into Myanmar. Our rival is here, so are we - certainly not the ideal way to ameliorate our foreign relations.

Even in Bangladesh, India’s interference in the fight between Pakistani Army and Mukti Bahini is now widely perceived as an attempt by an anti-Islam Indian nation to break up the Islamic Pakistan. Indian businesses are regularly at the receiving end of threats from self-proclaimed Bangladeshi terrorist groups. Quite a good number of Bangladeshis are happy to do anything anti-Indian, even smuggling Indian coins to make razor blades in a nation where many men prefer not to shave their beards. These days the border with Bangladesh is a much more happening place than that with Pakistan. Highly porous and poorly guarded, it’s from where nearly half of India’s headaches are being imported- terrorists, explosives, illegal migrants, and bird flu.

The largest buyer of weaponry from China is not Pakistan. It is Bangladesh. Who are all those guns from China being trained at? Unfortunately, the Bangladeshis do not have many neighbours. . We cannot afford to be surrounded by enemy states wanting to annihilate the country for different reasons of their own. Another Israel is want we should not be. India now has two options. The first - make amends with as many neighbours as possible. Get rid off that spineless foreign policy that cannot get us friends. Every missile tested and every point gained by SENSEX should make these countries confident - not threatened by the big bully getting even stronger. Maybe we can learn a lesson or two from China, which is making fantastic strides in foreign relations. The second - start working on a plan to move the Indian tectonic plate away from Asia. Kashmir will go back to where it came from. The ocean floor and India can join Australia, a rather better neighbour.

Speechless, I was. Why on earth did Mayawati choose to vent her dissatisfaction in the form of an ad? This surely was one advert that kept me thinking about the purpose it served. Or wait, was it a mere public statement issued by Mayawati, which was highlighted a bit too grandly by the Times of India? It can’t be, for there was the name of an ad agency in an obscure corner of the page.

Union Budget 2008-09 is far from ground reality because had the central government been sincere and honest about the concessions given in this year then these would (have) been announced in the last year of UPA government.

The whole nation agrees with your point that this budget is populist and has been prepared keeping the forthcoming elections in mind. Times of India might have been correct when its headline said “Voting lines now open.” But how does it take the budget away from ground reality? P Chidambaram didn’t say that farmer suicides are just fictional or poor people don’t exist in India!

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It was supposed to be the iron structure that holds the country together. It did and still does, but a bit too tight - as it is continually blamed to be one of the prime reasons for the sluggishness in India’s growth. But the bureaucracy did little to mend its ways, because after all those these years, the IAS (Indian Administrative Service) remains what it was - rigid, inflexible and slack - something that Upamanyu Chatterjee successfully depicts in his novel, English August.

Perhaps nothing prepares the candidates better for this kind of life than the selection procedure itself. Stretched over 18 long months, this surely is a strong contender to be the longest examination in the world. The candidates are expected to master two totally unrelated optionals and General Studies - which include, among others, current affairs and Encyclopedia Britannica. When you come across somebody studying weird combinations such as Mechanical Engineering and Anthropology or Physics and Sociology, be sure he is a Civil Services aspirant.

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Imagine a cluster of caves in a horseshoe-shaped gorge with a small river flowing through it. Add to that a jaw-dropping 7-stepped waterfall through which the river enters the gorge. And now, imagine this place in the monsoons with all the greenery that comes along with it, and the cascading waterfalls. Heaven, isn’t it? Well, that’s the place Buddhist monks had decided to build caves and appease the heavens, which lie somewhere above the stratosphere and the ionosphere.

Ajanta.

With the ASI guide to Ajanta in one hand, and the cam in the other, and the backpack where it belongs - my back - I walked in. The plan: explore each cave at leisure, while reading through what the guide had to say about that particular cave, and click pics, loads of them.Enter Cave 1, among the best that Ajanta has to offer. “Foul play!” I screamed to myself. Forget reading - so dim was the light inside that I had to set my cam’s shutter speed to 4 seconds, at ISO l600. So I was holding the cam steadily, without the minutest shake, for 4 full seconds (the use of flash and tripod is banned inside the caves to prevent damage to the paintings). But the aura of Padmapani and Vajrapani proved too much to be ignored and I clicked quite a few pics, hoping I would get at least a single good one. And I wasn’t disappointed.

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“The day I could do justice to Ellora with words, I will consider myself a decent writer.”
-Harsha, a visitor from South India, 21st Century

And I thought Ellora is merely a series of caves with a lot of sculptures! All it took me were 2 minutes to realize how foolish I was. The showstealer was right there at the entrance.

The Kailash temple.

An audacious tribute to Lord Kailash by generations of kings and sculptors, it took them more than 100 years to just chisel the 400,000 tons of stone from the hill. Google knows how many more years it took them to create those intricately carved designs and those life-oozing statues. I always thought the world’s largest monolithic structure would be big, but I never thought it would be so huge, magnificent and spectacular. A tourist standing next to me exclaimed, ‘What’s Mt. Rushmore before this!’ He belonged to the Intellegia Homo Sapien Americanus - a very rare and endangered sub-species.

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5:30 AM Aurangabad - A chilly wind blowing across my face, I sat outside a tea-stall opposite bus terminus in Aurangabad. Took one last sip from the cup of tea, and started walking.

And Backpack Blogs Beta had just begun.

Following Nita’s advice, I had decided to visit Aurangabad before Ellora and Ajanta. Bibi Ka Maqbara and Aurangabad Caves are the only places worth a visit in the city. ‘There are no caves in Aurangabad, only at Ajanta and Ellora,’ a newspaper vendor declared confidently. However, another shop owner gave me the instructions to reach the Maqbara and the caves. ‘Maqbara do kilometer aur guphae teen kilometer Maqbara se’. After walking for a distance well over two kilometers, the heavy backpack taking its toll my shoulders, I reached Bibi Ka Maqbara.

It was definitely worth the five kilometer walk.

Built by the son of Aurangajeb, Shah Alam, over his mother’s tomb, it’s almost an exact replica of the Taj Mahal. Although no match to the grandeur and majesty of the latter, the rising sun’s golden light bouncing off the white structure gave it a radiance that kept my camera busy for 20 minutes atleast. Not a single soul was there inside the Maqbara (something unheard of inside the Taj) and I had enough time to have a look at all details inside the structure. I was horrified to find Mint-O’s along with lots of coins and currency notes thrown on the tomb. Just outside the Maqbara were some tombs of English officers who died in the first half of the 19th century. The oldest one was built in 1806. That’s more than 200 years! There was an ASI exhibition on Indian Culture going on beside the Maqbara, but I decided not to visit it for good. After all, it’s the ASI which is organizing it.

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Everything comes cheap in India. Our cheap software powers businesses worldwide. Our cheap health care facilities are a boon to poor patients worldwide. Our Rs. 1 lakh car, once it hits the roads, is going to revolutionize the automobile sector. Our telecom tariffs are the cheapest in the world. So are our lives. No major accident is worth two days of media attention if a minimum of 50 people do not lose their lives. The votes that make ‘leaders’ are so cheap that they can be bought with Rs. 100 and a liquour bottle or a saree. Just tell me, what is not cheap in this country?

A visit to the Maharashtrian hinterland and I had realised that the future of our country comes cheap too, at less then Rs. 300. I was a volunteer with Friends of Children and Infosys Foundation, helping them in the distribution of scholarships to deserving students. I was in an India that I had only read about. Of the 126 students who were selected for scholarships, nearly 85 were in need of less than Rs. 300 to continue with their education. Some needed as less as Rs. 150. Digest that! Rs. 150 per year is all that it takes to decide their destiny.

I asked a student what would have happened if the scholarships weren’t given. His reply didn’t surprise me, ‘I would have been working as a labourer in a sugar mill now.’ That’s the ground reality. 61 years of socialist and Garibi Hatao’s didn’t help the people at the bottom of the pyramid. These children are the brand ambassadors for atleast one part of India - an India which is struggling to cross that imaginary line which is more dangerous than any border line on this planet - the poverty line.

They exuded confidence that baffled me. They read newspapers that are days old. The only TV channel they watch is Doordarshan. Internet is at least 5 years away. But they were confident of crossing all barriers, real and virtual. What makes them so confident? ‘Because I’m going to make it to the IIT. The only problem I had earlier was money, to buy books and for the fees. Now that I have the scholarship, I can study for the exam peacefully.’ As I type these words, my eyes are focused on the 16+ something student sitting next to me and busy playing Counterstrike in a cyber cafe.

Will a certain Mr. Singh wake up from his deep slumber? Will the Ministry of Human Resources Development (whatever that might be) finally act to fuel these ignited minds? They seem to be busy finding ways to save their government. It’s time the people take power into their own hands. The power to build a better India. All you may have to do is contribute as less as Rs. 100 per month. Friends of Children have enough volunteers to help them, thanks to the Infosys Foundation. But they need money to help more and more children. Thankfully, there’s no dearth of bright, yet poor students in India. That is the hidden potential in India, waiting to be discovered.

Contact Venky, Friends of Children to know how you can be of some help @ +91 9890393132 or mail them at friendsofchildrenpune@yahoo.com