| By all accounts it must have been quite an amazing feat, putting together a team of 200, advertising for passengers on the train in remote parts of India and outside it, following up over the Net, coaxing the railways to extend them concessions, scheduling the journey, even managing the logistics. The group travelled 7,000 km across 15 cities and two villages in an India unshackled recently by sweeping reforms, its ambitions lofty. "Our expedition in this fiftieth year of independence was meant to explore thoughts and ideas that would help us shape India's future." |
| Original as the idea was, Mani and the core members of his team seemed to have got swept up not as much by the excitement (which would have been enough) but by the changes they hoped to bring about as a result of the journey. It was fine to expect the visits and discussions to stimulate ideas "" but change India? Good idea dude, but hey, it was eventually a classroom on wheels, and classrooms are bogged down by agendas and intentions, in this case "India's future", as Mani keeps repeating again and again. "We saw this journey as a debt we owed to our country for having given us so much." Duh? |
| At the end of the 22-day yatra, the ideas bank flitted off to their homes and lives around the world. Perhaps it changed the way these 200 yatris looked at India, true, but did it achieve change? Cast a new future for India? Change its destiny? |
| Mani re-visits that journey a decade later "" or perhaps a decade too late. The reason is another yatra. It is now 60 years since independence and India has changed rapidly. It has a new energy. Alas, the adrenalin that must have powered that original journey is gone. Mani is now a minute keeper. No doubt he maintained detailed notes about the journey, the incidents and anecdotes and discussions and fraught tempers "" but 10 years later they are just minutes. You can cull and put them together, but the passion has gone from the story. A journey that should have been recounted immediately after the yatra ended is now stale, a clerk's account of where the group went and what it saw, listed like ingredients in a jar of preserves. You know the contents but any recipe is more than the sum of its parts. |
| To repeat the itinerary then, there was Ahmedabad (Sabarmati Ashram to the Space Applications Centre in one day "" in many ways a capsule of the entire Indian paradigm), Aruna and Bunker Roy's Tilonia (a rural community that had achieved a dynamic status thanks to community participation), visits to Jaipur, Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, the capital New Delhi with a perfunctory visit to Agra, on to Lucknow, Bodh Gaya, steel city Jamshedpur and Kolkata, onwards to Visakhapatnam, emerging IT giant Hyderabad, and to Aurangabad, Ahmednagar, Pune and back to Mumbai. Along the way they met or were addressed by extraordinary individuals and the media coverage meant the group enjoyed great success. |
| If only those discussions could have been further explored in the book as the ideas Mani & Co set out to seek. In the end the narration boils down to "we felt", "we saw", "we discussed", and at most suggests ideas on "women's issues" or the "bureaucracy", or "ancient Indians" "" no more, no less. Mani might have saved the book somewhat by inviting his co-passengers to write remembered segments of the journey as separate chapters (perhaps on how the journey shaped their lives) "" mostly, though, had it been written in 1998 instead of 2007, it might have chronicled an impressive journey without turning it into a railway Bradshaw. |
| India A Journey Through a Healing Civilization Shashank Mani HarperCollins 213 pages; Rs 295 |
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